With the weather forecast showing some hope of clearing we decided to head down to Haines, Alaska for the labour day long weekend and do some Salmon Fishing... www.haines.ak.us
It is a 6 hour drive from our house so we headed out around noon on Friday and made it just in time for dinner Friday night. We took a drive out to the river to source things out and see if there was enough room to park our enormous entourage (26 ft truck plus 28 ft trailer). We were pleasantly surprised to find lots of space as well as have some bear sightings!
We awoke to clearly skies and, after getting our Alaskan Fishing Licenses, headed out to the Chilkoot River. It is a freshwater river that is sourced from a glacier and runs into the pacific ocean at Lynn Canal (as part of the inside passage).
The weather on Saturday was amazing and we all had a great time fishing. Tim had his hipweighters and enjoyed exploring the middle of the river and experimenting where and how one travels in the middle of the running water. Hunter had a great time hopping from rock to rock, fishing with his scooby doo fishing rod and playing on the shore. Mom got to fish a little bit but was mostly in charge of getting fishing lines "unstuck" from the various rocks in the river.
In this amazingly scenic setting we bizarrely got used to fishing in between the bears - when a bear comes wandering up the shore you can see the people pull their rods out of the water and quickly move up to the road to allow the bear to pass through. Ten minutes later the people are back in the river fishing...
here is the bear checking out where we were fishing moments earlier :)
and here's another bear checking out fishing spot #2!
People pay alot of money to come and catch Alaskan Salmon - pretty awesome having it a short drive away!
Sunday we were up and at em again and had another fun day fishing. Sunday night we headed back out to the river at dusk and enjoyed quite a show from the Bears - there is a weir where the fish are counted as they go up the river to spawn and in the evenings, when the weir is no longer manned, the bears come out and it's like showing up at the buffet table. The bears know the timing of the fish counter and they were zipping out of the woods and into the river within 5 minutes of the human having left the area...
It's nice to have a rock to sit on while you're fishing...
