Around and Around Round Lake

Those of you who do not fish or hunt might have trouble understanding why we take photos of catching fish, or of caught fish.  We agree that this is problematic.  We don't publish photos of dead people or scat, so why should we publish photos of caught fish?

We can't answer this.  We know that for perhaps 25 years, we've only fished to catch and release -- never to keep and kill and eat.  However, on this trip, we decided that, with fishing so rewarding in British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska, and because we're in a position to cook what we catch, we should try to catch more fish to eat.  We studied instructions on how to clean fish as soon as we catch them.  We thought a lot about the fact that we are the ones who are killing those little souls.

Nevertheless, fresh-caught trout is so tasty, and really not any different than eating store-bought fish.  So we decided we would start catching to cook and eat the trout.  If we could catch salmon to cook and eat, we would do that too, but not yet.

So today was another nice day.  There are, perhaps, 30 lakes in our area, with about half of them stocked with rainbow trout.  We fished Tex Smith Lake the other day.  Today, we decided that Round Lake was the best of the lakes that were not too far from our campground.  Tiny it was:

We needed to drive several miles in off the Glenn Highway, and then about a quarter mile further on a dirt road, where we found the pullout and informal boat ramp for Round Lake:

Two other vehicles were parked at the lake, but they were families who were fishing on the nearby Old Road Lake from the shoreline, so we would have Round Lake all to ourselves.  We wasted no time getting our kayaks into the water:

It's always exciting when we get the kayaks into a lake.  We never quite know what we'll find as we paddle around:

In this case, we found an almost perfectly round, less than 1,000 feet across, but it packed a whallop, with all those 374 rainbow trout that were stocked this May, just before the King Salmon run started in this area.  All the locals -- and everyone else in this region of Alaska, have been so obsessed with dipnetting for salmon on the Copper River, that they have completely ignored the trout.  This left all those little fishies for us to hunt on our own!

Round Lake is unique in how the winds play across its surface.  In most lakes, the wind comes from a single direction for a while -- say, the entire morning.  Once we see the direction of the wind, we will usually either paddle upwind to the furthest reach of a lake, and then "ride" the wind down the lake, or we will seek the downwind shoreline of the lake to fish, thinking that the food has been blown down there, and so the trout will be down there, too.

Here at Round Lake, those rules didn't really apply.  The wind kept changing direction.  Indeed, over the course of an hour, the winds blew from every single compass point.  This made it hard to "play the wind," as it were.  However, by the end of the morning, we had figured out, by watching the rises of the trout to flies on the surface, that the far (east) end of the lake had lots of trout feeding, and the near (west) end, also had many trout feeding.

Within an hour or so, Kathy scored first, catching a pretty, fat, 12-inch rainbow trout.  Here she is looking nose-to-nose at the little fighter:

It took a while, but eventually, Kathy persuaded him into her net:

By the time she had him in the net, he was exhausted, and lay quiet where before he had fought mercilessly.  Several other trout before him had jumped and twisted and shook the hook, but he could not:

Kathy paused to admire him before putting him in the creel, to be cleaned later:

Kathy caught her prize on the west end of the lake, near our pullout, so she pretty much hung out there the rest of the morning.  David, on the other hand, focused on the far (east) end, but to no real avail, even though he saw lots of rises.

By lunchtime, Kathy had caught two beautiful 12-inch trout, ready for cleaning:

We ate our lunch, cleaned Kathy's trout, and then paddled back out to try the lake again, having figured out where the fish were biting.

David is not stupid.  He had seen that Kathy caught her fish on the near end of the lake, so after lunch he decided to try that area, too.  Within another hour after lunch, David had caught three rainbow -- a beautiful 14-15 incher, a 10-inch trout, and a little perhaps 8-incher:

Kathy had been feeling pretty self-confident after having caught two trout to Dave's none before lunch, so she had been fishing fat and happy.  But, once she saw that David had three, the fires of competition were stoked in her heart and she tried mightily -- then succeeded -- in catching one more rainbow.  Our final tally was SIX rainbow trout, to be cooked for tonight's dinner and some saved for fish stew or other great meals.

We're back at camp.  The heavens opened up and are pouring on us, but we're dry and warm inside and getting ready to enjoy our trout dinner.  Alaska is a pretty fine place!