Fishing trip lasts eleven years

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Let me ask you this: how long would a couple of gift certificates for full-day, guided, king-fishing trips last around your house? Say you got them for Christmas. How long might they last?

Until the next season? or maybe the one after that?

How about 11 years?

That was how long a friend of mine had them. She had bought them for her brother, as a Christmas present. He lost them. So she called and the fishing outfit — Mahay's Riverboat Service out of Talkeetna — was nice enough to send her two more.

Then they sat, and sat, all but forgotten.

Until one day when my friend's friend, that would be me, said she wanted to go fishing. But who would think these 11-year-old certificates (originally a $135 value, now gone up to $185) would be honored?

"They're good as long as we're in business," a representative of Mahay's said over the phone. Well . . . surprise, surprise!

As a coworker at the newspaper said, "That's a story in itself."

We got to Talkeetna on a bright sunny night — summer solstice in Alaska. The young man behind the counter was James.

"You're going out with the best guide we got," James said. "His name is Eli."

Eli Hoffman, 24 years old, a native of Bethel, had been guiding on the Talkeetna River for two years.

The next morning, six of us (seven, including Hoffman) piled into a boat named Ruth. She was a 23-foot jet boat with a 357 inboard motor. She skirted downriver at about 40 mph.

Hoffman brought Ruth to a halt near the confluence of the Talkeetna River and Clear Creek. There are usually difficulties when fishing. This day, besides the usual backlashes and broken lines, the problem was that Clear Creek was not even close to being clear.

The series of warm, sunny days the Valley's been seeing have caused a great mass of glacier melt to pour down from the mountains, bringing with it whatever it can pick up off the banks.

Logs the size of telephone poles were racing downstream. The river, in which Hoffman said you can usually see the bottom, was the color of mud, which means the fish can't see the lures. Besides that, the water was high and moving very fast.

Still, there were people — people on the banks casting toward people in boats, people in boats casting toward people on the banks, people knee deep in the water, people chest deep in the water.

With brand-new rods (Uglies), brand-new reels called Shakespeares and colorful Wigglewarts on the end of our leaders (Spin ‘N Glo lures weren't doing so well), we had seven fish on, in a period of eight hours. Two were dollies. Five were kings. We landed four — two of each. The dollies went back.

Of the five kings on, four were my friend's. It seemed it was her day. Yet, as often happens (this is going to sound so clichéd) the biggest ones really did get away.

We came back with a couple of small ones, maybe 12 and 15 pounds (neither were mine). And we saw about a half-dozen more caught by anglers in other boats or on the bank.

All in all, fishing was rather slow last week. At least on the Talkeetna (should have been on the Deshka, I heard). But Hoffman said the river's been going down a little each day. And by early to mid July, it should pick up.

My friend, who doesn't eat salmon, gave me her fish. And I thought, as it lay smoldering on the barbecue later that night, "One fish, 11 years later. My coworker was right, that was the story."