Alaska 9/8-9/11 Jim and Mike find the Fridge Hole

By Chad Pettrone
22 September, 2013
No Comments

Jim, and son Mike, were out for a couple days of catching. They arrived by plane in the afternoon, put on there waders, and headed out on the water. The first fish Mike hooked into, likely on his first cast, spooled him. What that means is Mike hooked into a Salmon that took all the line off his reel, until there was no more, and kept going. Mike was then forced to switch over to fly fishing, and it wasn’t long before he was onto fish on the fly rod. I got Jim to try out my 12′ Greys Spey rod with a Skagit line, and he hooked into a Coho shortly after getting the hang on it. I think the fly on the rod at the time was a green and white bunny clouser that I tied.

The next day we went exploring for new water and a good story. When driving the 4-wheeler around it’s difficult to know exactly how deep the water is in front of us, so Mike was gracious enough to get out, wade, and point out the high ground. We followed Yogi Bear out to grass island and watch him as he caught a couple fish, but Yogi didn’t save any for us to catch. The big Brown bear started coming our direction and we decided it was a good time to find another hole.

We kept exploring and found what we named, the refrigerator hole. I kept watch as Yogi followed us to our location, and eventually we met about 15 yards from each other as I had to cut him off from walking up on the guys fishing. I was on the 4wheeler and he came around a sand dune when he unexpectedly saw me waiting for him. We looked into each others eyes for a moment, and I could see his reaction was very similar to what I was feeling…”Ough Shit!”. I resisted the urge to run away, and stood my ground as the over 1000 pound Brown Bear aka Grizzly ran away from little old me. THAT, was my first face to face brown bear encounter.

The fishing was lights out at the Fridge Hole and we soon called it a day as we caught our limit of 4 fish per person in about 10 minutes. I quickly filleted our salmon and we called a day as the arms and legs were tired from a great day.

The following day we decided to explore once again and traveled across what we called the 2nd washout to an area known as the fence hole. We moved around the area, fishing various islands and catching a couple fish here and there, but never found anything as good as the Fridge Hole. We did find our friend Yogi again as he walked our way when we were fishing, then walked us out as we were leaving.