Alaska surf n' turf

[Richard Flanders]

Dean, we caught them on flies and various spoons on spinning rods. And Nick said that egg sucking leech flies work very well. They actually eat what Nick called "water shrews", that mostly live in the water. Two we kept to pan fry had one in their stomach. I'm about to look up "water shrew" as I've never heard of that one. They have also been in feeding on the eggs of the pink salmon run up there. The salmon are done spawning now but there are still Dollys in there, albeit a bit scrawny as you can see here. There's also pike in this river, which we were fortunate enough to not have caught. I've caught a couple of grayling that big before but we caught almost nothing but 2#+ fish all day, and lots of them. The biggest grayling I've heard of up here was caught north of Nome and weighed 4#15oz. THAT had to be a real hawg.

David; SW Alaska is arguably the finest rainbow fishing in the world these days. I fished there some yrs back and my first fish was 23". We used 9-10ft rods set up for Spey casting. I tried my 9ft, 9-wt Orvis cane rod but it was just too heavy for my arthritic hands and wouldn't reach out enough.