Saturday August 7, Copper Centre, AK

60 Miles

Tonight we are eating like kings thanks to a fisherman on the Copper River.
We wandered down to have a close look at the salmon wheels on the river this morning and as usually happens, got chatting with a couple of chaps filleting their sockeye salmon. They had a bin with about 30 fish that had come from the fish wheel overnight and they gave us 2 beautiful red fillets for our dinner.

Overnight the fish that are caught in the wheel fall into a cage, so they are kept alive until they are collected. It was a great atmosphere right along the riverbank as the fish were getting brought back to the tables to be cut up. 

A German couple were also taking photos, and he is a wild life photographer, check out his website for some stunning images..  www.uwehasubek.de  He and his wife have been in Alaska for the past 5 weeks and have been kayaking out to wilderness areas as well as flying into Katmai National Park where they camped for 4 days. He showed me some of the images of the bears catching salmon at the waterfall and they are just stunning. Puts my wildlife photography to shame….guess I just need a 500mm lens!!!!!

We headed further up the road towards McCarthy …a 60 mile drive on an unsealed road, but decided it was a bit rough and turned back. Maybe it was just that we had too many trips over gravel roads!!! 

Our firewood supply was getting a bit low, and Ian can’t bring himself to spend $5 for a small bundle of pretty inferior wood, so on the way back to the highway we pulled off into a gravel quarry where there were a number of felled trees. So the lumberjack set too with his pretty small saw and filled the wood bin. I found some salmon berry bushes with quite a bit of ripe fruit so collected some to go with ice cream for supper…what a feast after the salmon!

We had crossed the Klutina River on our way down to Valdez and it looked amazing, really blue and clean and it is renowned for its salmon, and had seen a campground right on the river. What a great spot, we booked in for the night, but think we will stay for a few nights. Our campspot is just metres from the river and Ian has been out fishing this afternoon. There are quite a number of people fishing but haven’t seen any caught yet although it is supposed to be a great spot. 

The King salmon are still in season here and we saw a charter boat come in this afternoon with 2 huge kings. Ian has booked to go out with them in the morning….at 4.30am!!!!! I am staying in bed!