Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/528216
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 3 7 experience the area's maritime wilderness and reach a variety of water on one trip. The best compromise between wilderness and price may come by renting a forest service cabin at nominal cost. A number of these cabins are located right on good steelhead streams. Almost all will require at least a short trip by boat or floatplane, but that's the reality of getting anywhere in an area that has no contiguous road system. Reservations are required and cabins located on the best-known streams book up fast, so plan ahead. he year after my adventure in the canyon, two days of drizzle matured into a downpour, providing my philosophical attitude toward coastal Alaska weather with its sternest test of the season. My skin felt damp from the neck down despite my raingear. Above the neck I'd given up, as water dripping off my hat sought and found new routes down my collar. A lazy cast away on the opposite bank, my wife, Lori, looked like a wet, blonde grizzly bear as she poked through her fly box looking for a heavier streamer. I wasn't even wondering about when to retreat, since I knew the water would make that decision for us. The way it was crawling up the stick I'd planted in the gravel on the bank behind me, our window of opportunity to fish the stream would close in an hour or two, no matter how we felt about staying. I swung an Egg-Sucking Leech across the current below me. This pattern, which resembles nothing in nature, has nonetheless accounted for more anadromous fish than any other in Alaska. While the rising water was pushing the fly up out of the zone as it quartered past me, I hoped the changing conditions would motivate a steelhead to leave its lie next to the bottom and smack the fly. And then one did. In contrast to the subtle takes a dead-drifted nymph can provoke, a steelhead seldom leaves much doubt when it hits a swinging streamer. The strike was a real wristbreaker, and the strip-set from my line hand was probably unnecessary. But my father taught me decades ago that the steelhead should really be named the "steelmouth," and I popped the fish with as much force as I thought the tippet could handle. Over the previous two days Lori and I had hooked a grand total of one fish between us. (Full disclosure—she hooked it, and I watched the show.) The point is that encounters with fly-rod steelhead are not randomly distributed, no matter what the location or the experience level of the angler. Sometime is just doesn't happen, and sometimes it does. Becoming a real steelhead angler requires developing the ability to enjoy the days when there's nothing to talk about but the current. But patience in sufficient quantities always leads to reward, as it did that rainy day. I'd no sooner set off slipping and sliding downstream in pursuit of that first fish when a whoop from Lori rose above the clatter of the rain against my jacket. I never did catch up with my fish, but hers chose to circle the pool in front of her at high speed rather than run for the sea. By the time I slogged back up the bank trailing a lifeless fly line, she was bringing her fish to bay in the shallows. Since we needed to be on the same side of the stream, I found a wading stick and made the increasingly difficult crossing. We hooked four more fish before high water sent us scrambling downstream toward the skiff and what I hoped wouldn't be a mental error about the timing of the falling tide. I didn't feel like dragging the skiff across half a mile of beach. Coastal Alaska isn't for every angler. There are easier places to catch steelhead, which is really to say there are less difficult places to catch steelhead. But the opportunity to pursue the world's greatest gamefish in a splendid maritime wilderness is special in itself—rain, alders, thousand casts, and all. Chest waders, woolens, fingerless gloves, and a box of flies—all essentials on an Alaska steelhead trip. S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 3 7