Saturday dawned cloudy and cool, but doable. Master breakfast chef Don cooked up scrambled eggs, bacon, reindeer sausage, and blueberry pancakes. By the time everyone was up, ready, and fed and the dishes done, it was 11:00. A rather lazy day, I would say!
While Bart, Jerri, Chris, Kenneth, and Melinda took a hike to the Russian River Falls, Katie, Don and I went to the river to try our hand at fishing. When we got there, we could tell where the silver salmon were, because the combat fishermen had arrived. Since we were not really interested in that, we went upstream a bit and did some dry fly fishing. That didn't work . . . the rainbow and dolly vardens were not biting, and the big red sockeye would get snagged by the flies, so we decided to change our tactics.
After I had lost a $1.00 green lure and Don had lost several himself, we met a man who seemed to know what he was doing. Unfortunately, he was otherwise preoccupied. In his backcast, he had hooked a sea gull, and his line had wrapped around its wing. We could hear him talking to the gull as it kept pecking at his hand, but it was obvious he needed help.
Don and I offered to assist, and Don had the brilliant idea to use his net. He slowly walked to the gull and put the net over its head. After some initial pecking at the net, it calmed right down, Rick was able to untangle the gull's wing, and it flew off!
He then gave us some tips, waded out, put his fly in the water, and caught a dolly varden. He released it, put his line out and caught another one. Seven times. Seven times he put his fly in and pulled out a fish. Then he caught a large Rainbow (or Bow, as they say in Alaska). He was impressive.
In the meantime, Don and I caught a few, and Katie had a 17" Dolly Varden. So although we didn't do as well as Rick, it was a successful, if not expensive (in terms of flies, hooks, and lures lost) trip.
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