Winter Operations in Southeast Alaska

Removing the snow from last night.

 “Because the mail never stops. It just keeps coming and coming and coming. There's never a letup, it's relentless. Every day it piles up more and more, and you gotta get it out, but the more you get out, the more keeps coming in”. Newman said it best in an episode of Seinfeld, it never stops, and not only the mail, but UPS, Fedex, and typical freight orders from town. During the wintertime in southeast the people don’t just up and leave until the cruise ships come back, they get order happy on amazon and keep the pilots at Taquan busy on through the new year. With more and more people taking advantage of amazon prime the loads double yearly and we fly more and more boxes out of Ketchikan to the smaller communities in southeast Alaska. With that increase in mail also comes the hard to work with weather of an Alaskan winter. After the summer solstice, the days begin to get smaller and smaller until the sun isn’t up until 8am and back down at 3pm. With the shortening of the day the amount of time we have to fly decreases, but the amount of flying needed to be done doesn’t change, people need to get home and important items need to make out to the communities. Having thirty to forty minutes between flights quickly becomes five to ten, just enough time to recycle some coffee, reload the plane and your thermos, and get fuel.       The flying windows also get even smaller when the weather stops coordinating, if it isn’t early morning advection fog, its wind, rain squalls, snow squalls, or temperatures so low the saltwater freezes to the aircraft. At twelve degrees saltwater will begin to freeze and make aircraft controls harder to use and your floats an ice rink. If it snowed the night before you now have to de-ice and de-snow the aircraft, which and take upwards of an hour depending on the thickness of the snow, if it froze, and if you can hose it off with the deicing sprayer. Fortunately, we regularly plow and salt our dock at Taqaun but not all locations we fly to have those tools or necessarily the people to do the job. The airport dock is one such treacherous place that if you don’t take you time and get the plane slowed down enough you end up sliding down the dock holding onto a wing rope trying to find a spot your boots finally catch grip and you can tie up. To add to that ninety percent of the time the dock ropes are frozen and require some bending and kicking to get the plane secured. A few times I have gotten onto docks and began digging through a foot of snow trying to find a rope to tie the plane up.         With this increase in excitement also come an increase in boredom, we can go weeks without flying to certain locations due to weather. One such location that we visit rarely in the winter is the small community of Hyder on the Canadian border southeast of Ketchikan. It is uniquely located within the Misty Fjords and its location further inland gives it much colder temperatures than Ketchikan, with almost a twenty degree difference its hard to find days warm enough to even land there. Many of the bays and inlets that the communities we service have a tendency to freeze during the winter and will only stay clear if the winds can blow the ice out of the bay or prevent the ice from freezing over the top of the water, this can often create ice fog that will blow off the top of the water in a very spectacular fashion. Fortunately, with ferry service to Prince of Wales island (POW), where most of the communities service reside, we can send a box van over that can deliver a lot of the mail. Even though most of the towns on POW are on the road system there are three that you cannot access via the road, Edna Bay, Port Protection, and Point Baker. Reliance on flights is one of the disadvantages of remote living and a few times this year we have had over a thousand pounds of dog kibble stacked in the freight room, of course the dogs in the remote town then get to eat salmon and much finer fare until the dog food comes in.

River Otter on the Taquan Dock

Mike Rhoads flying the Otter in from the afternoon Craig flight.

Is Cloud

Snow-covered Rainforrest 

Fog blowing off the Thorne River.

December 15, 2019

Five Out of Six

“Splat”, all but one of the six eggs I had were totaled. The one good egg was quickly offered as a sacrifice to the fish gods and hurled at the nearest cedar. Breakfast would be a granola bar and three sausages that had fallen off the unsteady cooking stove. It was enough to make me wonder if the five seconds restarted after every fall or not.

I’d spent the night in my second hand CRV next to the creek so I could take advantage of the ever-diminishing daylight we get during the Alaskan Fall. Recently the accessibility on Revillagigado Island has more than tripled with the opening of new sections of road, connecting the town with a massive expanse of former logging and four-wheeler trails. This has granted access to new forest service-maintained fishing and hunting grounds that up until now have only been accessible by either boat or floatplane. I was going to make sure I would fish these new waters before they became both well-known and overfished.

The Idea of catch and release is often laughed at in a town known for its large salmon runs and halibut fishery. Alaska is a place where people will stock the fridge with as much wild game as they can legally get their hands on, and the idea of letting that hard-earned trout slip back into the water and swim away is often looked at as foolish. Because of the lack of a catch and release culture the two main trout streams are often fished for keepers and the fish typically don’t grow beyond twelve inches. Of course, that has never stopped me from displaying my hard-earned pocket trout, but I have never been able to catch the large rainbows that make Alaska such a destination. But with little human intervention on these new waters the trout should be able to grow fat, happy, and dumb—or at least that was my notion.

After countless hours of staring at topographic maps, satellite images, and a pre-trip recon mission with my girlfriend, I loaded up the car and went straight from work down the road in search of big rainbows and my own version of “The Good Old Days”.

After a long drive on an old dirt track, a few sketchy bridges, and a small rockslide, I had reached my campsite. Now, if you’re going to visit a rainforest, dry wood is something you should bring with you, but in my excitement, I had forgotten that while packing my rig. After a visit to an old cedar snag and the sacrifice of a hoodie sleeve and some toilet paper, I had a fire large enough to entertain me for the night. With a cigar saved for a rainy day and the latest Colter Wall album, I had all I needed to conjure adventurous dreams of massive fish.

I was too excited to wait for the sun to come up, so I slid down the embankment on the side of the road through the devil’s club, holding my flashlight in one hand and my five weight in the other. Next time I’ll bring a headlamp. After shambling over multiple downed trees and a few beaver dams I had begun to worry if there were any trout in here at all. After casting a few times, I didn’t get so much as a nibble, nor had I seen anything rising. There was more than enough bear shit, and one suspiciously friendly beaver, but not a fin or ripple in sight. Most of the waters around this part of Alaska have salmon runs that keep the fish fed all winter, but with no sign of spawning, or even zombies, my hopes dwindled. I started to lament that all this anticipation and planning was going to go down as just another stream nobody knew anything about because there was nothing worth knowing.

Just as I contemplated returning to the car and trying a different stream, I noticed I was not far from a waterfall with more fast water below it. Another half mile or so of no fish, as well as an interesting round of “please don’t let there be a bear on this bear trail”, led me to the base of the falls. Thinking this trip had turned into a sightseeing adventure, I scrambled up onto a large boulder and had a seat before lazily casting.

“WHAM”! I had my first fish on, but then realized that there was no way to land it! I ended up losing this prodigal fish while sliding down the side of the moss-covered rock.

The disappointment was short lived, however, because after that the day went on to becoming the best day of fishing I ever had. Each new hole would produce the biggest rainbow I had ever caught, and I followed the river feverishly all the way down to the saltwater. In all my excitement I had lost track of exactly how far I had come  down stream, and realized it was going to be a long rest of the day trudging back to the Honda

Next time I’ll bring more eggs.

First Steelhead Nov 22^nd, 2019

Alright, this is my first attempt at this whole blog thing and I’m starting it with a post about catching my first steelhead last Friday.

Three years, three fly-out trips, two broken rods, four lost fish, and one failed relationship later, I finally caught my first winter Steelhead. The first time I heard about steelhead was inside a bass pro shop in Dania Beach Florida, trying to buy my first flyrod. At the time I was working as a floatplane pilot doing daily trips to the Bahamas, on multiple occasions I carried passengers on their way to Bimini or Andros to fish for Bonefish on the fly and I wanted to try this new challenge that was more than hurling cut squid for snapper. My first fly fishing lesson was inside that bass pro with Keith the shop pro who sold me an eight weight that would catch everything from snook, to bonefish, to steelhead. Fast forward two years and it’s my first week in Alaska and my coworkers Luke, and his wife Tracey, are taking my roommates and I out to our first fly fishing trip in Alaska, my first time fly fishing in fresh water.

Throughout the car ride Luke told us about how he was going to catch his first steelhead, he had spent the entire winter preparing for it, read multiple books, and tied the exact flies he needed. Being from Florida I was more captivated in the amazing views and mountains that surrounded us as we drove into the island, up until then the highest mountain I knew was a dump we passed on I-95 heading south to Ft Lauderdale. While sitting on a large fallen spruce Luke pointed out a large steelhead just ahead of us on the stream, drift after drift and the fish ignored every single fly he had in his fly box. It just sat there intently until it was finally spooked off by an ill-timed splash that may or may not have been me sliding off the log into the stream. By the end of that day nobody had caught a fish, I had sprained my ankle, and Luke had snow shoved down his jacket, but that is a different story.  After that little adventure I was obsessed with catching one of those chrome sided beauties that Luke pointed out that day. The Flying, which was the entire reason I came to Alaska, was now an inconvenience that prevented me from fishing. I went fishing all summer long trying to figure out this new freshwater enigma, I had no idea what nymphing was, how to mend a dead drift, or the effect of water levels on the fishing, I only knew that I was having a blast and that the few trout I astonishingly caught were enough to keep me fixated on fly fishing. But before I knew it my summer in Alaska had ended and I was on a plane back to Florida dreaming about coming back earlier next summer so I could catch the Steelhead run at its earliest in the springtime.

The following year I was ready, I had spent my winter tying flies and this summer my roommate was a local fishing sage that had his own airplane and guide service for fly fishing in Ketchikan, Dave Rocke. With a winter of preparation, Dave’s priceless knowledge, and early arrival into town, this would be the year. Or at least that was the plan, the summer started off with a bang, literally, I blew up the motor on my nineteen ninety-nine Ford Ranger halfway to Washington in Kansas City, Missouri. The setback was a thousand-dollar plane ticket and the cash to buy Dave’s old Mitsubishi when I got to town. The few times I did get to go fishing that summer it didn’t end well, I hooked up with two fish and lost them both, one to a hook that straightened out, and the other to a sloppy knot. There were a lot of good things that summer but the steel heading was not one of them. It would be an entire year after that until everything came together and I landed my first fish.

Four O Clock, that was my cutoff time, at that point, it would be too dark to even see my indicator as it drifted down the stream. I had an hour and thirty minutes of sunlight left after I got work to try for a winter fish. At this point in the winter the sun didn’t come up until seven thirty and it was down by four. After a well-meaning warning from my very pregnant coworker that it would be too dark to fish, I left work and sped for the lake. Thirty minutes and two dolly varden later I hooked bottom for the second time, as I sighed and tried to break it loose my line suddenly went taught and the bottom began to pull back, this was no dolly. twenty minutes and three herculean runs later and I had my first steelhead in my net, well sort of, only half of the fish fit in the net. This fish eclipsed every other I had ever caught, this was no canal largemouth bass, this was a steelhead and it was worth every bit of effort it took to get to this point. Well except maybe the blown ranger, it didn’t even have one hundred thousand miles yet.

(First Steelhead Trip) The Log im on used to be a bridge that had been knocked off its foundation by rain.

(First Steelhead Trip) From left to right, Luke, Sam, me, Trevor.

(First Steelhead Trip) I had no idea what I was doing.

(Second Year) Out on the Creek with Luke 

(Second Year) Out on the Creek with Luke  

(Second Year) Dave and I flew out to fish, I broke two rods that day.

(Third Year) My First Steelhead

(Third Year) I had to lay my phone on the bank and use selfie mode with a timer to get this.