Blogs from Kenai, Alaska, United States, North America

June 16, 2011 Thursday Deep Creek Campground. Sunny looking west, cloudy and rainy looking to the east. 51 degrees out at 10:30 am. The tide this morning is the lowest for the month, at a minus 4.19 so, the beach was crawling with people out clamming. With a fishing license, free for kids, you are allowed 60 each and there is no size minimum for the clams. Hence, the beach was crawling with families with children in tow and church youth groups. One of the major problems with such a fluctuating tide is that boats have trouble getting into the water. They have solved this problem with big wheeled tractors. The boat is put on a boat trailer and towed across the mud flats and out into the water until it is deep enough for the ... read more

Our new best friends Dave & Pam, whom we had met in McCarthy, invited us to sponge off their friends Bob & Patty for a weekend at their cabin, so we could fish for King Salmon on the Kenai river, which boasts some of the best salmon fishing in the world. Obviously after long and careful consideration we said yes! Bob who is half Eskimo, raised by his Eskimo mother, has hunted whale in just a canoe. Eskimos now use modern weapons in their canoes, rather than the traditional method of jumping out of a canoe onto the whale’s back and spearing it down its blow hole to sever its spinal cord. Given Bob’s credentials we thought that the odds for catching a really big fish were good! Eskimos hunt whale sustainably. One whale may feed ... read more

The Kenai Peninsula is known as Alaska’s Playground—home to the Chugach National Forest, Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, and Kenai Fjords National Park. There is something for everyone from salmon and halibut fishing, clam digging, whale watching, and glacier cruising to hiking, biking, kayaking and everything in between. From Seward, we hiked to Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park, the only one of the glaciers accessible by car. We also took a glacier cruise, where we got close to Holgate Arm, one of the huge tidewater glaciers that “calve” and where huge chunks of ice break off into the sea with a deafening crash. Both of these glaciers are part of the massive Harding Ice Field, here since the Ice Age and covering the entire southeastern part of the peninsula. We enjoyed watching bald eagles fly ... read more

The talk of this summer is the continuously cold weather, overcast and rain. The few days when the sun breaks through the clouds and pours onto the pale skin of scattering ants, people flood the parks, the trails, the water ways, and highways. After a long winter of an average 5 degrees and 2 feet of snow, the thick overcast, as far as I am concerned, is greeted just as warmly as any other summer day would be in Tennessee (maybe even more so without the extreme humidity and unbearable waves of heat). After I have done my time in the office, I keenly escape into the outdoors with a light sweater. The ambitious sense of adventure has died down and left me with a true appreciation for spending my time as I feel most valuable. ... read more

Arriving in Homer is a spectacular sight to behold and no picture can do it justice. The land mass that projects 5 miles into the Kachemak Bay is called the “Spit,” and Homer is known as “the end of the road.” It is also known as the Halibut Fishing Capital of the World, although there are also a variety of salmon and other fish. Again, we were not in the right place at the time the Chinook and the reds were running. However, we did have success catching Halibut from a charter. We caught 6 fish together and could keep 2 each. It was filleted by the staff before we docked back in Homer, and then vacuum packed and flash frozen and stored until we were ready to send it home, which we did. Thanks to ... read more