Sorry it has taken me so long to post but I finally finished the "to do" list my wife made while I was gone for 10 days on my trip. We got back about 2 weeks ago and it was a trip that I will never forget. We flew into Anchorage and then drove about 2 hours north towards Cedar Creek. From there we hopped on a train for another hour(since there we no roads where we were going) asked the conductor to stop the train and PLEASE pick us up at that spot in 7 days. After gettting off the train we hiked about 1 mile to an old deserted lodge and there is where we set up camp. Thank god one of my buddies used to be a guide up there or I would have been lost for sure! Kind of sucks that even in Alaska you have to go through all of this just to get away from other people. But it was a small price to pay for the fishing we experienced for the next 7 days. There were endless streams in the area that held on average 24 inch rainbows!! At the time we were there the Pinks and Reds were beginnning to die off and the kings were all but gone. We did hit the prime time for silvers which was pretty cool. In the streams it was graeling averaging 13 inches, a few Dollies averaging 12(great for bragging rights!), and Rainbows averaging 24. Most of the Silvers were caught in the feeder where the Big Sue river would feed into the streams. The Silvers were just holding there waiting to make the big run so locating them was pretty easy(One even swan through my buddies legs while he was fishing). I have never seen or caught so many fish in all my life and I have fished a lot. There are just too many fishing stories to tell but let me tell you this thank god I brought 3 rods cause I broke 2 6wt rods fighting those damn silvers(should have bought a damn 8wt but I thought my 6wts would be just fine. NOT! Well I could go on and on with stories but I will give you just one more. Me and one of my buddies were fishing at the feeder on the first day. We are sitting there wading in the water (trying to get the kinks out of our flyfishing techniques) and we are like damn that looks like a couple of logs floating down the river in the distance. As the "logs" get closer and closer we are like #@$$ those logs are moving. As they start getting really close (I mean really close) we see that they are a Black bear and her 2 cubs. At the rate of the current we could tell that they were heading to hit the shore right on top of us. We get the hell out of the water as fast as we can. The mother bear makes it out of the water with 1 of the cubs just up the bank but the other one is having a little trouble. Now it is the mother and her cub up the bank from us (with the Mother standing on her hind legs staring at us)and the cub is in the water about 25 feet from us straight out screaming for her mother. Well the cub finally makes it up stream back to the mother after about 5 minutes of extremely cool but tense moments and then they start fishing in the stream right next to us. We just sat there and watched in amazement as she tried to teach the cubs how to catch the dying pinks and chum. That is what makes Alaska so awesome. We saw bears just about everday we were there and tracks were everywhere. We spent the last 3 days of our 10 day trip in Homer halibut fishng but that is a whole nother story in itself... I will post in in the saltwater form in a little while. I sent Rob an email with some of my pictures since I cant figure out how to put them in here. Hopefully he will post some of them.

Zacharooni out.....

Sounds like a fun trip. I'm not super fly rod savvy, but from my experience a 6 weight rod wouldn't be enough guts to battle all the variety in Alaska's freshwater. I'd say yeah to the 8 weight at least!!! Oh well, at least you had spares!

Matt

southernswimbait.com
BigBait Fishing in the South