The day started with us driving to Soldotna to return my waders. Seems like I have a leak on the right foot. I wound up getting generic men’s tan waders since they didn’t have my size in that pretty teal. And
maybe that’s good as I had several occasions where I thought I had been picked out of the crowd because of them. Once these new tan ones are determined to be leak free I will definitely have ‘Slice’ put on them with a black sharpie and the ‘i’ dotted with a red sharpied blood drop. 🩸
Next up was laundry! The laundromat in Soldotna was not what we were looking for so we headed back to Sterling to check out Sophie’s Suds. Perfect. We took care of laundry while I held my weekly family Zoom on their WiFi. Of course not one but two bags of chips got stuck in the snack machine on us. Ugh.
We did not fish today. Good thing as we guessed the numbers would be down. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game uses sonar and fish wheels in the Kenai River to determine daily fish numbers. These are estimates of the numbers of salmon moving upstream to spawn. Here are the numbers in relation to when we caught our sockeye salmon yesterday.
July 16 - 30,725
July 17 - 191,328
July 18 - 154, 944
July 19 - 123,186
July 20 - 69,468 (-5)
July 21 - ???
So as we have been told today the number of fish that we got yesterday was really good considering the low daily numbers. When we saw the river the day before we could see salmon rolling in the water everywhere and we saw many people who had caught their limit early. This is how locals and anyone can tell if the fishing will be good. Only saw two roll while we were fishing. Could you imagine our numbers had we fished here the previous three days?
Not many were catching any salmon today. We got lucky yesterday. And these fish swimming upstream will eventually reach the Russian River and beyond where we were a few days ago. By then they will have turned bright orange/red as we started to see there already beginning to happen a few days ago.
Tim and I were able to go see Hank and his parents, a few sites away, this evening before we depart in the morning. I love this little guy! He’s only about eight months old. When I first met him back in May he was such a puppy. Now he looks so mature and is a handsome little man. We returned to basecamp to find Jett not happy that she didn’t get to go see Hank and that she had not been fed yet.
Tomorrow we head deeper still out on the Kenai Peninsula. It will be a fun week coming up. There’s so much more to do. We have many people to meet up with and a few fun outings to enjoy! Maybe even some more fishing!
Sunset: 11:01 pm
Sunrise: 5:19 am
Wildlife viewings:
Seagulls
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