Bank Fishing: AK2008 Days 4-8

Fishing and Alaska, continued.
My favorite lure for catching silver salmon in the Kenai River - a bright orange pixee. Bright green is also good.
My favorite bank-fishing area.
The bank from which we actually fished.
Another view of the bank we fished from, taken from a boat in the river.
My favorite fisherwoman - actually, our best fish catcher; she usually catches fish even when no one else does.
Yours truly after catching more than enough pink salmon: I needed to take a break. We don't generally keep pink salmon. As soon as they leave salt water for the river, they start "turning" - as do all salmon - but fast, with the males getting a large hump on their backs. So they are also called humpies. They are smaller than silver salmon, are kind of bony, and are often mushy, especially the males. Sometimes a good, silver-looking female pink is okay to keep and eat. Sometimes they are good for smoking. I read recently that they are underrated, but quite frankly, I don't think so! Pink salmon is fine as commercial fish caught out in salt water and sold in cans; it is merely okay to much less than okay if eaten out of a river.
The famous empty bucket, waiting for a silver salmon. Fishing for silver salmon on the Kenai River in even-numbered years is challenging, because the pinks (humpies) run every other year - odd-numbered years are preferred, because the pinks aren't running. Fishing in even-numbered years goes like this: cast, hook or snag a humpie, drag it in, unhook it, throw it back in. Cast again. Cast again, drag in another humpie. And so on. You will probably catch a humpie on about every other cast.

Catching a humpie is like snagging your line on the bottom of the river - so much so, that sometimes you really can't tell whether you are snagged on the bottom or have managed to catch a humpie. It's especially similar if you happen to be standing in a boat. Silver salmon, on the other hand, are exciting to catch, and will usually jump out of the water, trying to throw the hook, and will run with your line, and jump again, and jump again. You are lucky when you catch one. Make sure the hook is well set!

It's fun to be catching something, but I've done this pink-humpie thing enough times in years past, to get tired of catching humpies pretty fast after the first or second day.
Finally, after a couple days, we decided to change lures to a Vibrax No. 4 or No. 5. [Be sure to check fishing regulations each year before using any particular lure. Some are too big, or are otherwise illegal, and regulations change.]
And what's that? Another humpie? Aaargghhh...
A great cast by our most persistent fisherman, and hence, our top catcher of silver salmon!
When fishing, remember to go out when it's early, mid-day, late, later, foggy, cloudy, sunny, rainy - in fact anytime that you aren't doing something else.
If you get bored, at least there are rocks to look at!

A Geology Reference:
Richard D. Reger, R.D., and Petrik, W.A., 1993, SURFICIAL GEOLOGY AND LATE PLEISTOCENE HISTORY OF THE ANCHOR POINT AREA, ALASKA: Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, PUBLIC-DATA FILE 93-50b, 8 pp.

Finally Some Fish: AK2008 Day 3

As I noted in an earlier post about this Alaskan saga, it was hard to get photos showing the height of the rollers, as they called the waves out there in Cook Inlet. The photo above, of a relatively nearby fishing boat, is what we probably looked like as we rolled up and down, and as we got about the business of fishing.

BTW, I don't know if halibut fishing qualifies as an actual Alaskan Experience, in capital letters. I'd have to ask an Alaskan about that. I know that any bear encounter in Alaska qualifies. Fortunately, I haven't had any of those, except when inside a vehicle (and while Outside Alaska on the Alcan). And those were black bears, anyway, not giant grizzlies (a nice black bear picture here at Geotripper). In Alaska, I've only had encounters with grizzly tracks and grizzly scat.
Back to fishing. First, you get down these huge fishing poles - or, rather, the deckhand working up there for the summer gets down the huge fishing poles - and then you jam them into some pole-holder-thingies on the sides of the boat. You don't hold the poles. The poles and fish are too large for that, and if you got a fish on while holding a pole, you'd soon lose both pole and fish. (At least that's how we did it - I can't tell for sure about the guys in the blue boat above.)
Before putting the poles in place, the deckhand has gotten them all rigged up with the appropriate gear. He puts a smallish fish on each line for bait, then you reel it down until the bait is sitting on the bottom, however far down that happens to be. I, personally, couldn't tell when the bait reached the bottom.

After awhile, in fact immediately, you will get a halibut on the line. The captain or deckhand says, "You've got one on!" Then you are supposed to let it eat and swallow the bait completely, without letting it take too long. You are not supposed to reel too soon to set the hook, as in regular river-type fishing; the halibut is supposed to set the hook itself. If you reel in too soon, you won't have a fish. If it nibbles awhile and you reel in too late, you won't have a fish. I totally could not get the hang of this! So by the time they would say to reel in, it would be too late. Or, thinking that I had it figured out, finally, I'd go ahead and reel in, then the captain (especially, the deckhand was more patient or pragmatical) would act all exasperated and go help someone else. Eventually, though, with the help of the deckhand, I finally pulled in two halibut. But give me silver salmon, any day!

We all caught our limit of two. That was eight 20-30 pound halibut for our group of four (MOH, my parents, and myself). We spent from about 10:30 am AKDT to about 12:10 pm AKDT catching our fish. So, that's get there: 1.5 hours; fishing: 1.5 hours; and then, head back.
As you are catching the fish, the deckhand is putting them in a large metal box in the center of the back deck.
When fishing is all wrapped up and when things are all put away, the deckhand spends some time throwing water around to clean things up, including putting a bunch of water all over the halibut, to keep them cold.
Here, above, we have turned around in order to pull up the anchor, so we can hightail it back to shore.
Ah, shore. Does it look familiar? Well, it looked quite familiar to us, lighthouse and everything. With all the rollers pushing us from behind, it took us a lot less time to get back, from about 12:10 pm AKDT to 1:00 pm AKDT: about 1.5 hours going out v. less than 1 hour coming back in.
Seagulls, boats, and boatmen await our arrival on the beach at Deep Creek.
Land! I'm standing on it! No more rolling around!
As we come in, another one goes out.
Here are a couple views of the fish we caught. Big halibut strung up on this post would touch the ground. We caught a bunch of "chickens" - small, but good-eating halibut.
A second look at the white side of our halibut with captain for scale.
Our three largest fish, maybe 30-pounders or so.
And then we're done! So we drive north on the Seward Highway toward Kenai, stopping at the first coffee place, called Electric Beach Tanning & Espresso.
Then, after a long afternoon of cutting and processing fish, we have some beer in the evening, one of my favorites: Alaskan IPA.

On the Boat: AK2008 Day 3

There we were, finally on the boat. I thought the boat was rather small, expecting something larger with side decks you could walk around on, maybe something like this. Instead, there was the inside and the outside - cabin and back deck.
So, what do you do on the boat once you get there? Well, for one thing, you hightail it away from shore, generally keeping the sea-cliff at Deep Creek in your sights behind you for a very long time, as it gets smaller and smaller, and harder and harder to see.
You can sit inside the cabin, pondering this sign posted on the oh-so-tiny bathroom (which has just enough room to stand in while the boat goes back and forth, up and down). And while inside, you can watch the spray from the rolling waves splash against the cabin windows.
And you can peak out the cabin door, standing up while watching the waves, the wake, and the spray.
If you are quite brave, you can actually stand on the deck, but not too far back, never away from the cabin door, and always holding onto something. I found that location to be disconcerting and mostly just wedged myself inside the door, while MOH ventured out onto the deck. The parental types, more familiar with this boat-ocean thing, sat inside the cabin the whole time.
We were in the water at 9:10 AKDT, and about a half hour later, we could no longer see the details of the coastline behind us, as we still hightailed it farther and farther out.
Birds, mostly gulls, came to follow the wake in anticipation of all the fish we were going to catch.
I'd tell you the names of the mountains, but I never figured out exactly where we were. Some of the mountains in these photos, the ones to the west of us, might be the Kenai Mountains down near Homer. I don't think we got as far south as Kodiak Island (in less than 1.5 hours!), and we never saw Augustine Volcano, which was probably to the south or southwest.
Flotsam and jetsam, which the gulls were immensely interested in, appeared now and then, and the lighting beneath the clouds and on the water was beautiful. The sea was rolling with large waves. My parents weren't impressed, but the captain said it was pretty bad. Maybe he said that to try to make us feel better. I tried to get pictures showing the height of the waves, but you can't really see it, nothing out there for scale, I guess. Perhaps if I hadn't rotated most of these photos so the horizon was horizontal; when I took them, I couldn't hold the camera steady relative to the horizon, only relative to the boat, so the horizon was moderately to highly tilted in most original photos.
Finally, at about 10:20 AKDT, more than one hour out, we started making the turn to set the anchor, so we could begin our fishing.

Alaskan Turbidites

This post is mostly an excuse to show some turbidite photos, turbidtites obliquely mentioned much earlier. The best turbidite photos I've seen are Brian's at Clastic Detritus - like these.

The above photo shows the famous Alaska Turbidite Locality, located on Alaska Route 1 between Mileposts 104 and 105, about 23 miles southeast of Anchorage on the way to Girdwood and points beyond. The photo is taken from the Girdwood side of the roadcut, looking in a northwesterly direction, more or less towards Anchorage.

The location of the next two photos is the in the cliff area above the two dark vehicles that are in front of the red truck and past the leftward turn in the road. The location of the last four roadcut photos is in the cliff area above or to the right of the white vehicle that is between the closest turn and the far, righward turn (past the two dark vehicles).

Parking can be seen on the immediate right side of the road. Parking is tight; use caution. I walked on the outside of the guardrail to get to the roadcut, and then carefully ran across the road when no one was coming - you may have to wait awhile, especially on weekends. Also, there may be parking on the Anchorage side of the roadcut; I didn't, however, check that out.

Turbidites! The cliff above is about 50 to 60 feet high. It exposes turbites of the Cretaceous Valdez Formation or Valedez Group (somewhere between about 146 and 66 million years old).
Above, a somewhat closer view of the same cliff. In general, the dark gray layers are finer grained, composed of sandy to silty mudstone, and the light gray layers are coarser grained, composed of dirty, silty sandstone. The alternating patterns create a banded look typical of turbidites. These are not varves, so each light-dark couplet can't be counted as one year - it counts as one turbidite episode.

The rocks in the cliff show all kinds of sedimentary structures, including soft-sediment deformation, ripple cross-lamination, graded bedding, and rip-up clasts. Non-sedimentary structures include some faults and a pervasive high-angle metamorphic foliation.

Unfortunately, I haven't examined this roadcut in any detail for a number of years. Cars and trucks were whizzing past, and the lighting was poor - dark and cloudy. Some of the best examples of sedimentary structures require more time to find than I had time for (if you can believe that! - but we had dates with fish to keep, remember!). The roadcut is a fun place to stop, however, even if only for a moment or two.

A bit of geologic history: The turbidites in the Valdez Formation formed when submarine slumps and slides, set off by earthquakes along a paleo-subduction zone, flowed along the sea floor carrying sand and mud. Currently, the Alaska subduction zone is off to the east and southeast in the Gulf of Alaska.

The Valdez Group rocks were probably not anywhere near Alaska when they were forming. Some notes of mine from a 1997 field trip suggest they formed at about 40 degrees north latitude, and were moved north by strike-slip faulting along the coast of North America. They have since been uplifted along the Border Ranges fault, which runs along the western base of the Chugach Mountains, and which separates the Wrangellia terrane on the west from the Chugach terrane on the east.

The Google Earth - One Geology image above shows the Chugach terrane in green, with Girdwood smack dab in the middle. To the west of that, the Wrangellia terrane is shown in light yellow. Another terrane or group of rocks is shown to the east of the Chugach terrane in bright yellow. The present Alaska subduction zone is approximately located between the dark blue water and the deeper water shown in a funky purple. The terrane boundaries curve eastward, somewhat parallel to the curve of the Alaska subduction zone. Active volcanoes created by the subduction zone also curve crudely to the east (although to the north of the above image). The Border Ranges fault, an active fault with movement and an earthquake as recent as 1997, runs along the west side of the green Chugach Mountains terrane.

The Chugach terrane is an accretionary wedge, prism, or complex. South-central Alaska is made up largely of several accreted terranes with complex geologic history. I really can't pretend to be up on the details - I took a class at UAA in 1997 and went on a few field trips. Things have probably changed some since then, at least interpretationally speaking!

This Google Earth - One Geology image has been rotated to look straight down the Chugach terrane from northeast of Anchorage, toward Girdwood, and to the Homer spit and Kodiak Island beyond. The turbidite roadcut is just a little west, or right of, the yellow pin marking Girdwood.

Back to the roadcut:

The above photo was taken from the other side of the road, outside the guardrail. The cliff in this part of the roadcut is about 20 feet high, with its base just below road level - there's a dip between the road and the cliff that you can't see from this angle. This photo, and the photos below, show some of the features I was looking for, but the cliff is steep and hard to climb around on!
Above: metamorphic foliation cutting across the turbidite beds. The foliation has been interpreted as indicating top-to-the-right motion, which is more or less to the east or southeast, and the top-to-the-right motion has been taken up somewhat by little bedding plane slips, which are hard to see.These last two photos show me pointing to some beds just above the white flowers that were seen in the lower left of the previous photo.
Turbidite flow direction is to the right in these photos, perhaps best indicated by the upper part of the lower light-colored sand layer - the one that makes it all the way across the photo from the lower left corner to about a third of the way up on the right side. The finger, for scale, is pointing to a thin white layer that may show the same thing.

Comments are welcome - maybe you can spot some things in these photos that I haven't! For lots and lots about turbidites, go see these posts at Clastic Detritus.

Putting in at Deep Creek: AK2008 Day 3

The day started out as a typical Kenai Peninsula day at the cabin, with clouds hanging over the access canal to the river, and the sun tyring to push through. The sun didn't make it, though: it sprinkled off and on, and temperatures stayed between 50 and 60 degrees F through the day.
We made our way down the Sterling Highway, past Ninilchik, to Deep Creek, having some time to stop and look at typical Alaskan scenery.

We arrived at Deep Creek, the upper part where the offices are, went inside and paid for our soon-to-be halibut charter.
Above: a view from inside looking out toward the Sterling highway, with various blurry halibut boats across the parking lot.
Ah, and there's our halibut boat: Tilt II !
Above: a dark and cloudy view, looking north across Deep Creek to the sea-cliff and Cook Inlet beyond. The weather is such that you can hardly tell sky from water; in fact, I think that it's easier to see the horizon in the photo than it was in real life. The lighthouse on the cliff may be a residence rather than a lighthouse: I couldn't find any info about it in lighthouse listings.
Our halibut boat again, now down on the beach. And no, that truck or SUV isn't going to pull the boat into the water!
Instead, a John Deere tractor will, first pulling us towards shore, then turning around on the beach...
...in order to back us into the brackish waters of Cook Inlet.
And hey, that's how we probably looked from the shore: a smallish halibut boat heading southwest toward deep water.