20 – 23 July 2014

Fishing with the Blairs and Friends

NOTE: This post has a large number of photographs since it includes four full days of happening at Valdez, a truly wonderful place!

We stopped by “fish camp” in Copper Center this morning to renew our friendship from last trip and check on what salmon are running. They told us the first run of Reds was finished and the second run will not start for another week or so. However, they said the Pinks are running in Valdez. So…we bid them farewell and headed the 100 miles south to Valdez.

We fished for Pinks in Valdez in 2011. These are the salmon the Alaskans will not eat unless they are smoked or canned. These are also the ones Meriam smoked on our last trip. This time we decided rather than get one day’s worth of fish, we would go after at least three days of 6 Pinks each (that’s the limit this year for Pinks).

We got to Valdez about 2:00p and immediately scooped out the fishing scene. Indeed the Pinks were running. The run this time did not seem as plentiful as three years ago but we were most anxious to get our hooks in the water. We each got ½ our limit today.

Just as a side note, I was wading out about 50 feet in the water when I heard Meriam yell “BEAR”! I looked around and a huge grizzly was standing on a small rise about 30 feet from me. Needless to say Meriam said my eyes almost popped out of my skull! Fortunately the bear decided the area I was fishing in didn’t have enough fish to suit her so she moved on up the parking lot about 100 yards to the mouth of the fishery where there were more fish and only bears were allowed to fish. I stopped fishing and got some great photographs of the sow bear as she proceeded to have dinner.

The next morning, Meriam and I were up early, making sure we were at our favorite fishing spot before anyone else. This morning the fish were swarming almost on the shoreline. We caught a fish on almost every cast. Within two hours we had our limit. Twelve Pink Salmon, each weighing 2-3 pounds!

Since a lot of charter fishing is done out of Valdez, the city maintains a marvelous set of fish cleaning stations at the harbor. We headed there to filet our fish. Not being very proficient at fileting, I think it took us more time to filet the fish than catch them. There was a young Alaskan couple fileting their Red Salmon they caught using nets at Chitina. As we described on our last trip, only Alaskans are allowed to net salmon. In Chitina, they hang off cliffs on ropes and dip net the salmon out of the Copper River. Obviously a very dangerous operation! Note the photograph of the Pink Salmon filet as compared to the Red Salmon filet. Hopefully we can get some of the Red Salmon in a week or so!

Driving back out to the Solomon Falls Fish Hatchery (where we do all our fishing) after cleaning our fish, we passed a bald eagle sitting on an old tree stump out in the water. We stopped to do some photography of eagles. With the salmon being “in” there are dozens and dozens of eagles in the area.

This particular eagle looked interesting and I got a great sequence of photographs, from the eagle sitting on the stump, to flying off to catch a fish, to attempting to fly away with the fish (it was too big from him to carry), to eating the fish were he caught it, to fighting off the seagulls while he ate the salmon. I was really fortunate to capture this sequence. Since the sequence has a number of photographs, I have made a separate page for this. Click on the “eagle” word in the Page tab on the main tool bar!

The final two days at Valdez was just kind of “oh hum”. They consisted of just fishing early in the morning (catching our limits in about an hour), returning to town to clean the fish, enjoying the city of Valdez and then crashing (climbing over the rocks, hooking the fish, netting them, stringing them and then carrying the back to the truck was very tiring)!

All told, we got between 50 and 60 lbs of FILETed pink salmon. Meriam has acquired a couple of different recipes she plans to use for smoking these babies.

We are now headed back to fish camp in Copper Center where we will spend the next few days smoking them (and trying to catch a few reds if the second run is early)!

All you folks back home get your “smakers” lathered up!

P.S. I guess by now you can guess who the “friends” are we referred to in the title!