ALASKA SALMON FISHING : Kenai River Provides New Meaning to Sport of Kings

SOLDOTNA, Alaska —  Bill Yamashita thought he’d seen it all. But he should have known better. He had never been to Alaska.

Yamashita, 69, from Marina del Rey, sat on a park bench under a rainy Alaska sky and watched the Kenai River roll by below him. He was in a mild state of shock, scarcely believing the morning’s fishing he’d just experienced.

“I’ve fished most of the major salmon streams from the Oregon line to Central California,” he said. “I’ve fished for sailfish and marlin in Mexico, at Cancun and Loreto; and I’ve done a lot of tuna fishing in Hawaii’s Molokai Channel.

“But I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never seen a body of water like this, where the fish are so uniformly big.”

He was asked if he’d return to fish the Kenai.

“Return to fish? Heck, right now I’m thinking of moving up here. I’m going to skip my afternoon fishing and go find a real-estate agent.”

Yamashita and his fishing partner from Marina del Rey, Fred Miyashiro, had just had their day of days. Yamashita had caught and kept one king salmon that weighed 40 pounds and released six others in the 25- to 35-pound class. Miyashiro kept a 35-pounder and released five between 25 and 35 pounds.

They were fishing out of Tim Berg’s Alaskan Fishing Adventures lodge in Soldotna, a Kenai River lodge on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, about 65 miles southwest of Anchorage. And Yamashita and Miyashiro didn’t even have the best of it. On the morning they fished, for the 15 or so fishermen at the lodge, 40- to 50-pound kings were common, a couple of 60s were caught and another angler returned with a 76-pounder.

When the kings are running on the Kenai, you can be humiliated if you catch a 30- or 35-pound salmon. You’re assaulted with scorn and ridicule by your fishing partners. The hazing is unbearable. You try to release a fish of such size under the waterline, where no one can see how small it is.

For Yamashita, it was a very good day on a very good river that’s having a very good year. A Soldotna fisherman caught a person-size king last May 17, 97 pounds, 4 ounces. That’s the largest king salmon ever caught on a rod and reel. Not that the Kenai needed the exposure. Most Alaska salmon fishermen already considered it Alaska’s greatest salmon stream.

Chuck Tennin, from North Hollywood, sat near the bow of one of Tim Berg’s dozen 20-foot aluminum fishing boats. He felt the 3/4-ounce sinker bounce heavily off the rocks on the Kenai’s bottom. The sinker was holding the Spin-N-Glo attractant near the bottom.

Berg was allowing the boat to drift downriver. It was almost 6 a.m. on a bitterly cold morning and a soft rain was falling. Along the way, fishermen in bright yellow or red rain slickers in other boats were hooked up. Struggling with bent rods, they shouted excitedly. Ken Lescoe, another guide in the boat, looked at the sky and said: “Actually, Soldotna is in Alaska’s banana belt. When it’s 30 in Anchorage, it’s 40 here.”

Suddenly, Tennin’s rod tip took an almost violent downward lunge.

“Set it!” Berg shouted, and Tennin did--he pulled back hard on his rod, setting the hook. But almost immediately, this salmon had everything going its way.

First, Tennin’s reel popped off his rod, shifting gears into free spool as it did. With Lescoe’s help, Tennin managed to get his reel reattached to the rod, but now he had another problem: a backlash. His reel looked like a bird’s nest.

While Tennin frantically untangled his line, the fish showed, just off the stern. It looked like a king in the 20- to 30-pound class. As Tennin finally untangled the backlash, he discovered he had one last problem to surmount: a rod tip snare. He fixed that, and finally battled his first Kenai king.

He had it at the boat in short order, about a 25-pounder. It was released.

“I want a 60-pounder, nothing less,” Tennin said. “I’ve got a perfect spot for it on my wall at home.”

Several days later, he caught one, a 63-pounder.

In seven days on the Kenai, Tennin caught and released 14 kings weighing more than 50 pounds each.

Lescoe set up Tennin’s rig for another try. First, with a small file, he sharpened both 6.0 hooks, about three inches apart at the attractant, and attached hunks of salmon roe to them. Tennin cast the rig and allowed it to bounce along the bottom again, about 50 feet behind the boat.

Next to get a strike was Times photographer Don Kelsen. He battled what appeared to be a much bigger salmon than Tennin’s. The fish made two long, powerful runs. In 10 minutes, he had a 35- to 40-pound king at the boat, and he kept it. Later, it weighed 38 pounds. As he admired his prize, Kelsen announced it was the first fish he had ever caught in his life.

Then he added: “Without hand grenades, that is.”

“Without what?” someone asked.

“In Vietnam, we fished with grenades,” Kelsen said. “We dropped them in the river for little kids, when we saw them fishing. It brought up all kinds of fish for them.”

Berg turned the boat around, to head it upstream for another three-mile drift down the Kenai. His passengers zipped up jackets and rain-slickers, tied down their hoods and put their hands in pockets or put on gloves for the 25 m.p.h. ride through the icy morning air.

Halfway back, Berg suddenly stopped the boat. Two yearling moose were grazing near shore in knee-high, moist grass. They frequently turned, to study the boat traffic. Berg allowed the boat to drift within about 100 feet of the two animals, while his passengers took pictures. At that point, the animals bolted, trotting off on legs that seemed too long for their bodies.

A bald eagle’s nest was discovered overhead, occupied by a scowling eagle. Click-click-click . . . end of wildlife show. Back to the serious stuff--fishing for America’s biggest salmon in a little river in the biggest state.

Just before reaching the starting point for another drift, Yamashita and Miyashiro, in another boat, were seen hooked up, fighting big kings.

After another downstream drift, Tennin got hit again, hard. His rod was nearly torn from his grasp. In the confusion of the hookup, someone knocked Berg’s net overboard. It sank.

Berg groaned, “I’m out a $35 net that will be hanging up lines for years.”

Tennin’s catch this time was a huge king.

“I figure him between 50 and 55, Chuck--you want him?”

“Too small, let him go,” Tennin said. Lescoe carefully reversed the hook through the king’s bent jaw, and it swam slowly to the river’s bottom, its bright silver sides and blue-green back fading to a big shadowy silhouette before disappearing altogether.

Fresh-from-the-sea Kenai kings are sometimes hugely fat, having gorged themselves on Cook Inlet squid. Kings that have been in the river for a period of days or more have empty stomachs. Typically, salmon stop eating once they begin their fresh water spawning journeys. Biologists believe they strike at lures or bait as expressions of territorial or aggressive behavior.

Finally, this reporter caught one worth keeping. The power of a big salmon is a sensation that passes through your arms and shoulders. After the fish had struck, putting a deep bend in the rod, it moved to mid-river and then downstream, turning the boat around as it went.

The salmon pulled 25-pound-test line off the reel as if it were in free spool. I could only watch the line, spinning off the reel and disappearing deep into the river. It swam powerfully toward mid-river again, then near the south shore. It made two runs of 50 to 75 yards, then another shorter run, then saw the boat for the first time.

There was one more short, powerful run. This one came in surges, not a continual pull, indicating its great muscles had reached the end of their endurance. After 25 minutes Lescoe finally dropped a borrowed net under the fat salmon. I studied the fish. It looked as if it he might go 50 pounds. It was so fat, it looked as if he’d pop like a balloon if pierced with a pin.

“Keep him,” I said. About two hours later, at the dock, it weighed 49 pounds. I’m calling it 50. At present, it’s being reassembled in a Soldotna taxidermy studio.

Back at the dock, for a lunch break, fishermen talked about a memorable morning. They gathered in clusters, talking excitedly while their fish were weighed.

“I caught and released eight fish and every one of them was bigger than any salmon I’ve ever caught in Washington,” said one.

In the Berg boat, there had been about 15 strikes in five hours. Six fish had been lost. The remaining salmon ranged from a runt of about 25 pounds to the 55-pounder Tennin turned loose.

“Where can I find a real estate agent?” Yamashita asked.

Ken Tarbox is a fisheries biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game who looks as if he should be playing in the NFL. He goes about 6-5 and 250.

“You were fishing the Kenai today?” he asked. “Congratulations, I was, too. In five years, that’s as good as I’ve ever seen it.”

The Kenai, he said, is the biggest and one of the newest salmon sport fisheries in Alaska.

“This is a rapidly blossoming fishery, for sport fishermen,” he said. “As recently as the early 1970s, not even many locals fished the Kenai. The water’s silty, and it was mistakenly believed by a lot of people that fish couldn’t see lures. In 1974, there were 24,000 man-fishing days on the Kenai. Last year there were 128,000. Last year, about 60% of all the salmon sport fishing pressure in Alaska was on the Kenai River.”

The Kenai doesn’t produce bigger strains of kings, Tarbox said, they’re just older than most stream salmon.

“During our 1984 late run (early July to late August) of kings, we checked several thousand sport-caught fish and 66% of them were 5-year-olds,” Tarbox said. “Of last year’s early run (mid-May to late June), 58% were 5-year-olds. That 97-pounder was a 7-year-old. A 60-pounder is probably a 6-year-old. So the reason these are the biggest river salmon in Alaska is because they’re older.”

There are some very strict rules for fishermen on the Kenai. Sport fishermen can kill one fish per day and two per season. You can catch and release all you want, but you must stop fishing any day you kill a fish. And the game wardens are everywhere. Last year, Kenai fishermen took just under 3,000 kings from the river, out of a run estimated at about 100,000.

Tarbox said Kenai kings spend their first year in the river. At sea, they range as far as halfway to Japan. They grow rapidly, feeding on small fish such as herring and sandlance, squid, shrimp and crabs. Most return as 4-year-olds and weigh 27 pounds. Late-run fish average about 30 pounds.

The Kenai is one of the Upper Cook Inlet’s major salmon rivers, along with the Chakachanina, Susitna, Kasilof, Big and Crescent rivers. Most Kenai kings actually spawn in two Kenai tributaries, the Funny and Killey rivers. The Kenai itself is almost a wild watershed.

The Kenai is relatively small. It’s as narrow as 75 yards as it flows through Soldotna, a town of 3,000. The mouth is 10 miles away, at the town of Kenai, on the Cook Inlet.

For now, the Kenai is in good shape compared to West Coast salmon streams in the lower 48 states, or “down below,” as they say in Alaska.

“Most of those Northern California, Oregon and Washington salmon streams have a lot of habitat degradation problems that here in Alaska we’re just beginning to see,” Tarbox said. “But for the foreseeable future, the Kenai will be one of our best salmon rivers. A couple of years ago, the legislature made the entire river a state park.”

“Excuse me, where could I find Les Anderson, the guy who caught the 97-pound salmon?”

“Go out here to the main drag, turn right and just walk about four blocks down the street to the Ford dealership on the right. He owns it.”

A walk in Soldotna, population 3,000, gives you the impression that this is a fisherman’s town. Sign at the service station: “Alignment: $29.95. Fresh Shrimp, Crab.” Sign at the ice cream shop: “25 cents off purchase with fishing license.” Sign on the sporting goods store: “The Kings Are Here!”

Les Anderson is a smiling, white-haired grandfatherly type. He enjoys talking about his catch--the biggest salmon ever caught on rod and reel--but is a touch embarrassed, too.

“Don’t make it sound like I’m a brilliant fisherman,” he says. “I’ve lived here since 1966, and I still can’t out-fish my wife.”

Said one of the locals of Anderson: “Les is a wonderful guy, but a hacker, really. It just shows you the great thing about the Kenai is that you don’t need to be a great fisherman to catch trophy-size salmon here.”

Anderson is 67, originally from Seattle. He moved to Anchorage in 1948, then to Soldotna, in 1966, to buy a radio station.

He talked about the morning of May 17, 1985:

“It was my annual pilgrimage to my brother-in-law’s house, downriver a half-dozen miles. We were fishing in my boat. The third guy with us was Bud Lofstedt, a friend of mine from Kenai. We were drifting by the area we call ‘The Pillars,’ about four miles from the mouth.

“It was early in the morning, overcast and cold--a miserable day, really. We were drifting with Spin-N-Glos and roe, with 25-pound test. It was really too early for kings. As far as I know, no one had caught any in the river up until that morning. We just thought we might get lucky and get some early arriving fish.

“The strike was at about 6:30 a.m. He made several very strong runs before I saw him, but I never had any idea he was that big. In fact, even when I first saw him, I figured maybe in the sixties.

“Anyhow, we got him to the boat in about 30 minutes but we had a heck of a time getting him in the net because he was so fat. Finally, we put the boat on the beach, got out, and netted him on the beach.

“We continued fishing for a couple more hours. Then I put him in the back of my pickup and drove 21 miles back to Soldotna. I came here (to the dealership) first, to show him to one of my salesmen, B.J. Peters. At that point, I still figured it’s maybe a 65-pound fish.

“But B.J. says: ‘Les, you better weigh that thing. It’s way over 65 pounds. Look at that girth. On the other hand, if you weigh it and it’s as big as I think it is, we’re going to lose a lot of peace and tranquility on our little river. This place may never be the same.’

“I drove to a meat packer and weighed it on his certified scale. Ninety-seven pounds, four ounces. I couldn’t believe it. But it was the girth, see. I measured it there, and it was 37 inches. He was 58 inches long. But I caught a 63-pounder in 1978 that was longer than that.

“I weighed the fish at 2 p.m. I’m sure it was a 100-pound fish when I caught it. He’s still at the meat packer’s, frozen. I’m going to keep him frozen, until the International Game Fish Assn. rules on whether it’s a record or not, in case there’s any problem with certification. When I have him mounted, you can come here to see him, he’ll be on the wall, right over there.”

Make a note: Peninsula Ford, 43965 Sterling Highway, Soldotna, Alaska.

Eleven years ago, Tim Berg had just graduated from Sacramento State College and was working in a grocery store in Napa. An avid fisherman and a reader of outdoors magazines, he saw a photograph one day of a 75-pound king salmon caught in the Kenai River.

“That picture had more to do with me being here today than anything,” he said.

“I studied that picture for days, and finally said to my wife, Diane, ‘Honey, let’s go to Alaska.’

“I gave two weeks’ notice, we left, and in a few weeks we were in a Soldotna apartment and I was an assistant manager in the supermarket here,” he said.

Today, Berg’s salmon fishing operation wouldn’t remind anyone of that remote Alaskan wilderness fishing lodge, the kind you need a two-hour flight in a seaplane to reach. All they do here is catch giant king salmon. It’s one block off the main drag, behind a new bank building. It’s a 10-unit, two-story apartment building about 50 feet above the Kenai. There is no food service operation. Guests simply dine at Soldotna restaurants or purchase groceries and cook in the apartment kitchens.

Three days of fishing and four nights’ lodging in May-June-July costs $495 per person, $795 for five days of fishing and six nights’ lodging. He also offers halibut fishing trips out of Homer in the Gulf of Alaska on his 53-foot sportfisher.

“You’ll never know what you’ll see when you go halibut fishing up here,” he said. “One time we saw a sea lion and a big halibut fighting on the surface. The sea lion apparently grabbed the halibut on the bottom, but it was too big for him to kill down there. So he brought it to the surface, where they were rolling around when we came by. Then they both went down again. That’s a sight I never expect to see again.”

Berg began guiding on the Kenai in 1977 as an independent, one-boat guide. There were 25 guide boats on the river. Now, he says, there are at least 100.

Today, he recruits much of his summer business from the heart of America’s salmon sport fishing country, Seattle. Southern Californians, by comparison, aren’t much for salmon fishing, he said.

“I sell about 300 trips every time I go to the Seattle outdoors show in the winter,” he said. “Last year, at the Long Beach show, I sold three.

“It’s not hard to sell salmon fishermen on coming to the Kenai. Novices can catch really big fish here, and we stress that. Last summer, a lady who had never fished before in her life caught an 82-pound king with us. A good fisherman coming up here for five days can catch 50- to 60-pounders consistently, every day.”

Through July, three of Berg’s fishermen had caught salmon weighing more than 80 pounds. In the summer of 1984, there were 17.

Berg has another Alaska salmon fishing experience to offer. It’s at King Salmon, a little town a few miles inland from the waters of Bristol Bay, at the root of the Aleutians.

From Soldotna, you make a 20-minute flight over the Kenai Peninsula and Cook Inlet to Anchorage, then board the two-hour flight to King Salmon, with a stop in Dillingham. The plane is about one-third full of young people, from “down below.” They’re on their way to Bristol Bay canneries for the red salmon run.

“You can make $6 to $10 an hour and all the overtime you want,” said Scott Mooreland of Seattle. “There are five canneries in Naknek alone.”

King Salmon is to commercial fishing what Soldotna is to sport fishing. It’s a dreary-looking little river town, with heavy equipment parked everywhere, much of it abandoned. No roads lead to King Salmon. Nearly everything that’s flown in stays--forever. The one-story buildings are of temporary construction. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young people come here for the three-week salmon season, earn a lot of money, and leave.

Off the main road, behind a cluttered parking yard for half-built commercial fishing boats and heavy equipment, is a prefab dormitory-like structure called The Ponderosa. For Berg, this is Kenai West.

The first guy you meet is Steve Jones, the cook.

“You’re the guys from Soldotna, right?” he asks. “OK, here’s how the kitchen works. This is a 24-hour kitchen. We serve you breakfast, lunch and dinner, and you can come in here any time of the day and help yourself to cookies and pastries.”

Jones, at the time, was reading a book titled: “Cooking for Fifty.”

The Ponderosa is home away from home for construction workers and seasonal people connected with the commercial salmon season. Also present was a Japanese video crew, filming a TV documentary about the Bristol Bay salmon fishery.

“This is the middle of the sockeye (red) run,” Jones said. “What you’ve got here are guys working around the clock, on boats. They get about 60 cents a pound for sockeyes, and on a good day they can bring in 20,000 or 25,000 pounds.”

Early the next morning, the guide in the sport fishing boat was Gary Brees, who grew up in Illinois, then was a guide on some of Canada’s best known lakes such as Great Slave, Red and LaGrange. He was about to take three fishermen fresh from the Kenai for some salmon fishing on the Naknek River, which flows northwestward out of Katami National Park and into Kvichak Bay, which becomes Bristol Bay.

“We’ll fish with the same rigs you used on the Kenai,” he said. “You won’t find the fish quite as big, but I think you’ll find more action here.”

The Naknek--say it fast, and it sounds like the laugh of one of the Three Stooges, Curly Joe--is wider, shallower and slower moving than the Kenai.

Kelsen, as a cold rain started to fall, had the first strike. At the outset, it was apparent that these kings make up in spirit what they lack in the size of their Kenai cousins. Three times Kelsen’s fish jumped free of the water, twisting and shaking like a marlin. Underwater, it traveled rapidly in several directions.

At the boat, it looked like a 22-pounder. It was Kelsen’s second non-grenade fish.

Tennin had a fish on that was even goofier. It jumped several times, struggled underwater for a while, then headed toward the boat. Suddenly, at the bow, it exploded off the surface of the river and nearly came into the boat where Tennin was standing. Startled, Tennin nearly fell overboard. Finally, he released the fish, a sleek 30-pounder.

The following day, one of the guides, Mark Hedrick, took the three fishermen about eight miles upriver, for some rainbow trout shore fishing. He ran the boat up on a pebbly beach and the three fishermen rigged up spin-casting outfits and walked up and downriver, casting.

It was a wilderness flatlands area, where the Naknek runs low, wide and slow. Blue sky began to leak through the gray. A flight of trumpeter swans flew by, about 10 feet above the river.

It was a tranquil setting. Then Hedrick dampened the mood of the moment by looking around and saying: “Don’t see any bears, but I wish I’d remembered to put my .45 automatic in the tackle box.”

In just over two hours, several sleek, healthy trout were caught in shallow water, up to 18 inches long.

The Naknek is a memorable river, clean and beautiful. But King Salmon isn’t. Once you’ve been there you’ll never go back.

On the plane, flying east from King Salmon to Anchorage, the mighty Alaska land mass rolls by below. To the north, tens of thousands of potholes, scoured out by long-ago glaciers, have left behind one of the great waterfowl breeding regions of North America, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. To the south, the Kenai Peninsula shelters the Cook Inlet from the Gulf of Alaska. Somewhere, through the haze, you know a river they call the Kenai flows, bearing some of the largest salmon on the planet, and you wonder why you ever left.