Paul, Joe & Al's Alaskan Adventure - Day 2 - (6 Aug 06)

[Al]

 

We were all up by 6am. Paul & Joe actually got up earlier as they were still on Eastern Time. After several cups of coffee and a quick breakfast we were off to Goose Creek.

Goose Creek was about 7 miles from our cabin and is one of the many streams that cross the Parks Highway. It is smaller then Montana Creek and does not get as much pressure because you have to walk a fair distance to get to the better holes and the trail passes through prime bear country. My favorite anti-bear encounter tactic is to keep up a steady stream of conversation going while on the trail. We tell stories and if there is a lull in conversation I have been known to sing "Jody Songs" and count cadence, all of which I learned during my youth in the US Army.

We arrived at the Big Rock Hole @ 8am and found it filled with tons of fish. Paul and I immediately hooked up and Joe soon followed. We did not see another soul until about 9:30. I estimate we each had 30-40 hook-ups and each landed 15-20 fish. We only kept the biggest ones and had our limits of 3 each by 10 o'clock. After a session of stream side cleaning we were on our way with 2 silvers and 7 pinks.

In the afternoon we checked out Sunshine Creek which is where the locals go to get away from the tourists. We found it to be very low so did not fish even though there were a lot of locals fishing at the mouth where it empties into the Susitna River. We then went for a little ride and ended up fishing for a couple of hours at Montana Creek.

Montana was not fishing as well as the day before. We explored down toward the mouth of the creek and each ended up catching one.

On the way back to the Explorer, Paul went up over the Rail Road track while Joe and I went through a tunnel. We figured he would meet us on the other side and just kept going. We waited for him at the vehicle (he had the keys). I finally went back downstream and there was old Paul fishing his heart out just a little south of the highway. He claims he hooked up on a big fish which broke him off, but I can not verify that tale.

That evening Joe grilled the Silvers and complemented them with baked potatoes and green beans. Mmmmm, good. They went real well with a glass of wine. We were a group of tired fishermen when we finally hit the hay.

BTW the sun comes up at about 5am and does not set until 1030pm. Unless there is a lot of cloud cover, it does not get very dark even then.

Day two the weather was sunny and reached a high of about 70 degrees. We worked up a sweat walking into and out of our fishing spots and fished in T-shirts most of the time.

Tomorrow I think we will get up early and go all the way down to the mouth of Goose Creek.

[phg]

Sunday morning on Goose Creek was so awesome that I didn't even take any pictures.  We were into fish as soon as we stepped into the water.  Mostly, the fish in the hole were Pinks, but we saw a few Chums, and Silvers.   My largest pink was a 27" male.  They are a strange looking fish.
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Having caught our limit in the morning, though, we didn't go fishing for salmon again that day, as that would have been illegal.  We did go scouting locations though.  Sunshine Creek was a major disappointment.  It's normally a good place for silvers, but the creek was basically a mud gully with a  trickle of water in it.  Beavers must have damed up the creek further upstream.  What little space there was was filled with families chunking spinning lures into the salmon that were stacked up in what should have been the mouth of the creek.  Since we were strangers, they were a bit leery of our presence.  I  suspect that a number of snagged salmon were released that wouldn't have been if we hadn't been there.  A few nice silvers were hauled in.  I should have taken a few pictures, but I really didn't see anything I wanted to take a picture of.

After we left Sunshine Creek, Al decided we should scout down toward the mouth of Montana Creek.   This area had totally changed since his last visit.  The mouth of Montana Creek had split into several branches, and the main flow of the Susitka had moved several hundred yards to the west, leaving only a shallow flow near Montana Creek (across the center of the picture) that you could easily wade across.
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A few fish seemed to be coming up the channel on the left in the picture, and the man standing out in the Susitka picked up a few, but no one we talked to seemed to be having much luck. 

After I got separated from Al and Joe, I spent a few minutes looking for them, and then gave up.  It seemed likely that they had gone up a different trail, and there was no telling  where they were.  I knew they couldn't leave without me, and that sooner of later one of them would come back looking for me, so I wandered upstream looking for good holes and trying to see what people were having success with.    The spin fishermen were having a fair day using Mepps and Vibrex spinners, but many of their hookups were simple snags.   No one seemed to have the salmon dialed in that afternoon.

I was pretty well back to the bridge when Al found me, and we soon agreed that there were just too many people there on a Sunday for serious fishing.  There was a big campground on the east side of the highway, and a lot pf people seemed to have taken advantage of the plesant weather to camp and fish.  It was a good thing we got our fishing out of the way early.    We had, however, identified several nice holes that we would hit later in the week when the crowds were gone.

[phg]

OK, I'll admit that it's all beginning to run together. The picture I posted above was the mouth of Goose Creek. The mouth of Montana Creek looks like this:
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We are standing by the left split in Montana Creek with a few fish coming up the channel by my feet. The line of fishermen are on the sandbar created by Montana Creek, and fishing the silt line created by the other channels of Montana Creek, which are out of sight to the right. Later in the week we fished the right-most channel with considerable success.