“This is all you need to catch fish up here,” George said earlier in the day as he handed out egg sucking leech patterns he had tied back home. They were #6 size royal purple leech patterns with bright orange yarn eggs tied near the eye of the hook. We tossed the leech pattern along […]
The second to last day of our first trip Tom asked if I’d like to accompany him in his boat to go into the towns of Point Baker and Port Protection. Being nineteen and not experienced enough to be nervous about getting into boats with strangers, I obliged. He was running in to get fuel […]
I went back and forth on the third rule of camping and fishing in Southeast Alaska, but I decided that it wasn’t nearly a rule as much as a suggestion. It has apparently been a long-running joke in Alaska that the official state bird is the Mosquito. During the day it seems like they’re out […]
“Look! We’ve spotted our first bear!” Dad joked as George greeted us coming off of the float plane. George had a welded metal houseboat docked on the backside of the harbor just out of sight from Tom’s. It was painted in camouflage as well which made it very difficult to spot. An entire story […]
I never kept up with it but I know even until 10 o’clock at night you’d still see sunlight, but every now and then you’d wake up in the middle of the night because nature was calling. For the hour or two or three that it gets dark in Alaska during the late summer, it […]
There’s so much that can go wrong when trying to catch a fish on a fly rod. There’s at a minimum 4 knots that connect the fly to the reel. Hook sets are critical to fly fishing as well, and they can be very species specific. You certainly don’t set the hook the same way on trout […]
At times I can hardly distinguish what characteristics actually define the person or the place until I arrive at the singularity where George and Yahtam are really just one and the same. I’ve mentioned before that George and Bo Jackson were good friends. They bow hunted together, and apparently while Bo was at Auburn, […]
I can recall our first return trip from Yahtam being a roughly two-hour boat ride in the steady rain. It wasn’t thick sheets of rain, but each drop was fat and consistently beat on the outer shell of your clothing like a deep rhythmic bass drum so persistent that it became almost impossible to focus […]
It’s difficult not to philosophize when discussing fly fishing. The mixture of science (objectivity) versus art (subjectivity) demands it at a certain point. In the beginning, it feels like a black art. The cast seems like something only a sorcerer could master. The mind hardly even knows where to begin at this point. The […]
There’s a hard bend in the back corner of the harbor opposite the houseboat that upon initial approach isn’t obvious. Once you make it back to farthest and westernmost point of the harbor it’s possible to see the bend cutting back to the north. A grim reminder of the harshness of navigating the waters sat […]
