The trout of my childhood were crafty little buggers, wary and mysterious, full of ingestion-related idiosyncrasies that made hooking them at least twice as difficult as solving my new Rubik's Cube. Every chance I got I'd venture out with rod and flies, inevitably tans that should have been olive, or vice versa, and every chance I gave them, those intellectually superior creatures taught me lessons in humility that I've not forgotten to this day. The trout in front of me, on the other hand, are d-u-m dumb. One hundred and fifty miles up the Nushagak River in southwest Alaska, spread across a flat of even-tempered flow, they come to the fly like hogs to a trough. Everything works at these times, and I plow through rainbows with a Zuddler, a pink-and-white flesh fly, an Egg-sucking Leech, Double Bunnies of two different color combinations, black sculpins, olive sculpins and an articulated leech. All are good fish, 16- to 22 inches in length, a few larger, with big shoulders and substantial girth. In the moments when the action slows, I go back to nymphing the single egg and inevitably turn things in my direction once again. By evening I'm fishing Matukas, a pattern designed for brown trout in New Zealand. At first there's nothing doing, however, so I attach a free-sliding pink bead on the tippet above the fly. Two fish for pictures in the golden light are the reward. A third smacks the bead so hard it cracks against the hook-eye when I set-up and is lost. Made lazier because of all the success, I don't clip the fly and slide on another bead, but rather just continue to fish the Matuka as-is. The trout are onto it now and I catch fish until it's time to fire-up the outboard and return to camp. Twenty years removed from my Montana education, it feels as if I'm conducting the class now, fooling fish into chasing things they don't even want to eat. The only problem is I know believing this means I'm the fool. In Alaska, fishermen enjoy wild rainbow opportunities that have long been lost to anglers just about everywhere else. Only the streams of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula can rival the 49th state for big, beefy and abundant 'bows. From the celebrated swimming lanes of 30-inch trophies - the Kenai, Naknek and Iliamna watersheds - to lesser known, though not necessarily less prolific, ribbons of blue crisscrossing the state in areas both remote and right-next-door, the rivers that hold Alaska's wild Oncorhynchus mykiss irideus offer the kind of potential that can make anyone look good. First, they have a lot to eat. As might be expected, environments conducive to hosting large rainbows offer both rich and stable food sources. Depending on availability, larger rainbows will mostly eschew insect and other invertebrate morsels to feed on sticklebacks, sculpins, leeches, freshwater shrimp, snails and even small rodents such as voles, mice and shrews - and in Alaska especially, eggs, alevins, fry and out-migrating salmon smolt. Then there's the age factor: Most trout of western North America join the spawning pool after two or three years and only live to reach six or seven. On the other hand, Alaska rainbows, which can live for upwards of ten years, might not enter into reproduction until after their fourth or fifth year of life. Some rainbows from drainages like the Kvichak and Naknek rivers have been estimated to be 14 years old or more and have recovered from the rigors of the spawning beds on multiple occasions. And last, Alaska's resident trout not only enjoy a higher caloric intake of food than many other wild stocks in North America, due to the immense numbers of salmon returning to the state's most prolific waters, but the cold water temperatures also impart lower metabolic rates to the trout. Amplify this by the fact that these rainbows don't have to work very hard to eat, and you're left with very big fish, with big appetites - and not a whole lot of pressure when compared to the drift-boat lines at river put-ins all across the western U.S. Still, the next morning on the Nushagak, fishing another flat not far from the one that swelled my head the day before, I labor through a broad and all-embracing skunk, trying every pattern I can think of and coming up with a solitary grayling, which spit the hook. It makes me think of the Montana rainbows that really taught me to fish. I might be a better angler - certainly I'm more experienced - and Alaska is Alaska, but trout are trout. Sometimes a little humbling is just what the angler needs. |
