Here I am with a 16 pound coho. He is the model for my cast bronze salmon buckles. Downsized, of course.
There might not be a stronger fish in the river than a chrome silver straight from the ocean. As a matter of fact, the surf was full of salmon......and seals! Yum yum.
These silvers loved a surface fly, and my knuckles took a full 12 weeks to recover.
I wore one of my Salmon GatorGrip belts, and gave one to my guide, Griz. He loved it so much that he bought 2 more when he got back home at the end of the season.
Speaking of season, this coastal river has a 7 week season. The fish run longer than that, but the weather out of the Gulf of Alaska gets real stormy toward the end of September, so flying in and out of the wilderness camp becomes predictably bad.
Carol and I caught hundreds of silver salmon in 5 days, fishing a leisurely 7 hour day. Doing the math, we each caught a salmon every 6 minutes, and that includes time for lunch, and changing flies. We caught no other species of fish, only silvers. No pesky pinks! All catch and release, except for our limit of 8 male fish.
We did look up occasionally and admire the Bering Glacier. And the thousands of migrating sand hill cranes. And we did look for bears. But we came to fish, and fish we did.
We quit at 3:30 and came in for a few fingers of whiskey before supper.
