This story is from last week’s Alaska trip and will appear in our forthcoming book, Long Flies. The week was cold, rainy and very windy. We had one afternoon of sun, and that happened to be the day the chums were on the shallow bars.It was fishing extraordinaire, as the story tells.

Alaska’s Alagnak supports superb runs of chum salmon. These are by far the strongest, pound for pound, of any of the Pacific salmon. Add to that the fact that they school in great numbers on the shallow water gravel and sand flats that occur on the inside of the bends on this impressive river, and you have a fly fisher’s delight.

This day, Dave Graebel, Les Adams,  Scott Snead, and I had been successfully fishing the Nushagak for king salmon, and decided to stop at the Alagnak on the way back to the No-See-Um Lodge, and fish for chums. John Holman, the lodge owner, and our pilot for the day, circled the plane above the river’s bends, until we found a “chum bar” heavily dotted with fish.

As we climbed out of the plane, our guide, Caleb Hitzfeld, told me he had seen a good concentration of fish at the top of the bar and on its outer edge. I headed up and began to wade out to the edge, about 150 feet away. Suddenly, there right in front of me, in water only mid-calf deep was a pod of six to eight chums. I cast and immediately took one.

When I’d landed it, I began to look closely at the water around me. There were pods of chum dotted all over the bar, stretching off to the limit of my vision. Just upstream, a small group finned softly in the shallow, but steady, smooth flow on the bar. I waded a bit to my right so I could cast up on the right side of the pod. The line stretched out over the water and then flipped around in a positive, overpowered curve. It was The L fished upstream. The fly drifted down, sinking as it came back, and a chum moved forward and took it. The fish’s every move was clearly visible.

On the next cast, I stripped the line, drawing the fly across the face of the pod, and one of the fish surged forward and grabbed the magenta Collared Leech. And so it went for the next two hours before the tide pushed in, forcing us off the flat and into the plane.

It had been the best day of chum fishing in my life. Not because of the numbers of fish. True, I’d caught chums to the excess, but it was the total sight-fishing experience that made the day so spectacular. That and The L fished upstream.

The Alagnak is big water with generously large chum bars.

Chrome bright chums are supercharged and fight as if possessed.

The chums smiled on the magenta Collared Leech fished with The L-- upstream.