Prompted by a spring that never came, leaving ice on the creeks and the trout unmolested far too deep into the calendar year, I had occasion to spend more time than anyone should thinking about some of my favorite fish memories. And I specifically mean fish memories, not favorite fishing memories, which would unnecessarily bring a host of other considerations into the discussion, things like streamside horseshoes on the Kanektok River or Fish Alaska publisher Marcus Weiner practicing the Five Ds of Dodgeball while trying to avoid a charging bear and simultaneously remain tethered to a few pounds of acrobatic trout.
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I thought I’d just sit back, contemplate a couple of the more brag-worthy fish I’ve managed to haul to the bank over the years and then grade my memories in the way one might go about ranking teams for a college football poll. Surely the monster Situk steelhead, my largest ever, would be near the top of the list. Then there’s a legit 15-plus-pound Kenai rainbow, a 50-pound king on the fly, several big browns in Montana and Argentina, bonefish, tarpon and a dozen other special fish that have found their way onto my screensaver at one point in time. Big fish, first fish, hot fish, fish that ate up top, fish that validated my wildest fly-tying flights of fancy.
But, no. None of the above.
The more I thought about it, the more my choices trended in a direction stocked with near-misses and complete annihilations, eventually settling on recollections replete with straightened hooks, snapped rods, failed knots and more out-and-out ass-whippings than I care to state. It begins with the biggest walleye I’ve ever seen, which left its home in the nearby reservoir and showed up more than two miles upstream in the small, four-foot-wide creek that coursed through my grandparents’ farm. I know because I hooked and landed this fish…and put it on a stringer in the creek for a few hours while I continued casting for brookies. I was thoroughly proud, even as a ten-year-old showing signs of an alarming penchant for self-aggrandizement. Then prior to us leaving the water for the day, my stepbrother pulled in the stringer and set to cleaning the fish. He removed my walleye, held it by the gills, and stuck the Old Timer into the bottom of its belly. At which point this cyborg/walleye hybrid flopped free, plopped back into the creek and swam away. Just bringing this up now makes me mad at my brother all over again.
As the rest of my list began to take shape, I was at least happy to notice a conventional strain among the litany of defeats. For instance, one of the more memorable piscine encounters of my time in Alaska came from a heavily-spotted two-foot rainbow that I watched finning beneath a mess of overhanging willow deep in the American Creek braids. With an eddy, a pair of swirls and riffles diverging to break around the rootwad, there was patently no manner in which to reach this fish on the drift. So I hucked the most absurd cast I’ve ever attempted at the willow and watched mostly dumbfounded as the loop opened to shoot my fly between a half-dozen branches, where it settled – almost leisurely – to the surface directly on top of the trout.
There’s no way the fly was on the water for even half a second. It hit; the fish hit, and my leader snapped, cracking like a .22 shot.
I see this scenario happen again and again in my mind, and it is way clearer than memories of any of the fish I’ve actually caught, even those I have photos of as a reminder. There are countless other in a quite similar vein: a tarpon near the Marquesas Keys that lit out for Cuba with my fly and line, and almost my rod as well; a monster Alagnak king salmon that blew up after I set the hook, splashing water all over my stupid-looking visage as it peeled away every bit of backing on my reel, eventually spooling me before I’d really gotten into the game; and way too many rainbow trout to count.
Alaska is good for that. And as we head into the peak of the summer months, when the angling action is nearing a fevered crescendo across the state, we’re presented opportunities unlike those on offer anywhere else – chance after chance after chance at the fish of a lifetime. But with the variety, size and abundance of Alaska’s gamefish comes equal opportunity to be made a fool of, to be broken off, ran circles around and generally, yet thoroughly, bested. Does it make each success that much sweeter in the end? Probably (just ask steelheaders). However, an impressive defeat can become its own kind of victory, too, as you’ll realize when you start thinking about the greatest fish of your life and find the list made up of those that got away.
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Troy Letherman, Editor [/emember_protected] [emember_protected scope=”not_logged_in_users_only”]
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