Even I got lucky and picked up a hot buck who made a great run
Frank hooked a small jack king salmon and when I landed the boat on a gravel bar the fish came unbuttoned. The funny thing was he stayed in the area and a few casts latter Joey had him hooked up a second time.
I think it will take too long to try and go camp by camp so I will try to summarize some of the highlights of the trip. Joey was able to catch and release 8 new species of fish on this trip (Grayling, Dollie Varden, Arctic Char, Pike, Sockeye, Chum, Silver, Pink & King salmon). Leopard Trout are pretty nice and hard to describe.
The first 25 miles above crooked creek were colored by glacial runoff and we did not catch a single fish but we were not fishing too hard. We were able to make it to crooked creek on our second day due to the winds pushing us down stream. The fishing picked up and we ran into several King runs where all you need to do was drop an egg for large rainbows, grayling and dollies. Double hook-up every time. The King runs seemed to be in places where there were no suitable placed to stop and fish so we just drifted through them. We did hook a few kings as they will take eggs but they were hard to impossible to land on a 7wt. We did try streamers against the banks with pretty good success. We also did some serious mousing and Joey lost many flies to trees and logs. I would suggest that it’s never too soon to start mousing and make sure you have a large supply. The egg thing gets old after a while and the quality fish on streamer and mice make up for the volume. We ran into some silvers above the weir but not huge numbers. We all could catch a fish or two and then had to rest the hole for a while. Some of the brightest silver's were higher up in the river. Below the fish weir the river widened up and started to become silver water but there were some pike in Magic creek. Make a note not camp to close below the weir as the dead salmon seem to wash up on the gravel bars. Not only do they stink but we had a bear that came back 3 times even though we tried to chase him off. He came back during the night and walked the coastline looked for the best of the decaying fish. We had issues with bears as we were always down wind so they could never catch our scent and sound did not travel very well up wind. We camped one night at Magic creek to fish for pike and it had the best silver hole we came across so far. The camp site was lumpy and no wood but it had good fishing. While we were eating our dinner a group of 3 locals (White guys who live in Bethel) in a jet boat pull into our silver hole and start fishing before we had a chance. They yell up to us that we picked a good camp site and that there was a great silver hole. All we could do was watch as they kept every fish well in the 20’s even though the limit was 5 each. We were not too upset since we had caught several silvers already and Joey and I had never caught a pike. So we rowed our unloaded raft past the jet boat up into Magic Creek. Frank rowed so Joey and I could catch our first Pike on a fly. We both did and the jet boat left after about 4 hours. The silver hole fisted pretty good in the morning. The further down we went the muddier the silver holes became and camping on holes became more difficult. I got stuck real bad in the mud and had one leg go down above my knee. I became exhausted trying to get out with my boot intact. I ended up knelling on one of the oars while Frank dug my foot out with the other oar. I was breathless by the time we were done and made think twice about doing the trip with just Joey and myself. The silvers were very hot and we had several that got leader wrapped around the gills and we were forced to eat them for dinner. I think the Kwethluk had the best fishing I have seen after 3 trips and there are some big trout and I only wished we targeted them sooner
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