Latest updates, page 39

Dolly varden to be precise. And grayling.

It was forecast to be scorching hot in Fairbanks (95!) so I left town and headed for cool air and a secret stream in the mountains with some beautiful resident dwarf dolly varden. Wild dollies are rare in streams in this area, most of which only have grayling.

It was sunny when I arrived at the stream and there were very few mosquitoes in the ten minutes it took me to fiddle with my gear, so I left the headnet and ThermaCell and DEET in the car and just took one spray bottle of gentler bug spray with me. This was the stupidest thing I've done in recent memory. Within the first hour the sun hid behind a nearby thunderstorm, and the mosquitoes attacked in full force. By "full force," I mean that I had to blow my nose several times to remove mosquitoes. I wish I were exaggerating.

I fished for four hours, catching 14 dollies and 8 grayling, before another approaching thunderstorm enticed me back to the car. The mosquitoes didn't stop me from fishing, but they put a damper on some of my more elaborate photography plans, and I just got some normal pictures of pretty fish instead.

This evening my wife and I took a short drive for some eager small stream grayling on dry flies. Unlike trout, grayling seem to bite best under the most pleasant conditions for fishing: bright sun and low, clear water. Today I caught thirty fish in two hours, while giving Lena first crack at all the holes (she caught plenty, too). This was the kind of day where every likely spot produces a guaranteed rise to a dry (sometimes several) and several fish wind up hooking themselves without my help as the fly line drags behind me while I'm taking pictures.

The main challenge was coping with the mosquitoes. This has been a nasty mosquito year throughout Alaska, and here they were about as bad as I've ever seen except on the North Slope. I was drenched in deet and picardin, which mostly kept the cloud buzzing around me without landing, while Lena was covered head to toe in bug-proof garb. Our defenses kept the bugs at a tolerable distance for a couple hours.