Unalakeet

This note is addressed mainly to hap but I thought some of you might find it interesting

Your recent comments & pictures of Chars and Dollys kindled some old memories. I got to wondering if I had caught any char. I knew I had caught a lot of Dollys in Oregon and other places.

So I Googled the town of Unalakeet to see if I could find out what type of fish were in their river. I found there was a lodge there and the Unalakeet had both species. So I will assume I have caught a char. Also caught either char or Dollys out of the Kenai.

If you wonder why I can't remember hears my story. In the summer of 1962 I flew from Fairbanks to Unalakeet complements of the government. We were boated several miles up stream placed in canvas tents with wood floors. We were given use of a boat with an outboard. The whole trip was a blast with many fish caught. Sadly I have no pictures of that trip.

Anyway we spent about a week there and fished till we were worn out. Lots of Salmon & Grayling and I think I caught a monster whitefish as well as char & dollys. And the bottom line is the lodge charges $5,300 for a week. My cost for the trip was $25.00 but we had to furnish our own food.

Thanks for awakening that period of my life.

Tim

My first job was guiding at Unalakleet in 1981/82. It was then called Silvertip Lodge. I was 17, fresh out of high school, missing graduation/prom and all that because the lodge was opening and I had to finish up two weeks early. I mostly did what I was told. The other lodge guides and manager said that we could not tell the difference between a char and a dolly without examining them biologically with a scalpel or something. So, when a guest caught a larger, beautiful "char" with big orange spots, we told them they caught a "char." When they caught a smaller "dolly" with pale colors and small spots, we told them it was a "dolly." Hey, I was just a kid on a summer adventure and getting paid for it! I still, to this day, don't know which they were, but they're so closely related, it doesn't really matter anyway. Your post brought back those memories of a great river, great (and interesting) people, and two great summers that forever shaped who I would become and my career path. To this day, over 30 years later, I'm still a fishing guide, and have done little else. Hmmm.

It was $3,000 a week for a guest back then. I'd sure love to go back there some day. I can still remember every bend in the rivers (there's two forks), every gravel bar (including the ones I hit at 30 mph!), the cut banks, the trees, the constant rain, the clouds of mosquitos, 100-fish days on silvers, kings and chums galore, the muskox, . . . A rookie kid guide absorbs everything like a sponge, and its all still with me. So many "firsts."

Panman
Thanks for that little trip down memory lane...

Interestingly, in '62 there were far more questions than answers about char versus dollies. You were surely here in the good old days. I arrived two years after your trip as a kid. My father was a gas-passer for the Air Force. Things I did as a kid still blow me away, like the fish we caught. Right through town and in easy walking distance from the house was a military dump, mostly right in the middle of Ship Creek. Many derelict vehicle bodies were right in the creek.

A deuce and a half lay on its starboard side pointed upstream. The windows were all gone and we could climb out onto it. Several big rainbows hung right inside the cab one day as I slid a tastey morsel in through the windshield. I had to jerk it away fom the greedy silvers several times before one of the rainbows took it. The trouble was the fish had a lot of options for departure gates and I had just the one where I drifted the bait in... The rainbows won far more often than I did, but the stakes were far higher for them.

I cringe to think how many incredible wild trout I rendered to protein in those days.

There are some isolated populations of Dollies in WA and OR, but not many. Those fish would be bull trout, mostly. The Kenai has lots of dollies, and many insist there are arctic char. I am one of them.

Anyway, some interesting facts about dollies:
The fish that dollies were named over was actually a bull trout.
Dollies and arctic char were only divided out a couple decades ago...
The true guru in char terms, Fred DeCicco, thinks there is another species that needs to be broken out...
Fred tagged two dollies in extreme NW AK that were recaptured in Russia, over 1,000 miles away, within 40 days...
Dollies overwinter in lakes that are not associated with their natal streams, and often go to different streams each year, but they usually live in running water.
Arctic char usualy overwinter in streams and live in lakes in the summer.

And there are many more head scratchers about char in general. Fred sat down with me one day and ran me through all of his notes and studies from an amazing career with ADF&G and it was very cool! Fred was also there when the new AK state record grayling was caught a few years back. A serious grayling nut had set out to catch the fish and did...

We have a humpback whitefish here that is an amazing fish. They get large, but they also put almost every other fish to shame the way they fight and jump. They are not your typical whitefish, but we have those, too.

Sorry for the run-on, but I get goofy when hit with the nostalgia stick...
art