Seward Fishing

So, we left Denali and headed south; the plan was to go to the port of Valdez, and catch a 6 hour ferry to Seward, Alaska. We were about 80 miles east of Anchorage, when we stopped to take in the view. When I got in and turned the ignition key...nothin'. I did my best to troubleshoot the problem, but to no avail. It took a towtruck about 4 hrs to get to us, and we were towed back to Anchorage and dropped off at a repair facility at 2:30 in the morning. The next day, being Sunday, there was no one to help us, so it was pretty much a down day. The next morning, one of the techs crawled under the engine area and found...a broken wire! He put a new crimp-lug on it and everything was good! Whew! It could have been a lot worse, although the two cost $900 and the repair only $170.

Well, Valdez was now out, so we headed down to the Kenai penninsula to do some river fishing. We fished first at a place called Cooper Landing and caught many, many "humpies", which is a type of salmon not very good eating. They were large fish, however, and fun to catch. The next day we fished closer to the mouth of the Kenai River, at a place called Cunningham. Again, a lot of humpies were caught, but no real good-eating salmon.

After that we headed on down to Seward to try to get a fishing charter for the next day. We arrived in Seward around 8:30 pm, and struck out to find a charter. We found a place that was kind of a central booking facility for a lot of the charter boats in the area. Unfortunately for us, there was a major fishing derby going on in town, so the only boat available to us was a full-day Halibut and Salmon boat for $250 each. We were hoping for a half day Halibut-only boat, so we said "no thanks" and went down to the docks in search of a better deal.

Well, there was no one else open at that time of night, so we pow-wowed and agreed to go back to the central booking facility to get the full-day boat. We arrived back at 10:07pm and guess what...they were closed! We knocked on the windows for someone to help us out, but we didn't see anyone. We only had the next day to fish, so our options were quickly running out.

We then headed across the street to a resturant/bar and asked the bartender if she knew of any charters for the next day. Before she could answer, a guy sitting at the bar said that he knew a boat captain that might have room for us. So, he called the captain on his cell phone, and the guy was down to the bar in about 10 minutes. He met with us, explained who he was, and what kind of boats he had (pretty good-sized ones), and that he had room on a full-day, Halibut/Salmon boat for only $195! Score!

So, the next day, we were up bright and early to catch the boat at 6:30 am. I took a fabulous shot of the docks at dawn:



We "drove" for over 2 hrs. to get to the Halibut. It was a cold, dark (but not rainy) day, and the coastline was really beautiful:



I've got a lot more shots on my photosite. Anyway, the fishing was really good. The 3 of us each limited on Halibut within a short time (2 fish each) and we caught 8 large silver salmon between the 3 of us. I also had the distinction of catching a "ling cod", a rather ugly-looking fish weighing in at around 45 lbs:





Anyway, we all had a really fun time, and wound up with around 80 lbs of filet!

We stayed overnight in Seward, and the weather cleared up a bit for us to take some pictures of the beautiful surroundings.





We had to get going later that day...Dad and Greg were leaving that night. We took care of some laundry and cleaned the coach, then headed back to Anchorage. We had a fabulous steak dinner at a Chinese resturant in downtown Anchorage, then I dropped them off at the airport. That was about it for Anchorage and Alaska, as the next day, I headed out of town, back towards the lower 48.