I’m going to tell you a secret. But you have to promise not to tell anyone. Promise? Because no one can resist a secret, right?
But first.
I’ve really hesitated to say this aloud but I’m going to anyway. These past few weeks in Juneau have been absolutely glorious. I’m sorry, Tulsa, that you’ve been slammed with the worst flooding of the decade. Here in Juneau, the sun has been shining all day long (and part of the night, thanks Alaska.) The weather has been up to 75, which is almost unheard of for Juneau. The flowers are a’bloomin. The wildlife is a’stoundin. The bears are out a’creepin for folks to be a’eatin. (Just kidding… sort of.) It has been perfect. Wonderful. Makes me want to sunbathe nude (maybe if I were the only lifeform left on this planet).
Everyone here is catching “the fishing bug” and of course we are no different. We have adventure running through our blood, dangit! So we buckled down and bought our non-resident annual fishing licenses… not cheap, but seeing as we won’t be “residents” (i.e. having lived here a year with no intentions of leaving) until August, we were left with little choice in the matter…. well, little choice except to wait until August, but who wants to do that when there are fish out there just waiting to be tasty dinner table delights?! I thought you’d agree with me.
So we packed up some stuff and drove out to Echo Cove. We thought it would be ever so delightful to walk a mile along the beach with 2 children and 15lbs of fishing/child gear. About 3/4ths of the way there, my brain kicked on and I realized that wasn’t a great idea, so we turned back and started fishing about 1/4 mile from where we began. Boy did we get our exercise!
We fished. And fished.
Water got in boots. Tide covered up bags. Kids cried. Kids laughed. Kids drove us insane.
The sun started setting. We got tired. We packed up and left….fishless.
But what good is a fisherman if he doesn’t get back out there and do it again? So that’s what we did, the very next day.
But we picked a different spot this time. Amagla Harbor/Peterson Creek area. The walk was considerably shorter and easier and the tide was fairly low. It was actually a bit difficult to get right up to the water because there were so many rocks and they were slick!
But our little guys kept trekking on. They’re true adventurers, just like their wonderful father. (I’m a little bit fond of him)
Nothing is more attractive than watching baby daddy teach babies a new skill, yes? They learned to cast, reel in, get their line caught on seaweed and rocks and say goodbye to brand new lures. All in a day’s work, my friends. All in a day’s work.
It was slick and deep. After a while of me trying desperately not to slip on rocks and kill myself while simultaneously wearing the baby and breaking up tantrums and untangling lines, I decided it would be best to take this partaaaay elsewhere.
Did you think I was kidding about the rocks?!
We set off to “old faithful”, where we knew we would[n’t] catch any fish. Echo Cove! Only this time, we headed for the opposite side of the beach.
We fished until the sun went down over the mountains and it started getting chilly. Truthfully I didn’t want to pack it all in yet. But all good things must come to an end. We left with full hearts and empty fish buckets.
And so ended our wild weekend of fishless fishing. But that was last weekend! This weekend… well, seeing as it’s almost midnight now, that’s for another blog post that you most certainly do not want to miss out on.
Oh yeah, about that secret? The secret is, that although we try to have fun wherever we may go, we are a curse to all of fishing mankind…. so if you want to catch any fish in Juneau Alaska, you may want to ask someone else!