By October most of Alaska has put the salmon rods away. The kings are long gone, the sockeye are in the lakes, the pinks have done what pinks do to a river, and the lodges have shuttered for the year. Kodiak does not get that memo. The island sits far enough south in the Gulf of Alaska and its rivers run late enough that the coho, the silvers, keep coming into Chiniak Bay well into October, big ocean-bright fish that have had all summer to eat and look it. The weather by then is a different matter. The Gulf sends squalls up over the island with about four minutes of notice, and the daylight is leaving at the rate of five minutes a day.
I fished it out of the harbor in town on a thirty-foot charter boat with a captain named Marguerite who had been running Kodiak waters for twenty years and a deckhand who was her nephew and knew it. We trolled, which in Kodiak means a downrigger, a flasher, and a plastic hoochie squid in a color the captain picked by looking at the sky. Pink and white under cloud, she said. Green when the sun came out. The sun did not come out, so I never got to test the second half.
Silvers in October are not the silvers of August. They are heavier and meaner and they hit a trolled lure with their whole body. The first one popped the downrigger release and came straight up, jumping four times before anybody got to the rod, then went under the boat and around the prop and came out the other side still on, which the nephew said was the first time that had worked all season. It went twelve pounds. The second went fourteen and the third was lost at the net in a squall that came off the Gulf and turned the bay to white chop in the time it took to say it looked like weather.
We ducked into the lee of Long Island and waited it out with coffee, then came back around the point and picked up three more off the mouth of the Buskin River, where the fish were staging in a tight school on the sounder like they were waiting for a bus. We limited on silvers by one in the afternoon, two apiece, and the captain turned for the harbor with the light already going amber at half past two.
At the dock she handed me a bag of fillets and said that in October Kodiak gives you one of three things, fish, weather, or both, and the only wrong answer is to stay home. I asked how often it was both. She said she had not stayed home in October since 2006.
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