SEWARD FISHING

Well, Zach and I took another 1/2 day salmon fishing trip out of Seward also, but this one was pretty much a bust - Zach and I caught the only two fish that the six guys (us included) on the boat caught in 6 hours. However, the captain let Zach drive the boat for a half hour, it was calm and pretty in the bay (as you can see above, Seward is surrounded by mountains in the same manner as Valdez), so it was a pleasant (albeit expensive) boat trip. We had those fish cleaned, frozen, and shipped back as well, so we started September with 38 lbs. of salmon in our freezer. I figure it should last us about a year.

Now, what you're looking at here is about the most bizarre form of fishing that I've ever seen. There are apparently so many salmon running around in the bay that you don't even need bait to catch them, and since they're about to die soon anyway (these are fishery salmon and have nowhere to go to spawn) they wouldn't bite even if you used bait. The idea is that you put a weighted treble hook on the end of your line, cast out as far as you can, and then repetitively yank back on the line to try to "snag" a fish in the side. It's called "snagging" (Duh). Now, I figured that the chance of actually catching a fish in this manner was about on a level with having an alligator fall out of the sky onto my head, but in fact, people standing on the shore will catch a fish approximately every 20 minutes or so using this technique. Go figure. Zach tried it, but he wasn't really strong enough and didn't have a heavy enough rod, so he decided to collect lost treble hooks at low tide and then sell them. Made a few bucks, I think.

We took a couple of small hikes in the Seward area as well, and went to the marine wildlife aquarium, which was pretty interesting. It doesn't really match up with the aquarium in Boston, but you've got to remember that Seward has about 4,000 people in it, I think, so it's pretty impressive given the size of the town.

Seward was also blitzed by the 1964 earthquake and tidal wave(s), and we saw a few remnants of the seashore and sea wall there.

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