Fish This! Marsh madness and the tackle box of broken dreams
By Andrew Cremata While packing my fishing gear for a two-day Yukon camping trip, I stumbled upon two packages of plastic swimbaits. They were buried deep inside an old beat-up tackle box full of rejected fishing gear, broken lures and rusty hooks. Plastic swimbaits are fishing lures made from silicone. Like all lures, they are built to mimic fish that bigger fish like to eat. I purchased the swimbaits online a few years ago during the dead of winter after watching YouTube videos of anglers using them to catch monster lake trout. If you’ve spent a winter or two in Skagway, ...
Fish This! The tricks of Tutshi
By Andrew Cremata Fishing should never become perfunctory. However, the art of finding fish sometimes falls prey to expectations. Success writes the recipe for failure and the main ingredient is misguided faith. There is a place on British Columbia’s Lake Tutshi where a creek flows with purpose in the spring. Lake trout cruise the depths throughout the year. Fishing this spot is as close to a sure thing as possible in the fishing world. When I fish in this spot, I have faith that I will catch trout because that’s always been the end result. Until it wasn’t. The ice on ...
Fish This! – Counting empty spaces
The older I get, the harder it is to live in the moment.
Fish This! – Looking for a second chance
Shorter days. Colder nights. Less time for fishing.
Fish This! – The Luckiest Lure
Sky-blue damselflies hovered in midair near the shoreline where my fishing rods were leaning against a small aspen.
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The evening sun hung low within a steel-colored sky.
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When I was a teenager living in Tampa, I often walked a three mile long white sand beach fishing for redfish as vast armies of blood-red fiddler crabs scattered into tiny holes.
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Looking for answers in a remote stream on southern Baranoff Island. PHOTO BY ANDREW CREMATA A little mystery By ANDREW CREMATA FOR THE SKAGWAY NEWS I was once a little boy living in Florida who dreamed about coming to Alaska. In those days before the internet changed the way we receive information, my glimpses into the faraway frontier were few. An old network television show called “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom” showed grizzly bears catching salmon in mid-air as they tried to navigate upstream. Wrinkled magazines at my school’s library showed rugged outdoorsmen braving wild mountains to build homesteads and hunt ...
Fish This!
There were moments during the busy summer season when the relentless waves of the world’s rising tide began lapping at my threshold.
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I eagerly worked my way down to the lake by way of a rocky streambed where fireweed seemed to magically grow in between round river stones.
Fish This!: Ships passing in the Alaskan night
"There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” -Hunter S. Thompson By ANDREW CREMATA FOR THE SKAGWAY NEWS My dad bought me my first “grownup” fishing outfit when I was eight years old. My hands barely fit around the seven-foot heavy boat rod, which was outfitted with a Penn reel spooled with 50-pound monofilament. The rig was absurdly oversized for a little kid, but my dad was both old-school and an optimist when it came to fishing. Outfits like mine ...
Fish this! Hung up on the north
At least two dozen grayling were suspended in the water column just below the Carcross railway bridge.
Fish This: Spirits of the Past
Just before you reach the Yukon border sign while traveling north along the Klondike Highway, a small creek empties into Tagish Lake’s Windy Arm.
Fish This! The joys of fly-fishing
BY ANDREW CREMATA FOR THE SKAGWAY NEWS After scoping out a promising area on Google Earth where a freshwater stream emptied into a shallow saltwater inlet, I drove to the nearest public parking area and began assembling my gear. My target zone was still a quarter-mile to the north. Getting there required wading through waist-deep tidal water during the final hour of a rising tide. I hoped to encounter silvers, so I carried along a lightweight rig equipped with eight-pound line, and a small assortment of neon-colored spinners. I entered the water along the shore of a well-manicured public park. It ...
Fish This!: Passing it Along
BY ANDREW CREMATA I watched my grandmother’s small, wrinkled fingers reach into the bait bucket. They emerged with a live shrimp grasped firmly, just behind the head. She carefully pushed a hook through the top of the tail and then back through the other direction before handing me my small fishing rod. Smiling down at me with a broad grin, she baited another shrimp for herself and dropped it over the rail using nothing more than a hook tied to a hand line. As a four-year-old boy, everything about fishing was a mystery. Sometimes my grandmother’s face would get very serious ...
Fish This!: The value of a secret
BY ANDREW CREMATA I know a charter fisherman named Captain Johnny that protects his secret fishing spots with a tenacity that borders on psychosis. He lingers at the harbor in the morning, often feigning some problem with his engine while the rest of the fleet races to the fishing grounds. “Look at them go,” he says. And as the last boat disappears around the breakwater, the captain waves at no one and sings “bye bye!” With a maniacal eye, Johnny scans the remaining boats in the harbor, doing his best to make sure nobody is watching his next move. When he ...
Fish This! Life on the Edge
BY ANDREW CREMATA Where have our winters gone? In the not-too-distant-past the idea of fishing the Yukon lakes in April was nothing more than a passing daydream. Throughout May I would keep my fingers crossed, hopeful that there would be some fishable breaks in the ice by Memorial Day Weekend. Most of the time I ended up disappointed. For two years I’ve been able to work ice-free shorelines in mid-April, enjoying sunshine and warmth that made me think I had time travelled to mid-summer. This is all uncharted territory, and a number of fellow Skagwegians have asked me whether the weather ...
FISH THIS!: Jesus, the fisherman and a duck
BY ANDREW CREMATA CONTRIBUTING WRITER Here we are again – poised on the narrow edge of Skagway’s two-headed coin. When the lake trout’s flanks match the orange and yellow mountainside, the white of winter peers down from snowy peaks. It is a bittersweet time of year. Time to adjust to a different pace. Soon the streets will be empty. The drone of trains, planes, and buses will give way to the querulous calls of morning magpies. We will say goodbyes to friends who wander the world, and when they return in the spring it will be bittersweet yet again because we ...
Fish This! Fishing for Life
BY ANDREW CREMATA “Subsistence - To have or acquire the necessities of life (as food and clothing)” - Mirriam-Webster Dictionary It didn’t take long for the floats to start bobbing irregularly on the surface. This indicated that something was caught in our 100 foot long monofilament mesh fish trap, stretched out near the mouth of the Chilkoot River in Lutak Inlet near Haines. My shipmates and I spent our morning forcibly untangling salmon from the gill net. It was my job to whack them in the head with a club, cut their gill to bleed them, slice open the belly and ...
Fish This! Ocean Fishing
By ANDREW CREMATA I saw the big king chasing my bait as I reeled it in toward the boat. The cut plug of herring was rotating perfectly, but it was only a few yards beneath the surface - not enough time for the silver torpedo of a salmon to catch it. I released the clutch on the reel and let line freefall from the spool. The bait quickly turned back toward the bottom.... Spinning. The king followed on cue. I counted off three long seconds, enough for the herring to sink 20 feet, reengaged the clutch and reeled like a ...
FISH THIS!: The winds are blowing
By ANDREW CREMATA The withered wooden structure seemed to take form amidst the quivering aspen leaves and the twisting branches that formed them. It was an old wooden tramway pylon; one in a series leading up the mountainside, all connected by a coiled-steel cable glazed with burgundy rust. A few steps away, a tattered mining car still clung to a limp section of the thick metal wire, slowly being swallowed by purple lupines and wild yellow daisies. A crowned sparrow landed on the cable and trilled in my direction. A little more than a hundred years ago, this Yukon tramway hummed ...
FISH THIS: Crossing Lines
By ANDREW CREMATA Not too far north of Skagway is a line - a place where our tenuous stake in human civilization gives way to the pulsing energy of a great upheaval. Thousands of years ago, ice covered this landscape from lakebed to mountain peak, and the ground is still flexing in the aftermath, like a sponge expanding after being wrung with a clenched fist. There are other remnants of this age, like the rocks that litter the shores of endless glacial lakes. They are jagged, not yet having been smoothed by wind and rain. They are loose, and in search ...
FISH THIS: Bait & Tackle
By ANDREW CREMATA Opening the front door caused a bell to jingle in the back room. A strand of heavy monofilament ran from the doorframe along a series of metal loops attached to the ceiling, disappearing behind the wall of an unblocked entryway. A tiny black and white TV was partially visible through the opening, and its sound filled the store with the din of car chases, cheering crowds, or canned laughter. Larry would quickly appear through the vacant doorway, maneuvering his wheelchair within the narrow space behind the counter toward the bait well, where live shrimp waited for their turn ...
Pausing for Patience
By ANDREW CREMATA A silver torpedo. It appeared from the depths as I retrieved my spoon over a rocky ledge that yielded to the depths of the lake. This strangely colored laker followed close behind the lure, ready to strike, but I was running out of room. There was enough ripple on the surface of the water to conceal the exact size of the trout, but there was little doubt it would take some effort to land it – if I could get it to bite. I did the only thing I could do – I stopped reeling. The sudden pause ...
A gathering of friends who also fish
By ANDREW CREMATA Even at a considerable distance, I could see the heaving surf turn into white foam when it rolled against the rocky shoreline of a distant island. As the boat drew closer, more detail came into focus – mint green ferns cascading over the edge of a high, sheer cliff face, against which large black and white seabirds dived and rolled in the stiff morning breeze. Minutes later that island was nothing more than a memory, as the boat continued west into the depths of the vast ocean. I was guest among old friends, visiting Sitka from their various ...