Transcript
Episode 3: Fly Fishing on Alaska waters
Emily Charash (00:02)
Hello and welcome to this episode of my summer in Alaska. On this episode, I'm going
to be taking you with me on my fly fishing weekend course. I've never fly fish before,
so I'm excited to learn a new skill, be out in nature for a few days and meet some
new people. Let's get to class. So this course is a two day intensive, and it's broken
up into two parts. The classroom part where we learn the basics of fishing and principles
behind technique. Here's the instructor talking a bit about this in class.
Shann Jones (00:31)
Fly lines are about 90ft long, so that's big trophy Grayling takes your fly and runs
out there. Line 90ft. You better have room on there to have a little bit of material
called backing Speaker 2 (00:42)and then the actual fishing part.
Emily Charash (00:43)
So I'm going to set the scene a little bit. We drove an hour outside campus and about
45 minutes onto this drive. No cell service, so we're really in the sticks. The landscape
starts changing a little bit. The trees are Fuller. It's definitely more and more
nature as we get closer to the pond. So now we're at the pond. I'm in my waders, I'm
in the water, I'm fly fishing, and my two classmates are next to me. This is Mark.
(01:11)
Mark (01:11)
I'm from Davis, California, and I got my doctorate degree at Washington State. And
my dissertation topic was farming salmon, Atlantic salmon. And so after I graduated,
there was a job up in Alaska, and I came up here as a fisheries economist. So it's
no better place to work on fisheries.
Emily Charash (01:26)
Why are you drawn to that for your PhD?
Mark (01:28)
Because I love fish.
Emily Charash (01:30)
This is Ted. I started off by asking Ted why he chose to take this class.
Ted (01:35)
Because I need to add some recreational activities to my life. So I'm driving around
Alaska camping, but I'm not doing anything other than camping. And I've always wanted
to do this. I've always wanted to catch Alaska fish, and I just haven't done it for
a long time.
Emily Charash (01:56)
Why do you need to add recreational activities to your life?
Ted (01:59)
Because I need to cease work activities. Kind of like retire.
Emily Charash (02:06)
Yeah.
Ted (02:08)
Just need to do things for fun instead of for whatever.
Emily Charash (02:15)
Yeah.
Emily Charash (02:16)
What do you enjoy about fishing?
Ted (02:20)
Just being out, being in Alaska? Alaskan waters? I like canoeing. I like going to
different parts of the state. So all of those things add up to if I have a destination,
go to a river or a Lake or something like that and try to see what's in there.
Emily Charash (02:42)
What kind of camping do you do?
Ted (02:48)
Just camping along the road in my camper. But this camper set up is pretty it's not
restricted to paved roads. I've been on a lot of little tiny, not quite off road trails,
but little small and developed roads and things like that. So I can see a lot of the
state that way. And then part of just being outside is for my health benefit too.
Walking, standing up, doing things, hiking, all of that?
Emily Charash (03:28)
Yeah, definitely.
Emily Charash (03:30)
And where are you from?
Ted (03:31)
Originally?
Ted (03:32)
I was born in Colorado. My family moved here when I was about twelve. So I've lived
in Alaska almost my whole life. I went away a couple of times for work or for school,
but keep coming back.
Emily Charash (03:47)
There it is.
Emily Charash (03:48)
Thanks to Mark and Ted. After about 2 hours and no bites, my professor and I sat down
on the grass and discussed all things fly fishing. Everything you're about to hear
takes place on the pond where we were fishing. So if you hear a fly or two in the
background, just know you're hearing the raw Alaskan fly fishing experience.
Shann Jones (04:07)
My name is Shann Jones. I'm an adjunct instructor of leisure and recreational studies
at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And this is the fly fishing weekend class.
Well, basically in the 14 hours weekend workshop, I teach the very basics of fly fishing.
I've had all skill levels, range of ages.
Emily Charash (04:27)
Can you give me a little bit about your background in fishing? Did you grow up with
this? Was this something in your family?
Shann Jones (04:34)
I started fly fishing- my father first took me back when it's about ten. So it's the
mid 70s and yeah, we fished a lot in central Pennsylvania and Appalachia fishing as
a culture for Alaska.
Emily Charash (04:49)
What does it mean to people here?
Shann Jones (04:51)
Folks take the fishing very seriously on different levels. There are three levels
that people participate in fishing in Alaska's individuals. One is the sport fishing
which we were doing today. Another type of fishing is called subsistence use fishing where people who live, particularly in rural
Alaska, they fish to get enough food to help make it through the winter in their small
rural communities that aren't connected by road service. And then finally there's
what's called a personal use fishery. And they're fairly limited. They're usually
salmon fisheries where we can go out with long dip nets and stick them in salmon Rivers,
certain salmon Rivers and bring home large amount of fish to feed their families.
Emily Charash (05:35)
What are some cool experiences you've had fishing?
Shann Jones (05:38)
Some of the coolest experience I've had really has been seeing my students come out
and learn and then some of them have gone to excel in other endeavors. One of my students
freelance writer, outdoor writer. I've had other students go on to earn doctoral degrees
and either fisheries or wildlife biology. That's really rewarding. I think the other
one is fishing with my autistic son really enjoyed our time over the years, about
the last ten years doing that.
Emily Charash (06:08)
What are some of the things you do with him fishingwise?
Shann Jones (06:11)
We just go out to a place similar to this pond. It's pretty easy access. He waits
there and throws sticks in the water and I Cook a fish and hand him the Rod and he
rolls it in and we have a nice little time together like that.
Emily Charash (06:27)
On that note, how do you think fishing connects people?
Shann Jones (06:30)
One of the last surveys I've seen of recreational fishing in the United States was
approximately 176,000,000. People have sport fishes sometime in their life, so it
breaks down to roughly a little under half the total population. So I think it's a
shared experience that many Americans have together. It's a very family centric activity
that can be passed down through generation. We saw a spike this last year in all outdoor
activities. Here in Alaska, we find fishing in different streams, and the feeds are
bigger Rivers. A lot of the salmon start their journey in either the north or south.
I mean the Northwest Pacific or the North Central Pacific in the ocean and move their
way inland from the bigger Rivers to the smaller headwater streams. And people fish
throughout those. We have some larger Lakes in Alaska, not just this small pond that
people fish out as well. We learned in class it's not random where you place fish
want to have three things in their car or their home. They need to feel safe from
overhead predators. They need some easy access to food, and they need a place where
they can rest and not be bothered. And like you said, Emily, not all areas of water
are the same. They might be too shallow, they might be moving too fast for fish to
want to be in it. There may be a serious lack of food in that particular area. Well,
I think one thing you look for is if you see vegetation in the water. Vegetation is
a good place for aquatic insects and other for crustaceans and invertebrates to live,
and then that's what the bigger fish feed on. Also, if you see smaller fish in the
water, there could be big fish. Big fish eat little fish.
Emily Charash (08:24)
I was talking to Ted about this earlier about just feeling very calm when fishing.
What does that do for the psyche?
Shann Jones (08:31)
For me, particularly if I decide to go save after work? Some people run and they sort
out their problems in running or in the weight room or on a bike. I do it when I'm
out there casting. I can kind of sort through my problems of the day. Some of my future
work is going to focus on outdoor recreation opportunities for those in the intellectual
developmentally disabled community. And what I found is that when you take folks,
it doesn't necessarily have to be fishing. My son, for example, likes long walks on
paths, nature walks, hiking, that type of thing. They find when they get out into
nature and they're removed from all the external stimuli that a household or busy city street,
they calm down. There's definitely a therapeutic value in that Alaska versus where
you grew up originally.
Emily Charash (09:22)
What are some of the differences in some of the things that made you want to stay
here?
Shann Jones (09:28)
One of the differences that it's just the sheer sparseness of people. I have had the
opportunity in my 30 plus years up here to fly over parts of Alaska in small Plains
and there is not a lot of anything. There's a whole lot of wilderness and I've landed
on small airstrips where you can hear nothing but the wind. There's no road noise,
there's no nothing. The vastness. I think until you come here and experience it, you
don't really have a concept of what vast means, what wilderness means.
Emily Charash (10:13)
Thanks for listening to this episode of my summer in Alaska. This podcast is presented
by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. A special thanks to producers Marmian Grimes
and Samara Taber. Thank you to everyone at UAF. For more information on the classes
that I took, you can check out uaf.edu.