Fly fishing fun

[Richard Flanders]

Did a marathon 24hr fishing trip to Paxon, a 5 hr drive SE of Fairbanks. My neighbor "forced" me to go; I had no choice. To be fair, minimal arm twisting was required. The lake outlet had opened up and the smolt were piling downriver at night and the lakers stacked up and chowed down. Saturday night they caught around 50 trout between two of them and fished until 0200. We got there in the afternoon yesterday and fished some and caught a few lakers, grayling and whitefish. The feeding frenzy didn't start until midnight last night, long after all the other fisherman had departed and was still going at 0400. Ron and I were set up to sleep in the boat and were on hand for the fun. Don't have pictures of the night time frenzy but it was fun. Lakers rolling all over the riffles at the outlet. We did well, but not near as well as they had last Saturday. Still, big fun. We used rubber minnows on spinning rods and Ron broke out the 9ft 7-wt Sage flyrod he had bought 20 yrs ago and had never used. It has a slightly stiffer than medium action. My job was to teach him the basics of fly fishing. By golly, you can really put a streamer out there with a flyrod that long! I caught this trout in the process. Had I had my 00-wt Sage or my 1-wt Orvis rod and some small dry flies I'd have caught buckets of grayling in that riffle and one of those little lakers on a light rod would have been about as sporty as it gets. They were very well fed and strong. We were back in Fairbanks by 3pm today.