Nature Pictures from Trout Streams, Page 119

A merganser too young to fly scurries ahead of the canoe.

Canyon Rapids

My dad was messing around with this pike for about 10 minutes with various goofy weedless lures with mediocre hooking quality, and he kept missing it. Finally he threw on the only lure a spin fisherman ever needs, the Heddon Lucky 13 (my favorite for many years before I started fly fishing), and he caught the fish on the first cast. Not only did he hook it--he also snared it.

This is the smooth tailout of a large, wide flat into a very steep riffle. Fish rise here almost every evening, but it's a difficult place to fool them, with clear water and tricky currents.

My biggest fish of the trip, a 21-inch rainbow. I caught this one after hooking two others that were at least as big and losing them when they took off downstream through the rapids.

Dad playing a big fish

View of lower Nome Creek at the canoe launch for floating Beaver Creek (the next take-out is at the Yukon River bridge a couple weeks downstream).