It's a moist a.m., drizzly, slightly cold, a mist curling aloft to commingle with the first layers of low-lying gray. A few drops of rain prompt the use of my hood, and between the bulky jacket, confusion as to source of the elevator fog, and the subdued, almost muffled sounds of still water on the turn to proper river, I'm feeling a certain claustrophobia, like the sky needs to go blue before I can spread out and cast.

My Montanan friend Greg is struggling as well, but his problems begin and end with a blood knot. As we sit on anchor just below the outlet from Skilak Lake, he's trotting out a frightening lack of dexterity and it's starting to look like the last of the season's salmon eggs will have hatched before he gets his bead tied on. This is remedial stuff and should be easy for someone who routinely fishes double-nymph rigs that end in 6X, but it's proving otherwise and after a week of hearing him talk trash about how technical the fishing is on the Madison these days, I'm hardly restrained in my joy. For certain the major source of his issues is an overly ambitious Soldotna bartender from the night before, a young lady with a knack for turning one drink into six, though the how and the why doesn't make it any less funny. I'm not helping, either; in fact, my only suggestions are designed to accomplish the opposite.

Then, finally linked from fly to line, he goes to snip the last tag end, catches the leader and promptly loses his whole setup to the Kenai.

"You should consider golf," I offer.

"I hate this place," he retorts.

We've been through this before. The previous year, visiting him in Ennis during a Trico hatch, I made about six casts into his home river before spiraling some fourteen feet of mono around the tip of my rod, which prompted me to immediately declare the state fished out and demand we head north and west until we either found an anadromous species or the kind of cooperation from local authorities that made John Rambo famous. Having no quarrel with the wind, the tiny flies or fish that had seen it all before, he demurred. And since I am blessed with something less than the skill set of a veteran Green Beret, I also stuck it out on the blue-ribbon rivers of western Montana, eventually regaining some competence in the school of slinging microscopic bugs at trout with an Ivy League PhD. I even fought off my instinct to go with a streamer every time I blew a drift.

Of course, so much of travel is meant to be discomforting. If everything was the same all over no one would ever leave the house. For anglers especially, travel is an exercise in disorientation. Just when a person thinks he's gotten good, he'll gear up and head for someplace else, where between different water characteristics, varying fish haunts and habits and the very specialized techniques developed for local needs, he's bound to be served a nice helping of humble pie. This before factoring in the "help" provided by friends who withhold strategic bits of information and bartenders who are very good at their job.

In this sense, then, July must be the most uncomfortable Alaska month of all. In these thirty-one days alone, within say a hundred square miles of southcentral Alaska roadway, an angler can go deep for halibut, back-bounce heavy gear for the largest king salmon on earth, suspend a size 20 midge for grayling in an alpine lake, lob articulated leeches on sinking lines for rainbows-with a Spey rod-or utilize a fairly, umm, unique Alaskan technique for sockeye. And that's only the half of it.

For each of the above and the dozens of other alternatives anglers can expect to find when venturing into the Great Land during the height of summer, there are myriad variations on the simple manner of presenting a bait, or fly, spinner or spoon or cut-apart Pepsi can, to the fish that call these waters home. None of it's like back home, wherever home may be, and that-aided considerably by both the setting and the numbers and size of our fish-is part of what makes traveling to Alaska's waters such a draw. It's also why newcomers to the state's fisheries should set their expectations accordingly and plan to face something of a learning curve before they can encounter true, lasting success.

Not that I'm offering such a luxury to my friend Greg. As I said, I have my own issues to overcome on this algid Kenai morning, and being Alaskan-and having been whipped the summer before on his home water-I feel I owe him the kind of education that can only be provided by watching me catch many, many fish.

And so I hardly say a word as I work through the miasma of rain and fog to register the first of a couple nice rainbows. I barely acknowledge a twenty-six-incher picked up on the bend as the middle river gathers pace and I show admirable calm in the face of an eight-pounder landed just two gravel bars below. By this time Greg's pretty much stopped fishing and is just sitting in the boat looking like a Bassmasters groupie who's had his PowerBait taken away. Then, probably a little too caught up with self-congratulation, my backcast ends in a trailing loop and I hear the barbell eyes of my fly tick off the motor. The leech catches water, and before it can sink, I try some outlandish half-snake-roll-half-underhanded-pick-it-up-and-hope forward stroke and somehow get the fly to the right side of the boat. It skips twice before slamming through the surface.

The line immediately starts slicing towards Cook Inlet.

"Jesus!" I howl. "It feels like I've got a tuna on here."

No response.

"Did you see how I did that-skipping the fly along until I could drop it right on this fish's head? Bounced right over two smaller fish."

Again, nothing, but his silence is nicely framed by my trophy trout's decision to now vault a clear three feet out of the water.

"Whoa-just like a tarpon!"

He scowls; I continue to channel Ahab. We've got a halibut trip lined up for the next morning and I'm hoping I can affect enough damage so as to totally destroy his confidence by then.

"You know," he finally responds, "I really see no reason for us to remain friends."

I'd agree, if it weren't July in Alaska, the happiest month of all.