I’m no expert when it comes to Southeast Alaska and all that it has to offer. We took a couple of trips there with George and they were indeed life-changing experiences, but there’s still so much about the area and what it has to offer to fly fishermen then what I’ve experienced. Still, that’s not […]
It’s come to my attention that all of the posts pertaining to Tales from East Yahtam are untitled and fairly incoherent as far as any narrative or story arch is concerned. In short, I just started telling random stories as a photograph or memory would prompt me to and I understand how any new — […]
We had one native that visited us continually while in East Yahtam. Whenever dad would finish cleaning the fish for the day he would place the remnants on the rocks of the hightide-creek in front of the camp, and during dinner, we would receive a visit from a big male black bear. “We’ve named him […]
George kept several crab traps that we would fill with the leftover salmon heads. A few days later once you’ve had enough smoked salmon salad spaghetti we’d pull the crab pots and eat several hundred dollars worth of Dungeness crab each. The first trip we went on I was so excited to pull the crab […]
“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 […]
For the few hours that it gets dark in Alaska during the late summer, it gets really dark. Remember, there’s an almost guaranteed chance that it’s either raining, or the sky is overcast so there’s almost no chance you’re going to have any moonlight. It’s at that moment that you realize just how dark a […]
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 […]
Tales from East Yahtam 