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S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 8 7 bay—although nobody had a rod or reel. They showed me how it was done. Taking a hundred feet of heavy white construction string (used for laying out foundations, etc.), we tied on one of the massive steel nuts used to bolt down the structural steel beams that supported the building, and a circle hook purchased at the Chignik village store. I begged a few scraps of salmon from the back door of the cannery and walked to the rocks. I brought my fly rod too. I'm not sure why. As instructed, I baited the hook, then whirled the business end of the rig over my head like a lasso and let it fly. I was standing on the line when it jerked violently, sending the bait flying off the hook; I actually saw a huge halibut cruise in and gobble it. I managed to talk myself out of a heart attack, re-baited, and cast a second time. This one landed in a kelp bed to my right, and by the time I yanked it loose, the bait was gone once more. I had one decent piece of salmon belly left. The third cast was good. But when the bite came, transmitted directly through the line to my hand, I yanked back— forgetting everything I'd learned about fishing with frogs and chubs so many years prior. I jerked the hook out of the halibut's mouth. I was out of bait. So, I rigged the fly rod, tied a wooly bugger on the tippet, and cast out along the edge of the weeds. I soon had a small, colorful Pacific greenling in hand. I cut it into pieces, and set the fly rod aside. Fully aware of the ironies involved with using a graphite fly rod to catch bait for a handline, I cast the heavy steel bolt and baited circle hook out into the bay once more. In retrospect, I realize that a better fisherman could have certainly caught those halibut on a sink tip and some kind of flashy, fishy-looking streamer. Still, of all the memorable fish I've landed with purist fly-fishing lures—from a big Henry's Fork rainbow I caught on a size 20 pheasant tail nymph, a ten-pound Bahamian bonefish caught on a Kaufman's shrimp pattern, and a nearly 20-pound Gulf of Alaska silver salmon caught on a bunch of orange marabou lashed to a Gamakatsu hook—I have to say that landing a five-pound "chicken" halibut off those rocks, using some carpenter string and a gob of greenling guts, remains, to this day, one of the most exciting moments in a lifetime of fishing. I just wish Danny Humic and the Presti brothers had been there to see it. n Note: This story will appear in Richard Chiappone's next book, Liar's Code, available this spring from Skyhorse Publishing: www.skyhorsepublishing.com. It's a collection of 18 personal essays taking Chiappone from his childhood along the industrial Niagara River in western New York State, to the more than 30 years he's lived in Alaska while fishing some of the greatest trout and salmon rivers in the world, and finally through his late-in-life infatuation with flats fish from Christmas Island to Cuba. Chiappone lives in Homer, Alaska, with his wife and cats. He is a retired construction contractor, and teaches for the University of Alaska. L iving in Alaska, my freshwater fishing is done exclusively with flies now. But out there on the briny deep of Cook Inlet, all rules are off. Sometimes it's just a matter of physics; it would be mighty hard to get a fly down to halibut, rockfish, or lingcod in 150 feet of water with the tide running. We either tie on a two-pound sinker and stab a chunk of herring onto a circle hook, or lower a lead-head jig the size of a respectable trout down to the fish. We troll all winter for kings using downriggers, flasher-dodgers, and small herring, using a long needle to thread the leader through the vent and out the mouth. That would obviously be painful for the herring, if they were not already dead, conveniently killed by the good folks at Alaska Bait Co. It is nice to have someone else doing the dirty work. But forget all the squishy, squeamish, modern concerns about just how murderous it's okay to be. Let's face it: Clubbing a sea-bright salmon to death and cutting its gills to bleed it out is pretty exciting. And you never know when your mannered fly fishing ways will intersect with the bloody exigencies of meat hunting. The summer of 1994 I was working on the construction of a new school in the remote Alaska Peninsula village of Chignik Bay. The cannery there processed the local sockeye harvest, and discharged the offal from all those gutted salmon into the bay. That attracted halibut, a species generally beyond the reach of shore-bound anglers. Here, the big flatfish came right up to the rocky shoreline. I hadn't brought any meat-fishing tackle with me; I thought I would find rainbow trout or char in the streams that the salmon ran up. So, I brought my first expensive fly rod, a 5-weight "light line series" from Sage, a gift from my wife. Alas, there was no fishable freshwater near the remote job site. I discovered, however, that some of the carpenters and sheet- rockers had been catching halibut off a rocky point jutting into the h, those lazy days of summer when the bait-fishing is easy. the author in 1966 at age 18, holding his catch of largemouths, perch, and rock bass at Port Colborne in ontario. A