My First Trip to the Kenai River

As you can imagine, I cannot wait for the weekends to explore the great state of Alaska. I was invited down to a fishing tournament that the Anchorage, Wasilla & Soldotna branches of United Rentals puts on every year. I jumped on a plane and flew down with my boss and try my luck for some Big kenai River Kings.

The tournament is set up so each sales rep or branch manager has three of his clients on the boat with a guide. Our guide has been fishing the Kenai area for 25 years. I felt pretty good about our luck but as we started to line up to get on our assigned boats we got hit by heavy rain storms and high winds. Not a good start to the day but were wearing rain gear and had a thermos of hot coffee.

After traveling a few miles down river we started to fish and the water was high and off color. There were Bald Eagles everywhere and that was worth the trip alone. But as you well know I want to fish! As luck would have it, I spent eight hours in a boat and never touched a fish. I enjoyed the day, but wished we would have found some fish.

After the tournament, we went back to the lodge and ate steak and shrimp. I managed to talk to the only people who caught fish and it was strange that five people on the boat all caught fish. There were twenty five boats and one boat caught fish! I headed home instead of staying one more night to go Halibut fishing. I would have stayed, but I had things that needed done so I drove the nine hours back to Fairbanks. I will not be doing that again anytime soon! I left the Kenai River at 5:00 p.m. and arrived to our RV park at 2:00 a.m. I had been up for twenty two hours that day and it was too much.

As I was going to say I really wasn't going to miss much, I was wrong.......

My boss sent me the photos of his fish this afternoon he caught on the Kenai River today & I feel obligated to include them on this post as these are truly the fish we have dreams about on a nightly basis.

Tim did release this fish and as you can tell what an animal!