It was a dark and stormy night. Sockeye boiled all around us. The bears took heed of the commotion and joined the bipeds in search of the deeply red, succulent flesh. Al hooked fish on nearly every drift. Melissa was soon tied into one of many explosive red salmon. "The Ripper," armed with a new fly rod, a much appreciated Father's Day gift, was stinging fish at a prodigious rate. I stood in the river, seemingly oblivious to the activities, with but one thought on my mind. And that, of course, was rainbow trout.

It's this way with many hard-core anglers in Alaska. We first are attracted to the myriad procession of fresh from the sea, gourmet fish. It begins with the king and ends with the coho, with a month-long stay at the house of sockeye. At the end, our freezers are stuffed with salmon as if we are preparing for the next depression.

Slowly we come to appreciate the certain qualities of each fish and pursue them for their individual personalities. From the brute force of the Chinook and the acrobatic prowess of the sockeye to the all-out battle of the coho, we grow familiar with the timing, techniques, and tactics of salmon fishing.

Over time, we turn to catch-and-release, and begin to target trout. From the first fair fish hooked, a rainbow trout angler knows the excitement of blazing runs, gravity-defying jumps, and hook-dislodging abilities found in no other fish. With the development of the skills needed to find and catch trophy rainbows, anglers find themselves in that state of hard-core obsession commonly referenced as "fish fever." No amount of fish can cure this malady, as there are always more and bigger fish to pursue. It's this place that I now find myself.

At the start of the season, it's floats on the upper Kenai, a trip to Naknek and various excursions into Mat-Su Valley streams in search of hungry fish. Drifting flesh or swinging leeches seems to do the trick. When the opener hits in Bristol Bay, we go to pursue fish on smolt and fry patterns, large and angry rainbows frothing the surface like stripers in a frenetic blitz. Next, it's the streams of western Alaska, where a big trout might be tempted to eat a rodent, still waiting for the drifting salmon buffet to begin. After that, it is time to start nymphing beads for football-shaped trout that eat readily and do not come to hand easily. Their body language, from the fury in which they tear upriver to the glare in their eyes, expresses the frustration in interrupting their steady gorging on salmon eggs. As fall progresses, it's an easy decision to go the places that hold the big boys, the Naknek, Kvichak, and Kenai are the waters that most readily come to mind.

In all of these pursuits, the one common theme is the glimmer of hope that on that next cast, the trout of your lifetime will grab the fly. If it happens and if you are like me, your fishing skills will all but disappear, and you will be left standing in the river, possibly even falling in, simply awestruck by the encounter. You might anticipate a feeling of despair will overtake you, knowing that you missed the opportunity to land the biggest trout of your life. Quite the contrary, it will be a feeling of giddiness, a side-effect of the fever perhaps, that consumes me. I'll know that the decades of casting and the determination to encounter a giant rainbow has been worth it and this will only fuel the fire. Time to get the fly back in the water.

Marcus Weiner
Publisher