There are ten issues of Fish Alaska per year, each stocked with information and ideas on when and where and how to find fishing success in the Great Land; there's the third edition of Alaska Fishing: The Ultimate Angler's Guide by René Limeres and Gunnar Pederson, and there are reams of Fish and Game reports, stories from friends and acquaintances, advice from booking agents and fly-shop employees, and plenty of website chat rooms and bulletin boards to explore. 

As writers Greg Brush and Gary Olsby recommend later in this issue, there are also things to ask of potential guides and lodges, questions that can help you tailor an Alaska angling adventure towards whatever fantasies of success your dreams deliver. The wise traveler plans extensively, imagines nearly unthinkable contingencies, and researches like a fledgling scientist whose grant is about to expire. But ultimately none of the resources listed above - as honest, thorough and well-intentioned as they may be - can put fish in the net, or really, even in the river at the time of your visit.

Fortune, chance, fortuity - kismet, serendipity, providence - the fickle finger of fate: these are not terms foreign to the experienced angler; in fact, most of the fishermen I know use them quite often in explaining the galling success of an overly excitable companion. All too often we're simply not interested in admitting the role chance plays in our own angling successes.

Still, if you're planning an Alaska vacation for 2007, pack the rabbit's foot, a horseshoe, your personal genie or that Notre Dame cap you've been hanging onto since the '77 championship run, because when fish become the bottom line (and who's kidding whom, fish are what we're after), luck is going to play a part.

At some level I've always known this, intuitively one might say, and thus I didn't need a wacky 2006 - steelhead absent into May, a Kenai sockeye run that was weeks late, my mere presence bringing several drainages to flood stage - to remind me that even the best planning sometimes has to become its own kind of satisfaction. In Alaska we're typically dealing with anadromous fish, and when we're not, it's resident fish that tend to make the seasonal returnees look downright punctual. Regardless of our skill with a fly rod or a fishing report, that means things like juvenile mortality rates, percentages of predation while at sea, winter water levels and the gravitational pull of the moon all have an effect on the fishing we'll eventually find. Added to which we always have to contend with the many moods of Alaska weather, the moods of the fish and the the folks who set commercial catch limits, and other mysteries of the universe before we can say with any amount of certainty that the fishing should be good.

Unfortunately, knowing this doesn't make a good dose of skunk-scented humility go down any easier. Neither do reports like the one I received through e-mail this past fall.

In the summer of 1999, Nancy Locke of North Massapequa, NY, visited Alaska for the first time. While fishing from the Cove Lodge in Southeast's Elfin Cove, she boated a 316-pound halibut. The fish was taken in her first hour of angling, and as these stories typically go, it provided something of a spectacular fight, with both the Captain and mate ending up in the water before the monster was tamed.

Now, there's nothing altogether odd about this anecdote - Alaska is big-fish country and consequently, people tend to catch trophies up here. You don't necessarily need a thousand hours on the water to prove that. However, Nancy returned to fish with Gordy Wrobel from the Cove Lodge again in 2001 and almost immediately put a 323-pound flatfish on the dock. With a personal-best halibut of about 75 pounds, I felt that was a touch outrageous. Then here comes Nancy again in 2006, gadding about with 639 pounds of halibut to her credit in only two tries. She returned to the Cove Lodge - who wouldn't, with that run of luck - and promptly lit into another wall-sized flattie. This fish went 376 pounds.

For the math majors and amateur statisticians out there, that's three-for-three for a total of 1,015 pounds of halibut, or roughly the equivalent of hitting the Powerball numbers exactly right every day for a month. However, what I find particularly weird about all this isn't the almost unspeakably good fortune it takes to find three 300-pound halibut in a lifetime, let alone during three successive outings, but that I find myself buoyed by Nancy's good fortune.

If it can happen to her, I think, it can happen for me.

So here I am planning for another season of Alaska fishing, with really no idea when the fish may arrive or where the runs will be strongest. I've gone through all the latest research and am asking plenty of questions, trying to find a balance between the pragmatic - both how often and where I can realistically fish - and the absurd (all over the state, and every day). I'm also, despite stories like Nancy's, trying to keep my expectations in check.

A couple of summers ago, with just such manageable ambitions in tow, I managed to land a rainbow that taped out near fifteen pounds - the fish of a lifetime to be sure, but no Nellie from Loch Ness. In other words, in Alaska, a class of trout that can be heard from again. Today, if it were suggested that luck rather than skill had much to do with the appearance of that fish on the end of my line, I'd jump up and down and scream injustice and probably threaten considerable violence to anyone within reach. I think this has something to do with my need to think I can make it happen again. Sure, in some ways, my meeting with that great fish (like Nancy's encounters with her triplet flatfish) was fortuitous. Still, I had to be standing there, at the right time, using the right fly, just as Nancy Locke had to do everything just so before those barn-doors came knocking. 

And more than all the study and all the coffee-shop cross-examinations, that's the key - to catch big fish you have to be out there where the big fish live. Or, more simply, you need to give yourself a chance if you're ever going to get lucky.