Wednesday August 3, 2011

Today I was going to attempt to catch a trout in a way I’d never done before….

In the Lower 48 trout survive mostly off a diet if insects….In Alaska, trout eat very few bugs. They feed primarily on eggs from the female salmon and the flesh of rotting salmon…..for most of you, pretty gross right? I guess it’s the circle of life…….

My goal was to use red plastic bead as an imitator of a salmon egg. I bought a variety of colors and stopped to see my guide friend Skip for a little more advice. He told me that one time he actually saw a large trout swim and ram into the side of a salmon. The trout then gobbled up the salmon eggs just dispensed like a candy machine. He did some fine-tuning to my game plan and I was off to Montana Creek.

I was supposed to run my bead literally under the bellies of the giant spawning salmon and was told the trout would be waiting to attack it…….

It worked…..

After catching several trout this way I was left to ponder a few things……First off I was thrilled at my accomplishment, like scoring a hat trick in a men’s league hockey game or winning a tennis tournament, I felt, well……proud of myself. It was great to add a new skill to my overall repertoire.

Usually you get to the river, see the giant salmon, lose your mind….. and start bombing flies at them. Attempting to catch salmon in this particular part of the river was actually illegal, but fishing for the trout was not. I was also using a rod meant for the smaller trout and would most likely break if I was to accidently hook a salmon. Forced to fish exclusively for trout in a salmon filled environment allowed me to study the behavior of the spawning salmon. Today I was an observer. It was wonderful to watch the 4 foot long pairs of blaze orange king salmon do their thing, taking turns in the nest, performing their final act, perpetuating life …..just prior their own death.

The guy that I bought the beads from told me to “be on the look out for nature” while I was out there. So, needless to say, the walk back to the car in the half-light of the evening was scary as hell. Would being mauled by a bear really be a bad way to go? I actually don’t think so……I can certainly think of less noble ways. If one was to be killed by a bear it would say a lot about you as a person……it would say that you died doing what you loved. It would say that you were not afraid to be out there on the edge, alone in the wild. It would say that you too were a part in the great circle of life…….