|
...Continued
from top
Casting space often comes at a premium in Southeast Alaska, and the bar would accommodate only one rod at a time. "You're up," I said to my old friend Ray Stalmaster, one of the few anglers I know who is as willing as I am to work hard for a wild steelhead. I hadn't visited this stream in three seasons and I wanted to study the water a bit before I began to fish.
But Ray has always been an attack-on-sight fly-fisherman and moments after my deferral he stood waist deep in the current casting a skunk into the head of the pool. Forget the classic elegance of British salmon streams. This is America, where frontiersmen once bushwhacked redcoats from the cover of trees, and our steelhead techniques reflect a similar lack of decorum. Threading his back cast through a layer of branches, he took two short shots to gain a measure of the drift and dropped his next cast right where it belonged. Without warning, the pool exploded.
As Ray struck furiously, the rod tip bucked and a yard's worth of brilliant fish broke water and turned a great, lazy cartwheel in front of his face. He shouted something inarticulate-you always shout when a steelhead strikes, and what you shout never makes much sense-and danced clumsily back toward shore to keep the line from fouling on his boots as the fish roared downstream toward the falls. And over the falls, offering one last leap through a broken shaft of sunlight before it disappeared into the shadows below. It was hard not to imagine that jump as the fish's way of saying goodbye.
But when the reel stopped screeching, tension remained in the line and as I studied the rod tip I thought I saw pulsations that current alone could not explain. "Don't tell me he's still on!" I cried in surprise.
"I think he is," Ray replied. "But now what?"
"Not my problem," I replied as he began to pick his way downstream in an ultimately futile attempt to sort out the mess the fish had left behind. I hated to sound unsympathetic, but it was my turn to fish, and it was about time.
As I packed to leave Alaska in 1986, I wondered what I'd miss most about the Great Land once I no longer called it home. Waterfowl on Cook Inlet? Dall rams in the Wrangells? Caribou in the foothills of the Alaska Range? The answer turned out to be none of the above. What I missed most was wild steelhead.
The yearning I felt for these great game fish once I returned to the landlocked plains of Montana derived from my childhood in the Pacific Northwest, where I fell under their spell. Wild fish still thrived in the waters of western Washington then. But too much politics and too many people-always an ominous combination for wildlife-eventually took their toll. Resource managers responded with what they had to offer: hatchery fish. Trouble is, wild steelhead are to their pre-fab imitations as great Bordeaux is to a cheap wine cooler.
Alaska's coastal waters reminded me what steelhead were supposed to be. While steelhead run all the way north through the Kodiak archipelago to the southern shore of the Alaska Peninsula, the southeastern panhandle's rain-soaked coastline eventually became my favorite place to prospect for them, and not just because of the fish. The world's greatest temperate rain forest cast a spell I found impossible to resist. Bears and blacktail deer provided a welcome excuse to pack a bow. But in the end, at least to those appropriately obsessed, Southeast Alaska means wild steelhead.
To the newcomer, steelhead may seem an unlikely object of all this fuss, especially after long, damp hours casting to silent water. Don't think for a minute that the events described earlier represent typical steelhead fishing. Even in Alaska, I've fished for days without a strike. Unlike the rainbow trout, seafaring steelhead come and go and, when they're gone, all the technique in the world won't draw strikes from empty lies. Blink, and you'll miss them. Anglers needing instant gratification should consider another quarry.
But viewed philosophically, the steelhead's elusive nature only adds to its mystique. It takes a special kind of angler (or a special kind of fool) to brave the elements to cast to a quarry that may not even be present. And when that Close Encounter of the Third Kind does take place, the feeling of satisfaction suggests big-game hunting more than fishing. You'll remember every wild steelhead you've ever hooked, even when the numbers reach into the hundreds-a statement that's difficult to make about salmon, even kings and silvers at their best.
The essential mystery of steelhead has always been their uncanny ability to find their way home. Even after years of study, no one really knows exactly what happens to these fish once they've left their natal waters, although it's clear that many of them travel great distances at sea. But their admirers have always been able to count upon their eventual return, an instinct our own species has celebrated since the days of Homer's Odyssey. The trick is to be sure they always have a home to return to, and then to be waiting for them when they do.
Alaska's steelhead represent the survivors of a fragile resource and are a result of the state's refusal to turn to hatcheries as a way of coping with limited stocks of wild fish. Vulnerable at every stage of their complex life cycle, from inshore habitat degradation along spawning streams to interception as an incidental catch on the high seas, these splendid fish need at least a little help from their friends. Alaska has made its steelhead fishery largely catch-and-release, although anglers still may keep two fish longer than 36 inches in most areas. The regulation makes some biological sense because fish that large probably have already made a contribution to the gene pool. Personally, I choose to release them all. Steelhead are almost as memorable on the table as they arc on the end of a line, but I'd rather eat halibut and salmon and leave the steelhead in the stream. You never know when you may have just caught your last one.
Another season, another stream. This time, solitude rather than companionship defines the mood. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," Robert Frost once observed, and here in the wilds of coastal Alaska, they always seem a bit darker and deeper when you're alone. Rain drizzles gently from a lowering sky, calming the current and wrapping my surroundings in gently muffled silence. Today it's just me and the water, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
The water has proven stubborn and unyielding, either because the fish are in an uncooperative mood or simply aren't there. I've worked my way slowly upstream for nearly five hours, hypnotized by the constant rhythm of cast, mend and drift. Boring? Not really, not in a setting as lovely as this. The trick is to make the fishing the goal rather than the fish. Uninterrupted by distractions, I've established a Zen-like intimacy with the water that's difficult to describe. I've fished this same stream in the fall when it's full of bright silvers, and despite the obvious appeal of all those salmon, I can't remember ever knowing the current as well as I've grown to know it today. The absence of fish has allowed me to become part of something larger than jolting strikes and screaming reels and, oddly enough, I almost feel grateful.
For this is just the kind of effect Alaska's wild steelhead-or even their possibility-can have on ordinarily levelheaded people like me. Consider my refusal to feel disappointed by the "silence of the water" part of the steelhead's mystique, a simple explanation of what they mean and why. Confident that they will appear sometime, Iam ready for them as promised and, some days, that must be enough.
E. DONNALL THOMAS JR. divides his time between Montana and Southeast Alaska. He wrote about angling for rockfish in our October issue.
|