El Norte

 

Gentle Readers:

Once again, it is time for the report on the bi-annual Alaskan trip with Chartermistress Nike Wuhu and her band of thralls.  The crew on this Homer's Odessey included returning veterans Ajax Hagerty, Dionysus Satran and your narrator. This is a team that cuts players, so you'd better bring your game. We were joined by replacements Archimedes Boyd, Paris Fragoso, never-caught-a-fish Penthesilea Ventriglia, and new generation starter-yeast Isaac Schmitt, now relocated on the left coast from a year as a sternman in the Boston lobster fishery.

Thanks to the military planning of Nike, all members of this scattered squad made landfall  in Anchorage within hours on the same afternoon.  We took two giant vans down the Sterling Highway to our destination at a fabulous home nested above its namesake of Homer, overlooking outer Kachemak Bay.

We spent the first day provisioning dainty samplings of alcohol and end-of-times supplies of food.  Archimedes made a major miscalculation and bought a 195 pound bag of pancake mix after recalling stories his parents told him about the Great Depression.  It almost ruined the whole trip when there was still some left after our final breakfast of this journey.   

This failure of breakfast consumption is primarily because Nike's regimen called for lazy sleep-in ocean fishing days when we did not have to get up for fishing until 4 am, as well as early days when we were on the road just after midnight to make sure we were the first humans standing hip deep in the swift waters of the Kenai at 3:30 am to stake our nocturnal claim to the good spots, just like bears.

On our day of acclimation, we wandered into the Salty Dawg to get some free money and mark our spot. Homer was much livelier this time around compared to the masked dystopia of our last visit during the covid plague.

We fished seven days.  This report will concentrate on and hopelessly scramble the ocean experiences we had together over three days with OFish'ial charters.  If my readers do not protest loudly enough, this report will be followed by the essay on the virtues of night-time fly-rodding for sockeye in the next edition.  I am also considering a separate report on the one day that our group rubbed Isaac and  your reporter off on the rail when we had to split up on different boats and crews for dedicated salmon trolling on the only day without significant rainfall.  We all caught fish, but Isaac and I were put on a boat with a family of midwestern grifters, who ran a con on us as part of their masquerade as wholesome, innocent farmers.

We started the first of our three trips with skipper Garret, deckhands Austin and Zeke crewing the 35 foot Asteria.  The deckhands were fabulous and both on their way to higher education after this summer season.  Garret is an extremely charismatic captain who is a relatively recent transplant from the east coast.  He is the oldest of 6 and has brought out four of his sisters, all of whom work in the local sportfishing community.  His sister Sierra runs one of his boats, the Sweet Tea, and we buddy boated with them on a couple of the trips.

Like most of the guides on Nike's trips, he was initially selected based on his good looks, which is one of Nike's many prerogatives as our fearless leader.  Garret also guides boat-based hunting trips to Kodiak for Brown Bear.  He had some great stories about clients discovering what that adventure can bring to human predators if the tables start to turn and a rifle becomes a defensive weapon.  We did learn from all of our guides that harvesting bears under monitored circumstances has helped to bring balance back to the moose population, as these bears each consume at least twenty moose per season.  We also learned that the bag limit for residents hunting wolves is ten - per day, so they are not exactly treated like cows in India.

Our destination on day one was the Chugach islands, where we made big halibut our first priority on a 35 mile race to get in place for the right tide.  

The tides this time around were huge - up to 25 feet, so the currents were fierce at full flow.  The charter included others outside our group, several of whom were incredibly knowledgeable about the fishery in Homer and and every aspect of the northern commercial boat building industry, especially the popular Delta made in Seattle.

On the long rides this kind of fishing featured,  your reporter spent way too much time in the wheelhouse, peppering our very knowledgable skipper with questions about every kind of fishing,  hunting and game management program that Alaska has to offer.  I think he might have been ready to fake an abandon ship drill to get me to stop asking for information like a 3rd grader, but he stayed on the wheel and never reached for the flare gun as he tried to help make me smarter than I was when I got on the boat.  If only he knew the number of people who were depending on my journalism for this data, he probably would have been pretty bummed out.

I would like to bore my readers with all I have learned, but I will wait until I have you trapped at my house in a conversation that will constitute payment for attending one of the fish feasts that this excursion should afford.

Penthesilea (she calls herself Penny) had never caught a fish in her life and started things off by dragging in a 50 pound flattie that turned out to be the first and biggest, affording her hallowed status as Butt Whisperer of the Day. 

 Each angler is entitled to keep one halibut over 29 inches and one under 29.  We were fishing where we expected big ones and it turned out a fish under 29 was a pretty rare find in these locations.  Though many filled both slots on some days, your reporter was not able to land a fish small enough to take home. 

We stayed on the halibut spot long enough for everyone to claim one fish over 29, with long cause award going to Archy, whose patience was finally rewarded with a quality specimen, as he and Pentheselia raced each other on this double hook up at the end of the halibut part of the day. 

This allowed us to move on to target ling cod, rock cod and breezing salmon that ate the same vertical jigs we were dropping on the rockfish.

The lings bit like mad, but a legal has to be three feet long, so many  of these ferocious gators were pitched back after providing lengthy rod bouncing battles.  Below, Austin plants the steel on one that stayed on the boat after its long but losing battle with Isaac.

This was the largest ling of the trip and Isaac's personal best by a wide margin. He was fishing a big white grub.

Dionysus got in some good gruntin' action shots

before hoisting in a posed photo denigrated by his need to drop the fish and gulp refreshments.

He also had good luck with the yellow eye and is so photogenic that I have to give him three in a row.

Paris nabbed a quality 'butt, 

along with a beautiful yelloweye, for which the limit is one.

Nike went bendo and got into the grind off the bow.

She got a nice flattie, courtesy of Austin's gaffmanship.

She had to throw her big stompin' yelloweye back 

because she had already boated the one resident rockfish per day allowable under the strict rules of this fishery

Over the three days of fishing we had on this vessel, we spent one day at the Chugach Island passage. The other two took us out to the far edges of the Kodiak archipelago to fish the Barren Islands, where we found even larger halibut, insanely aggressive lings and piles of black rockfish visible beyond the side-eyed glance from Nike's ziptied victim.

Ajax managed the most efficient program, getting a legal ling...,

 and filling both halibut slots each day to go along with the easy limits of  delicious black rockfish that ate every chrome jig that fluttered down among the clouds of them that gathered below us.

Penny and Archie struck an impossibly cute pose with the elusive small halibut they managed to add to their tallies.

Penny also managed a dreamboat shot with our skipper and the drunken Irish Lord she released after this photo.

Your narrator managed to bag a personal best pigfish halibut of the trip on day two at the Barrens, but we had many fish in this weight class.

Your reporter also lost a monster on day three after stealthily working it up the water column to where I thought I would be able to get a picture. She bit a whole greenling that had already caught the same ling twice. It woke up when it saw the boat and smoked 100 yards off my righteous Accurate reel to run right back down to its hole and cut me off on a ledge.  I already had a limit and was duty bound to let it go, but we all wanted to get a shot of that fish before it beat us to the release.

Nike cheered Isaac on as he wickedly recovered his line on his own personal best halibut at the Barrens on Day Two.

Each day the carnage in the stern provided an opportunity to grab a shot like the one below, although a couple of those 65 miles trips involved railgrabbing rides home that caused us to shine on recording our slaughter on the slimed up deck.  The father-son shot is from Day One at Chugach, where, after limiting on halibut, we drifted through clouds of rockfish, lings and salmon that struck our yo-yo jigs.  Isaac even managed to net a salmon that I jigged up and brought to the boat.  It came unbuttoned and momentarily became a free-swimmer at the rail, only to be put to death due to Isaac's anticipation and deft netmanship.

                The primary lesson Nike has reinforced in all of us is: Don't wait for these experiences to straggle forward from the notion column of "some day we will do this."

Once we got home to our fabulous pad, the cocktails flowed  and we took in the view.

After sufficient lubrication, Isaac, Dionysus and your reporter wandered up the road to track an intriguing sign that had earlier sparked our curiousity.

We followed the handy arrow and got to meet yet another remarkbly colorful fellow by the name of Dale, who had one great resident Alaskan story after another and an inventory of curios that I only wish I could have bartered over.  He had a nice single action .44, as well as some lesser guns right on down to a blank pistol with a rusted shut cylinder.  There was really a bunch of great stuff that I would have liked to put into the trunk of my nonexistent car to clutter up my garage at home.

At the end of three days of larding up freezer fodder with this valiant crew, we bid our goodbyes and were on our way, but not before our leader got her glamour shot with Austin, Zeke, and Garret.

It did rain on us almost every day, but we all had rubber boots, as well as an enthusiasm for keeping loose and walking about to sample all this town has to offer.

Isaac and I toured the harbor, ogling all of the boats we wish we could try operating.  We took this photo of a 32 foot Bristol Bay gillnetter because we wanted to send a picture to Isaac's sister Sarah Jane, not realizing that this was the same model boat on which Isaac would sign on to crew out of Half Moon Bay when we returned to the lower 48.

I cannot stand typing any more of this story than you can reading it, so I will sit back in my chair and pause my narrative of our adventures on the brine, before we transition to the freshwater experience in the report to follow.  I will think about that later.

Though we did not need a heavenly sign from the ever-present rain, Nature never stopped reminding us of how lucky we are, or of the obvious fact that

These are the Days
 

Bitterwater and the Hogs of Affliction

 Gentle Readers:

Your Reporter and son Tommy recently celebrated spring break and the approach of  Passover with the pursuit of the Hogs of Affliction at Bitterwater, nestled in the confluence of Monterey, Kern and San Luis Obispo counties just east of the location of James Dean's fatal crash. 

It is a popular notion that wild boar are a blight on agrarian society, such that it is practically one's civic duty to go out there and keep the population of these omnivorous marauding creatures at bay.  Coupled with the common belief that boar are dangerous to humans, hog hunters can rationalize their act as performing a hazardous public service, even though pigs are just stupid unarmed animals and we have guns.

We left San Juan Capistrano at 8 am and headed up the 5 toward our ultimate destination at the Grant Ranch, where we had booked a hunt with Clayton Grant of Bitterwater Outfitters. These guys were really nice to us and the operation was smooth and friendly.

 We grabbed lunch at the Jack Ranch Cafe, which is a shrine to the spot where James Dean wandered down that road to Eternity.

After lunch, we headed further north on an opposite-direction detour to take in the town of Parkfield. 

This colorful little destination straddles the San Andreas Fault and is home to the Berkeley Seismic Lab, which is little more than a shipping container with a label that reads "Berkeley Seismological Laboratory."   

It really looks more like a lavatory.

The Parkfield lodge is a fabulously whimsical spot well worth a visit.  Despite its modest claimed population of 34, Parkfield has an elementary school.  Local kids mostly have to spend hours on buses ...or ride their horses to high school.

The Lodge has a number of rooms that celebrate an equestrian/earthquake theme, along with a bar featuring both stools and saddles, in case lodgers have not had a chance to drink from horseback.  Unfortunately, they only serve food from Thursday through Sunday, although you can still get a room.

They even have old seismology equipment randomly stored througout the place

After a quick beverage and a tour of the grounds, we headed down the 41 to hang a left and drive along beautiful Bitterwater Valley Road to get to the ranch.  We were greeted by the ranch bitch, whose throne is adjacent to a great old potbellied stove.

We  met up with ranch hand Terry and went down to the onsite rifle range to get our rifles sighted in.  Terry is a Vietnam vet who imparted considerable ballistic knowledge as he let us throw a few copper rounds down range.  He made sure the Belgian Browning  auto .308 that Tommy was shooting was sufficiently dialed in with hunting ammo, which can often perform much differently than the jacketed lead we shoot at the range.  As most Californians know, lead ammo is now banned in our state because condors will eat it right out of the box.

For all you ballistic mavins out there, Tommy was shooting Barnes solid copper 168 grain Vortex boat tail rounds.  I was driving the same bullet at a slightly higher velocity with my trusty old Winchester 30/06 model 70 bolt gun. 

Below, Tommy pauses during tent set up near Bitterwater HQ.

The ranch has an office, a nice set of bathrooms with a good shower, plenty of hookups for RV's and trailers, and a covered area with refrigerator, sink and tables.  Nearby is a big  shipping container cooler where the day's catch is hung to cool down prior to transport home or to a local butcher, which in this case is Creston Meats, described in more detail in the  HAMilton report from a few years ago.

We enjoyed a night's sleep in our simple tent, punctuated by howling coyotes, hooting owls and the noisy bawling of insomniac cattle.  Except for a few security lights in the ranch area, there is virtually no light polution.  We were treated to a great night under the stars with a waxing crescent moon and a few meteors striping the heavens.

In the morning, we were greeted by our guide Jake.  We grabbed our rifles and climbed into the polaris-like ATV  in which we would be Ubering about.

We were following another group of three Korean gentlemen with whom we would be spending the morning.  One of them, who I think was named David Kim, owns a Korean BBQ and sushi restaurant in Corona.

They mostly spoke Korean and occasionally addressed us or our guides in heavily accented English with such phrases (to me) as

"Is he your grandson?"

The Koreans were hunting for "trophy" boar,  which essentially means a great big one with tusk-like cutting teeth.  A hunter pays extra for this harvest and the trophies are generally solitary.  Tommy and I were  after "meat pigs," which are usually under 200 pounds, more likely to taste good, and tend to travel in groups ( called either a "drove" or a "drift").  This meant we got to hunt in cooperative togetherness, but gave way when a big one was spotted.  The Koreans made it clear that they were also interested in retaining certain internal organs and glands from the gut pile.  We told them they could have dibs on our gut piles if we bagged something, so we became their grandson/grandpa buddies.

The hills were truly beautiful this time of year.  We stopped frequently to glass the hills for critters.  We saw quail, golden eagle,  assorted live varmints and a dead badger, but surprisingly, no deer.

The Koreans were in the lead vehicle, which I will refer to as the BBQmobile.They managed to dispatch a really big boar from astonishingly close range with a 30/30 lever gun, primarily because it was sound asleep when it was discovered and never woke up.

There was a great deal of sifting through the guts as the animal was field dressed, which became a bit tiresome.  Your reporter took numerous photos of this autopsy process. I will withhold from my readers the opportunity to stare at this yard sale of pathology.  If you would like to message me privately and say "please send me pictures of Korean men brailleing for a gall bladder in a pile of steaming boar guts," I can oblige you.

After our companions bagged their second boar and were engaged in dissection, we split off to pursue a group of four porcine pedestrians that were crossing on a trail below us.  Tommy lined up for a shot, but the pigs were already 250 yards out, running down hill and away.  It was early in the day and we decided to try and intercept them  at closer range by getting back in the ATV and driving to a point of ambush.

Tommy scanned the hills for the pigs that very soon entered our sphere of inflluence.

Once we got in place, we were somewhat surprised by an entirely different drift of nine pigs coming downhill in our direction.  The sun was in their eyes and the wind was at their backs, so we were invisible. Using shooting sticks is pretty common for this kind of shot. Jake pulled out an enormous  surveyor's tripod that made for a stable, if barely portable platform.

Tommy made a clean shot that entered behind the shoulder and out through the neck, as the boar was slightly uphill and moving away.  It dropped dead after a few paces.

Your narrator zeroed in on another boar that failed to leave the area quickly enough.  It did not fall right away, but instead wandered toward Tommy's fallen prey and then conveniently collapsed a remarkably short distance away.  I got it to hold still for good with a second round.

We did not have to move these pigs very much at all to line them up for this gross photo.  These guys were in the 140-160 pound range and had a beautiful layer of fat.  They should be tasty.

We were soon joined by our buddies, who asked us to take their picture with our pigs, which seemed odd, since theirs were clearly larger.  They told us that ours were prettier, but I think they just wanted to make sure we let them paw through our guts for the treats they harvested.

We decided to help them find one last trophy and we were not disappointed.

They brought down this 300 pounder with a hail of gunfire in a steep ravine.  The creature fell back to the bottom, practically on top of the shooters.

It sported a really huge set of cutters and did not smell like victory.

Importantly, it produced the largest pile of guts from which our friends harvested the glandular prizes that apparently help give them erections when mixed with whiskey.  We will have to take their word for it, as we did not stick around to verify the carnal powers of this medicinal offal.

After we got back to the ranch HQ, we got to watch our hogs get skinned and hung in the industrial sized cooler.  We settled up, broke down our little camp and decided to drive to San Luis Obispo for a late lunch with nephew/cousin Kevin Schmitt, who attends SLO and is a high jumper and javelin thrower for the Mustangs track team.

We picked Kevin up from track practice and had a great meal at Firestone Grill in downtown SLO.  Kevin was stoked that he and a buddy had just received the news that they were being flown to Ireland next month to appear on a game show called Beat Shazam, which I will now have to watch.  It was a great chance to catch up and enjoy some fine college-town chow before turning south to hardnose the highway back down to the OC, foregoing a stop at my beloved UCSB.  We figured the Gauchos are not fans of visitors with scoped rifles, even old alums who just want to catch the view from the Carillon tower and wouldn't harm a fly.

Well, it looks like we should have plenty of pork to share with both Elijah and the Easter Bunny as the Judeo-Christian holidays approach.

Spring is upon us, as are the dreams of emerging fish and game opportunities that beckon.

 It is these visions that haunt both our waking and sleeping hours, invading our thoughts with the reminder that

                 These are the Days