Ketchikan gets somewhere around a hundred and fifty inches of rain a year, and the locals have a word for the kind of day when it is not actually falling. They call it a nice day. We had four of the other kind. My sister Denise had booked us three mornings of salmon fishing in the last week of September, well past the silver run, because the flights were cheap, and she would like it noted that the flights were very cheap.
What is left in September is feeder kings, young chinook that have not gone home yet and are spending the fall in Clarence Strait eating herring and getting fat. They run ten to twenty pounds, they are the best eating salmon in the ocean, and there are not many people chasing them once the tourist boats go on the hard. Our skipper was a woman named Bev who had been mooching the same stretch off Mountain Point for thirty years and did not use the sonar so much as consult it, the way you might glance at a clock.
Mooching means a cut plug herring on a two hook rig, a banana weight, and a slow drift while you raise and lower the rod so the bait spins down through the water column. The bite is not a strike. It is a hesitation, a moment when the weight of the sinker goes away because a king has picked the bait up and is swimming toward the boat. Bev said reel until it feels heavy, then hit it. I reeled through three of those before I believed her.
The fourth I hit. The fish went straight down, took forty yards, and came up sulking in the rain, and a Steller sea lion that had been following us for an hour decided this was the fish it had been waiting for. Bev put the boat in gear and towed my king away from it, which is an odd thing to do with a fish still hooked, and the sea lion gave up in a huff. Sixteen pounds, bright as a spoon, with a belly like a little pillow. Denise got a fourteen. The sea lion got a herring we threw it out of pity.
We ate the sixteen pounder that night in a rented kitchen with the windows steamed and the rain going sideways, and Denise said it was the best salmon she had ever eaten, which I think was true. Then she said we should come back in July when it is sunny. Bev had already told us: it is not.
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