Category Archives: Alaska Salmon

Fishing in Brown Bear Country

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Aki has temporarily abandoned me for my fishing partner.  She stayed with him when I drifted downriver to try another spot. When we hike with another human the little dog trots back and forth between people, urging us to close ranks. This morning I expect her to show up after I have made a few casts. When she doesn’t, I remember the pile of brown bear (grizzly) scat that I had to step over to reach this spot. We are in prime bear country. They are also here to fish for silver salmon.

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Aki has bluffed down several black bears in the past but the larger brown bears can’t be bluffed. I quickly reel in my line and start back to where I last saw the little dog. She is not there. Neither is my fishing partner.  I look at the swift water undercutting the bank where they stood when I last saw them and start back down river.  They could have easily passed me. I wouldn’t have heard them over the roaring river.

Aki appears at my heels, tail wagging. Should we head downriver or up? The little dog points her nose up river. I follow her to a barely discernable side trail now being used by my fishing partner to regain the main trail.

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Ropes

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Aki sniffs at something washed up on Sandy Beach by last night’s tide. Every high tide leaves a rope of rockweed along the length of the beach. I’m walking down this line of seaweed, taking an inventory of gull and eagle feathers, bits of crab shell, and sometimes whole salmon bodies. Thankfully no plastic objects or bags peak out from under clumps of the rockweed.

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The last storm tide that ripped down Gastineau Channel sucked away from the beach several inches of the finely pounded gold ore that we call “sand.” This exposed rusted machinery and fragments of ceramic bowls too thick to be fashionable today. What was once garbage we now considered relics of a time before the collapse of the Treadwell mine tunnels in 1917.

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We pass the partially restored tower that once ventilated the mine tunnels that ran beneath the channel. The usual pair of bald eagles roost on the tower’s metal roof, apparently obvious to the approach of the inbound Norwegian Jewell.  The mega cruise ship spews up two thick ropes of pollution from its stacks as it motors towards Juneau.

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If You Build it They Will Come

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When I first moved to Juneau, I was surprised to find Gold Creek imprisoned in a concrete trough where no plant or fish could survive. Before white settlement, its waters carried flakes of gold downstream to be discovered by members of the Auke Tribe. One of them led Joe Juneau and another white prospector up the stream to a rich vein of gold that provided the economic engine for a new city named after Mr. Juneau. Long ago the gold played out. Now cruise ships form our economic mother lode.

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Perhaps to give our visitors something to photograph, the city placed small boulders in two parallel lines near the creek mouth. Storm surges carried gravel and sand down the creek to collect in the lee of the new boulder necklaces. The next summer chum and pink salmon began to spawn in the artificial reids. Salmon have returned each subsequent summer to spawn and die a few meters from the Foodland parking lot.

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The abundance of salmon flesh entices to the stream the parking lot ravens that normally haunt trash bins and the pickup beds of careless shoppers. Gulls form a circle around the ravens or look for a chance to reach a salmon carcass before one of the big-beaked birds. I watched a gull perch on a rock in mid-steam and plunge its head into the water to pull flesh off from a spawned-out fish while other gulls complained about his good fortune.

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Fish Creek Eagles

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Last night’s storm broke its back on the spine of Douglas Island and the mainland mountains.  Its heavy rain has swollen Fish Creek and turned the water the color of molasses. Salmon too weak from spawning have already been swept back into Fritz Cove. Those still waiting their turn to bred are hunkered down in eddies or behind drift wood barriers.

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Aki doddles behind until we reach Fish Creek where four eagles and kingfisher watch us approach from spruce tree roosts. One, an immature eagle, has cruciformed its wings so they can dry. The little dog hesitates and then moves close to me. No one dives on her as we round the pond and head out to the creek mouth.

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A big ebb tide has lowered the creek’s level and exposed a wide swath of wetlands. But the dozen or so eagles that we can spot are either feeding along side the stream or watching us from spruce roosts. Aki relaxes on a part of the trail almost enclosed by tall fireweed and wild rose shafts. I stop where that stretch ends and count six eagles watching us from trailside trees. Aki doesn’t follow me out onto the exposed meadow.

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I figure that the eagles must have sated themselves on dead salmon and other goodies exposed by the ebb tide. They won’t be interested in my ten-pound poodle. But Aki doesn’t share my confidence so I have to carry her until we reach a more protected stretch of trail.

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While we circumnavigate a small island covered with tall spruce, I lose count of the number of eagles, mature and immature, that fly over out heads and out over the wetlands.  White puffs of eagle down drift onto the trail in their wake.

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Messy Eaters

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I am out in the North Pass, competing with Stellar Sea Lions for silver salmon. Aki is out berry picking with her other human. Three hundred meters away, a humpback whale throws its tail up in the air and dives.

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We will only boat on silver today. The sea lions will be much more successful. One surfaces with a silver trapped in its mouth. The sea lion snaps its head back and forth as a small flock of gulls dive on it in an attempt to snatch away bites of the fish. They know the sea lion is a messy eater.

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Bouncing Down the Pass

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This is a harvest trip. True we have time to watch the North Pass humpback whales feed. But thanks to a fifteen-knot wind that is cross grain to the incoming tide, we will bounce on close-set waves all day. We’d be elsewhere if not fishing for silver salmon. Again, Aki is safe and comfortable at home. As we did last week, the captain and I have used downriggers to sink baited herring into the pass waters. Unlike last week, there are other boats bouncing with us. No one is waving a net around preparing to boat a silver. We see someone boat a pink salmon but until the captain netted a eight-pound fish that I had hooked, we will see no silver salmon pulled from the water.

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We Could Be Miles Away

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It rained all last night. This morning only a light shower dimples Crystal Lake. But soon the real drama will begin. A storm is moving over Sitka. It is scheduled to drop four inches of rain on the Troll Woods and raise the lake’s level. Tomorrow the trails may be muddy and in places flooded. But now Aki and I should have no problem exploring the woods.

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I lead the little dog off the main trail and onto one of the beavers’ logging roads. We follow it to a little lake we seldom are able to visit.  For the last few years the access trail has been flooded by water backed up behind the beaver dams. Now it is dry.

Less than a mile away, a string of tourist buses unloads in front of the glacier visitor center. People crowd the bear-watching platform searching for inbound sockeye salmon and the bears that feed on them. A few miles in the other direction, planes and helicopters take off and land. When the wind drops we can hear airplane and bus noise. But the wind is rising in anticipation of the storm, letting me pretend we are thirty miles deep in wilderness.

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They are Back

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The ravens waited for Aki. Two of the large black birds strutted down the Fish Creek Bridge as if fat-rich bodies of dead dog salmon weren’t stretched out for them on a gravel bar beneath the bridge. They were sated and bored and looking to do some mischief. My little dog was a handy patsy. When they didn’t make way for us on the bridge, Aki growled and dashed forward. The ravens flited a little further down the bridge and waited for her to catch up. Just before she did, the ravens lifted themselves onto the bridge rails.

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Game ended, the little poodle-mix trotted off the bridge and headed toward Fish Creek Pond. Two bald eagles eyed our approach. Incoming pink salmon splashed on the pond’s surface. One let itself be caught by a grade schooler on the opposite shore of the pond.

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We’d see at least a half-a-dozen eagles on our walk to the creek’s mouth. All have been drawn here by the pink and chum salmon now filing up the creek. All around Juneau, chum salmon are spawning in their home streams. Each stream draws of collection of bald eagles, ravens, crows, and gulls waiting for the dying to begin.

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Fish and Friend Ballet

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Aki didn’t come with on this fishing trip. It’s for the best. She’d been bored after she investigated the boat for crumbs. The boat’s rhythmic pounding as it rounded Shelter Island would have sent her searching the cutty cabin for a place to hide. She wouldn’t have been calmed until the banging stopped, even after I assured her that the waves would drop at the changing of the tide.  Now I wonder if I shouldn’t have stayed home with the little dog.

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I was thrilled and frightened by a humpback whale that surfaced less than fifty meters in front of us as the boat headed for the fishing grounds. The captain and I both felt relief after he made a course correction letting the whale slide by twenty meters to port. Now I am a little bored and feeling put upon by the rough motion of the boat beating into sharp-edged swells. The captain and I sank our herring-baited hooks an hour ago.  At the edge of our vision, a pod of humpbacks bubble feed. But to move nearer to them would take us away from the fish we seek.

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Right now the Juneau Costco store is opening its doors. If home and not being hammered by waves on Lynn Canal, I could buy two immaculate red salmon fillets nestling under plastic wrap in a foam tray. The tray would cost less than the gas used to reach the fishing grounds. But if I substituted that salmon for the one I hope to catch this morning I could not have watched the peaks of the Chilkat Range climb out of low lying clouds. There’d be no more whale encounters if I only fished at Costco, no more chances to see a bear work the tidelands for found food.

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The tip of my trolling pole dips down and then pops us as a fish pulls my line from the downrigger clip. I grab the pole and reel in slack until I can feel hooked salmon struggling to escape. When it breaks the water and I know it is a silver.  My fishing partner reels in his line and cranks up the downrigger cables so they can’t interfere with the boating of the fish. With the net, he moves in front of me as I gently reel in my line. Three times the silver will undo my efforts when it swims away after being brought close to the boat. It will be too tired to resist the net the fourth time. Then I will remember that it is this ballet of salmon and friend that I would miss most of all if I only fished at stores.

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Salmon for Dinner

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The Gastineau Channel eagles and seals are assembled for a banquet. Thirty seals lounge on a disappearing sand bar. An even greater number of eagles huddle together on a barge tied up near the salmon hatchery. Their dish for supper—homeward bound chum salmon—wait in line to climb the hatchery fish ladder. Soon the seals will be herding salmon into a tight group that will make harvesting easier.  But I can’t figure how the eagles will cash in on the chum bonanza.  Except for those fish killed by seals or fisherman and not eaten, the salmon will all end up in the hatchery pens. There they will be electrocuted and their eggs or milt will be removed. The milt will fertilize eggs to create the next generation of salmon.

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