Combat Fishing at Midnight on the Summer Solstice

Well here I end the second of four weeks here in "Man Camp" aka Cordova and thought I would bring everyone back up to speed as I have been absent from the blog for a while. After my dad and Dave Aldous left (Memorial Day weekend) I was sent over to Cordova for my first trip of 4 for the summer. I was lucky enough to be sent over 17with Bart, one of our other pilots at the unit, who really (I mean really, really) likes fishing. You might say that he is slightly addicted, or at least has a small fishing fetish. Since the red season (sockeye salmon) season is currently on hold back in Kodiak due to low numbers this year, we thought that we would try our hand here in Cordova. Well the first week ended up being a complete washout for reds here too. There wasn't anything coming up the rivers and even the commercial fishermen weren't out trying.

So in between flights on our days off Bart and I decided to head out for the some halibut (or buts) as they are commonly referred too. Luckily the station here in Cordova has some handme down boats that are no longer used in Kodiak, and we can rent them for 15 dollars a day plus fuel. What a deal, a 17' whaler that ours for the day. So we headed out on two different days that first week and were able to catch some but. This one here is my very first but since arriving in Alaska, not a whopper, but still fun to catch on a salmon pole.

In between fishing, or I mean on our days that we had to work, we did do some great flying as the weather was truly fabulous. Here is a picture of us working a moving people and equipment from Hichinbrook lighthouse at the entrance to Prince William Sound. It's kind of hard to remember you are working when you get see scenery like this.

After the first week Bart and I were sent home for a week where we were either standing duty everyday or deployed to Anchorage. So after a week home, we were afforded another vacation, I mean forced to deploy to Cordova again. This time we were lucky enough to find out that the reds had started running and were given the location of a sweet spot that the previous crew found. I tell you what, if they hadn't found the hole we would have never suspected there were even fish there as it was a drainage ditch off one of the feeders to the Copper River.

So we arrived the first night here in Cordova, minus all of our gear as the Herc never made the trip from Kodiak to here due to Sar, and borrowed what we could and headed out. After a short drive (ha) we found this ditch that the previous crew had told us about, we were pretty sure that they were screwing with us once we actually found it. Like I said it looked just like a drainage ditch. Well were we wrong! I don't know why, but this little hole had more reds in it than we could imagine.

The second night we were there we were lucky enough to be fishing on the summer solstice. As the title of the post you can probably imagine that we were fishing all four of us, around that little hole and trying not to catch each other's line, until well past midnight on the longest day of the year. Yup that's right, we were fishing after midnight because the sun doesn't really set up here until way after most normal people are in bed. At 2am last night when we finally finished cleaning fish, it was still pink in the sky.

The last night we were off duty, we ended up taking a full crew ( 7 in all) back out to the hole for day 5 of our fishing trips and really had a great setup. Jarred, our flight mech, ended up receiving a package from his girl friend with tamales from a local favorite in Kodiak, along with a case of beer. So with a few smores added in for desert we headed out for a night of true combat fishing, cooking food in an open fire (any man's favorite passtime), drinking beer, and oh year catching fish. We ended up having such a good setup on the side of the road (because I refer you back to the drainage ditch) that people thought we were stranded at first and then soon realized we were in for the long haul.

So after 5 days of fishing, and at least 4 people each trip, we ended up with 39 reds total and over 150 lbs of fillets that we are bring home to Kodiak for a one week trip. Can't beat that! If you are lucky enough we may even share some with others. =) Well that's all for now, hopefully we'll be heading home tomorrow, and home that everyone is doing well.

Jason