Alaska 24. Road Warriors August 2

It rained all night.

And we are out of food.

And we didn’t know where we were going next. But we couldn’t stay in the site we were in for the next night because it was reserved… so we had to move anyway…

So we decided to take the camper and go have some breakfast, grocery shop, and talk to someone at an ACTUAL FLY SHOP and regroup. If we needed to, we could come back to that same campground and grab one of the first-come sites that were still open. Remember, it’s Friday now and we are basically in grand-central station for Alaskan tourism. Palmer, Alaska is just north of Anchorage and lots of people base out of it. Plus, we are learning the ins and outs of Alaska and it seems all the locals are on the big rivers trying to get their freezers full of salmon. So… I get kind of antsy about where we are going to stay. Definitely no dispersed options anywhere at all for probably the remainder of our trip. (But I’m not sure of that. Alaska keeps surprising me.)

Breakfast out at the Noisy Moose was… noisy. But good. I had to talk Dave into staying and waiting for a table because there were like 25 people jammed into the waiting area and that’s not his jam (haha). We passed a McDonald’s about a quarter mile back and neither of us is above a delicious egg McMuffin — and we definitely debated it — but I said let’s just give it ten minutes. And voila! We got a table. We ate WAY MORE than is reasonable and headed to the fly shop down the road in Wasilla.

The guy at this fly shop was…

AMAZING.

Yes, yes, we bought a shit-ton of stuff, so you could make the argument that he was really just a very skilled salesman/film-flam man, but even if he WAS that, he was a REALLY NICE flim-flam man.

NOW WE HAD THE TICKET TO RIDE!

Look out trout!

The only problem was…

He told us our only options to fish were…where… we had already fished. 

What??!!

“Willow Creek and Montana Creek. That’s it,” said A.J., the flim-fam man. They’re the best trout water this state has.

???

When we told him we already HAD fished Willow Creek and Montana Creek he said, “Well… What were you fishing with?”

And that’s how we ended up with all the new gear.

“Beads, man. That’s it. You need beads. It’s really not fly fishing. It sucks. But once you start catching the rainbows, you’ll get it. The good news is, it’s all cheap stuff.”

So, how we spent $249, I don’t understand, but does it really MATTER?

Now, we are gonna SLAY THEM!

But first, we need a place to camp. A.J. had told us of three different options, and having come from Talkeetna (which we were now going to be headed back towards) we knew it would be crowded. So we decided to systematically stop at each place and hope to find a spot. The first was Willow Creek State Recreation Area. This is basically a parking lot with picnic tables. And, as proof of just how far we have fallen, we backed into a spot on the end and paid our fee for the privilege. 

Our new gear required an hour of two building the rigs. 100% my wheelhouse. I could sit at that picnic table and build those rigs forEVER. Not Dave. But that’s ok, cuz I’m so fast I could make 4 to his 1. I get in the ZONE doing repetitive tasks. I absolutely love it. 

While I finished rigging the beads, Dave loaded us up and we headed to Willow Creek (again). But this time we knew to fish closer to the bigger river — less high and far up the road. Cuz “there’s nothing up there,” said A.J. But after our forays, we coulda told HIM that. 

Of course there were 3 or 4 other cars there. It’s basically a circus everywhere you can access the river. Our Colorado mentality of having to fish alone needs to be completely scrubbed. It’s still hard though, because as much as we want to fish alone, we also don’t want to screw anyone else’s fishing up by tromping past them in the water. Or feel like we are horning in on their water. Again. We need to get over that. Because we are CLEARLY the only ones worried about that. 

We are also learning from multiple people that these fish are not easily spooked or “line shy” so I guess you don’t have to worry about ruining an area like you do in Colorado, just by tromping through the water up the river? I’m not sure I believe that yet…

We wanted to fish the confluence of Desperation Creek (an apt name for a creek for us at this point) where it meets Willow River, but so did everyone else. We walked upstream hucking our new (heavy) rigs of a simple pink plastic bead above a hook with a heavy sinker and a giant gumball bobber upstream and letting it dead drift. We saw a LOT of sockeye salmon in the river for the first time which was REALLY cool. They are absolutely UNINTERESTED in our beads, which we already knew — but it was still interesting to witness. And all the googling in the world has not helped me to understand how you actually CATCH a Sockeye (Red) salmon (besides by snagging it). Anyway. We aren’t trying to catch them, but we are paying close attention to where they are in the river because the rainbows are supposed to school up behind them looking for tasty eggs to eat. 

We got some of those…

Much casting ensued with not a bite. 

The water is so big that it’s deceptive as to what is wadable and what is not, and, at some point Dave got ahead and across from me and I was unable to go further up without backtracking. You know how I hate backtracking… Besides, I was on attractive water… and I was, frankly, kind of sick of the whole futile effort… So I just stayed there. And, as I moved up a bit, I suddenly had a fish on! With, thankfully, no witnesses to my buffoonery as I tried to land it — easier said than done when you have 10-plus feet of line below the bobber (in fly fishing we call that an INDICATOR because we are fancy like that) so you can only reel the fish in so far — it’s still 10 feet away from you. And my arms weren’t long enough to net the rather large, very strong fish… Eventually, and miraculously, I did land it. And I even managed to get a picture. 

Subsequent casts had me hook three more in quick succession, but only one more made it to the net. The SCARIEST and UGLIEST fish ever!

I googled it to try to figure out what it was, but it was only at the parking spot where I asked a local guy who was at his car what it was and he said “That’s a king salmon. But it’s called a Jack.” I researched that and learned that it was mostly likely a King that had yet to go out to the ocean. They spend a year or two in the river after hatching before going out to sea where they get gigantic. Kings are pretty rare these days, so that was cool — but still ugly.

Dave, sadly, didn’t not get any. And he is NOT a happy camper. 

We were very tired. We don’t know WHY we are so tired, but we are. And it was late, so I pulled out my ace-in-the-hole for dinner.

Kraft Mac-N-Cheese, baby. Not one box but two. And I gotta say, it just might make it onto my top ten. It was delicious.

We FELL into bed. With dreams of trout biting our lines soon.