Firsts

My wife was celebrating one of those “ends-in-a-zero” birthdays and wanted to mark the occasion with our two daughters and their husbands. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, she suggested “here,” a daughter suggested “there,” and eventually, that decision landed us all on our first National Geographic/Lindblad Expeditions Alaskan “Inland Passage Expedition.”

The reservation details mentioned that we’d have opportunities to go ashore and insisted we’d need “mud boots and rain pants.” To me, that sounded a lot like wading boots and waders. So that’s what I packed. I also added a Reyr telescoping-down-to-seventeen-inches pack rod and reel, along with a few flies, because—who knows?!

Unfortunately, the “Now-we-can-rest-awhile-by-this-trout-stream-we’ve-been-hiking-along-so-sure-go-ahead-and-fish” moment never materialized. Even so, one of the daily activity options was labeled “Fly Fishing.”

When I marked the fly-fishing option for both the morning and afternoon, the activity scheduler informed me I’d apparently made a mistake. When I said it wasn’t a mistake, she hesitated—no one had ever done that before. I had a chance to be “the first ever!”

I joined the morning group on the dock at Haines. We were stuffed into waiting SUVs for the short drive to the Chilkoot River. Our destination was just downstream of the river-spanning weir that funneled everything moving upriver through a narrow opening. While its primary function was to count the sockeye smolts heading downriver from the lake a few hundred yards above, the local bears had figured out that all upriver-traveling fish had to squeeze through that bottleneck. So, while not exactly per regulations, a uniformed someone fired what looked like a sawed-off shotgun to scare off a sow and her four cubs—yes, four—just as we were preparing to fish.

Since I arrived already wadered-up, I skipped the shipmates’ boot and wader sorting and quickly accepted my 8-weight Sage rod with a fifteen-pound tippet on a swivel, and something in the hook keeper I couldn’t name. My fellow anglers were escorted into the river by our guides—each guide using a long-handled net as a makeshift wading staff. That meant everyone was pretty much anchored where the guides planted them. Well—everyone except the guy who brought his own wading staff!

The guides made it clear that if anyone landed a sockeye, they’d happily relieve us of it. But more likely, we’d catch pinks (aka “humpies”) or Dolly Varden. According to Alaska’s Fish and Game Department’s Southcentral Section, the name “Dolly Varden” comes from a character in Charles Dickens’ 1841 novel Barnaby Rudge. A brightly colored, dotted fabric was later marketed under that name, and when 15-year-old Elda McCloud—niece of George Campbell, the proprietor of Soda Springs Resort in Northern California—saw a catch of “bull trout,” she declared them too pretty for such a name and suggested “Dolly Varden” instead. Surprisingly, the name stuck, even if the biological classification of those California char didn’t. As it turned out, the anadromous char swimming near—and occasionally taking—our flies were, by modern standards, the real Dolly Varden: as silver as any steelhead or coho just up from the salt.

It had been quite a while since I’d tried casting a line long enough to swing for anadromous fish with a single-handed rod and sink-tip line. So, for the first thirty minutes or so, I was regularly checking for casting knots—even with that fifteen-pound tippet. But after hooking and bringing a pink within a rod’s length—only to have it come unstuck as the guide plunged his net into the opaque, chalky water—I felt I’d gotten the hang of it again.

I did occasionally wonder why I seemed to be ticking the bottom more frequently during the last hour of the session, until we spooled up to head back to the boat for lunch and I discovered my tippet was wrapped around the hook of my fly.

The afternoon session began much like the morning. As soon as I was handed an Orvis Recon rod—with a very recognizable, dumbbell-eyed chartreuse and white Clouser minnow in the hook keeper—I headed straight for the river, well before my new batch of shipmates had finished sorting their gear. I was impressed with how easily the Recon allowed me to cast as far as I needed, though I kept a close eye on that potentially fouled hook!

I managed to get one pink to the net and enjoyed a handful of long-line releases. Long ago, during a once-in-a-lifetime steelheading trip in British Columbia, I heard some of my fishing companions complain that pinks were just a nuisance. But on this day, my first experience proved them, at least for me, to be worthy game fish.

Though the rest of my family found other activities for their morning and afternoon, I was more than happy to celebrate my fly-fishing day of firsts when we reconnected for dinner. My first pink, my first genuine Dolly Varden, my first time a guide offered me a bug net when swarms of no-see-ums appeared, and the first guest to ever check "Fly Fishing" for both morning and afternoon.