Alaskan Adventure Fishing: In Search of Arctic Char and Rainbow Trout
Wild Fish Wild Places 03.15.12
Coming as I do from the rain-soaked, perpetually green Emerald Isle, an invitation to visit the remote Alaska Peninsula to film two episodes for Season 2 of our series Wild Fish Wild Places was the fulfillment of a personal ambition – held since I was a young lad of about twelve!
The afternoon when Denis and I received an email inviting us to fish at Rapids Camp Lodge we were in Vegas attending the ICAST Convention, catching up with friends at Sportsman Channel and meeting with our sponsors. As soon as I read the email I was so excited and mouthed ALASKA, ALASKA, ALASKA over and over again! It is a name that I absolutely love the sound of! Alaska or Aleyska as it is called in Aleutian, to me just sounds wild, wonderful and untamed!
Soon, phone calls back and forth between Rapids Camp and ourselves had us mark off the period from the very end of August into early September for our great Alaskan adventure.
To me, Alaska is synonymous with all five species of Pacific salmon. It is also home to the greatly prized Arctic char and famous the world over for its prolific rainbow trout fishing. Alaska also means bears and bush…lots and lots of large, deceptively cuddly, brown bears lurking amidst dense, almost impenetrable bush! Yikes!
Here is an adventure that most only get to dream about. Here is a land of incomprehensible vastness and scale. Here is a land of exquisite landscapes. Mountains so picture-postcard-perfect in form and appearance and braided streams of tumbling torrents and gentler riffles. A wilderness of jade-coloured, glacier-born rivers and lakes so pure and brimming with fish that momentarily you forget where you are and almost believe you are on a gargantuan, fairy tale movie set!
When the day finally came round I was so fired up with anticipation of what adventures lay ahead, that I overlooked the fact I had arranged a somewhat circuitous route from my home in Ireland to King Salmon, Alaska. I boarded five different planes, covering a guesstimated nine thousand miles or so to get to Rapids Camp Lodge, on the bank of the fabulous Naknek River. By the time I was reunited with the Wild Fish crew in Anchorage, I was so thrilled to be there that I could hardly sleep a wink. I just wanted to savour every moment of this fantastic fishing adventure. Most fishermen experience the childlike wonder and sense of awe that suddenly takes hold of us when an opportunity to catch new species in a totally different place and setting comes our way. Rapids Camp Lodge brings out that sense of wonderment and awe in all who visit there.
To call the trip a “success” would be a complete understatement! Denis and I caught char after char – beautifully coloured fish and what fighters they are! My introduction to the art of “dongling” for big ‘bows on the Naknek is one of the highlights of a trip that will remain on my cerebral hard-drive for many years to come. Denis caught a monster rainbow – measuring a hand-trembling 31 1/2 inches on the Naknek and he also winkled out a 30 inch hog of a char of about 12 lbs that inhaled his leech during what I now refer to as one of his “Hall of Fame” performances. This great double triumph was achieved by a really great fisherman.
We both consider Rapids Camp Lodge to be the best run and equipped camp we have visited in all our fishing travels, offering as it does so many diverse fishing adventures as well as daily fly-outs to over 50 different rivers, offering an Alaskan wilderness experience beyond compare.
Oh and did I mention those big, brown cuddly looking bruins? Yes, we did have a very close encounter with those hairy, smelly brutes!
Tune in to Sportsman Channel and catch Wild Fish Wild Places as Denis and I continue on our global fishing adventures in search of great predatory fish and the people who live to fish and the people who fish to live.
FISH AND FISHING. TWO WORDS HAVING A MYRIAD OF MEANINGS TO A MYRIAD OF PEOPLES. TO FISH FOR FOOD, FOR LIFE, FOR SURVIVAL; OR TO FISH FOR FUN, FOR SPORT, FOR MONEY.
When, almost 5,000 years ago in China, man first attached a hook and line to a bamboo rod to catch carp a little further from the river’s edge, little did he know that this creation would evolve into an industry which at the early part of this, the twenty-first century, is worth over $108 billion annually to the US economy in terms of sport fishing alone!
The variety of fish species is infinite. From cold water inhabitants such as members of the Salmonidae family, to warm water, tropical dwellers like the Cichlids. From the gigantic Tarpon of the Florida Keys to the gentler Arctic Charr spectacularly attired in their vivid courtship colors in the frigid rivers and streams of the arctic tundra. Take the celebrated Coelacanth, over three hundred million years old and still found today in the warm seas of the Indian Ocean around Madagascar, or the seemingly ubiquitous Golden Orfe, or the goldfish, which completes endless circuits in so many glass bowls in family homes in every corner of the world.
In this series, we will seek out great predatory fish. Fish that are much revered, fish that strike terror at the very mention of their name and fish that are the staple diet of many peoples subsisting along the shorelines and riverbanks of the great waters we will visit during our odyssey. Positioned at the very top of the food chain, these apex predators reign supreme in their own domain, be it mighty river, great lake or ocean.
Our quest will take us across cultures and continents to exotic locations of immense beauty and wealth as well as lands poleaxed by poverty. We will explore not just these wild and wonderful places, but the significance of our target species to the different groupings of peoples in terms of social, economic and cultural values.
Our travels in search of extraordinary predators will take us from the cold, unforgiving waters of the West of Ireland to the steaming jungle swamps of India. From the frozen, pristine wilderness of the Canadian subarctic to the sun-baked backwaters of Northern Australia. This will be a series of contrasts and comparisons where we will meet people who live to fish and people who fish to live.
