Chilly Summer . . . and a little fishing

I took Friday off to go fishing again and it kinda looked like it might turn into a nice day. It didn’t happen as by midday it turned cloudy, windy, and started to rain lightly making the fishing a bust.

We headed to Jim Creek and found our way to water’s edge looking down at the Knik Glacier about a mile upriver.

Another pretty place to fish with Pioneer Peak rising up from just across the river and the newspaper’s fishing report said the fish were in the last few days.

That has been the story all summer . . . “you should have been here the last two days” . . . we talked to several people on the way in to the river who said things had cooled off and that they had not caught anything since yesterday evening and it had slowed down drastically from what had been great fishing. We were hoping to fish for silver salmon but the six hours we stood around legs in the water casting there was only one fish that was landed.

We left Jim Creek for the Eklutna Tailrace to try our luck for some linger king salmon figuring if we were going to stand around in the rain we might as well go for the bigger fish. On the way we drove by the Reindeer farm to show Jessie all of the animals. There are about 200 there and a few bison, musk ox, and a huge bull moose.

Eklutna is in a protected area where the wind is not as bad and the trees keep it from being too wind blown. It was lightly raining the whole time so it was just another day in paradise. I was surprised to see so many other ‘nuts’ out there with us and over the course of several hours there were many carloads of tourist who stopped by to see what action if any was going on. Most were Oriental and there was one group that had several Buddhist monks who came by and were ‘blessing the river’ for us. It was kind of neat to see their culture being applied to ours . . . it did not change the fishing outcome but was neat to see either way.

Right now our so-called summer of '08 is on pace to produce the fewest days ever recorded in which the temperature in Anchorage managed to reach 65 degrees. Many Alaskans consider 65 degrees a nice temperature but this year . . . with the summer more than half over . . . there have been only seven 65-degree days so far. And that's with just a month of potential "balmy" days remaining and the forecast still looking pretty gloomy. Driving to work last week I could see a light dusting of snow on the Chugach Mountains above Anchorage. Not far away on the Kenai Peninsula, rain was raising Six-Mile River to flood levels and rafting trips had to be canceled

Who knows if this is "coldest summer ever," but looking at the data from the Weather Service, the interesting statistic might be to look at another measure in the number of days Anchorage fails to even reach 60. So far we have only notched 35 such days . . . far below the summer long average of 88.

Unless we get 10 more days of 60 degree or warmer temperatures . . . we're going to break the dismal 1971 record of only 46 such days. Let’s see . . . how many 70 degree days have we seen so far this summer? One . . . it was on a Tuesday and only lasted three hours. Usually there are 15 and last year we had 21.

Maybe the only real sun and warmth I will find will be on vacation in a few weeks.

Ice