KACHEMAK BAY -- On a Saturday morning in mid-October, could there have been a more perfect place to be than on the water off Homer Spit, trolling for king salmon? The barely wrinkled bay reflected the pale gray of a lightening sky, and wisps of low clouds feathered the mountainsides. How often, even in summer, was it warm enough to go hatless in an open skiff?
Before leaving the harbor — so peaceful this time of year — we'd paused to watch an otter rolling and flipping, round and round, fluffing its marvelous fur.
With our two rods rigged to troll at different depths, we began our slow cruise near the end of the Spit, just offshore from Land's End Resort. We'd heard the day before of someone catching his group's limit right outside the harbor in 15 minutes. We readied our net, our cutting board and knife. For longtime commercial fishermen, rods and reels and a tackle box of funny-looking lures were a new idea.
We motored westward at walking speed, parading with a dozen other boats through the still morning. A knife-like dorsal fin broke the surface ahead of us, and kittiwakes dove after bait fish; I steered us toward the action. We watched the other boats and didn't see any nets deployed or anyone getting very excited. We watched humpback whales blowing on the south side of the bay, a mile off. Cormorants flew around us. A silvery storm petrel, with its distinctive forked tail, darted past.
A pollock?
I didn't care that 15 minutes, a half-hour and an hour passed without a strike. I was entirely happy watching the clouds, the mountains, the whales blowing and the birds.
Finally, we caught something — a small pollock that we shook off. Then another.
I've lived on Kachemak Bay long enough to remember when we could catch king crab by dropping pots off the end of the Homer dock, when the bay was full of multiple species of crab and shrimp and I'd never seen or even heard of a pollock. The crab and shrimp left us decades ago, victims of — it is said — a Gulf of Alaska "regime shift" related to warmer water temperatures.
I remember, too, when there were only two charter boats in the Homer harbor. Now sport fishing is a major industry here.
Feeder kings forage
But winter largely belongs to us locals, and winter kings are the feast fish. In recent years the bay has been full of them — or else it just seems that way, with more people fishing, and fishing successfully. Winter kings, also known as feeder kings, are somewhere in their fourth or fifth year at sea, fattening before they return to their home streams to spawn.
The one-day Winter King Salmon Tournament, sponsored by the Homer Chamber of Commerce, will celebrate its 23rd year in March. Seven months ago, 386 boats, including seven kayaks, brought in 590 fish. The largest weighed 30 pounds.
We'd all love to know where the kings are from. What stocks are wintering here?
Some of them wear coded wire tags in their snouts. (The presence of a tag is signaled by a clipped adipose fin, although not all fish with clipped fins are also tagged.) In recent years, our Alaska Department of Fish and Game has sampled more than 800 heads and "read" 304 tags. Most of the tags indicated the fish were from hatcheries in Washington state and British Columbia. However, since few Alaska fish have been similarly tagged, there's no way to determine what the mix in the bay might be. All we can say is that some kings have come a long way to feed.
Changes in the bay
We should have better information soon, though. A study started two years ago has been collecting genetic samples, year-round in Kachemak Bay and north along the Cook Inlet coast to the Ninilchik River. In another year, preliminary results will be able to tell us what stocks, in what proportions, are present in the different seasons.
Meanwhile, so much about the bay is odd this winter. No one remembers so many humpback whales being in the bay at once or staying for so long. Seabirds normally found far from land have become familiar sights. Whales, birds, salmon — they all seem to be feeding on juvenile herring that are, themselves, apparently more plentiful than in the recent past.
But all is certainly not well. Dead birds, mostly murres, keep washing ashore. Otters, too, are dying in unusual numbers; more than 200 dead or dying have been recovered on the bay's shores since summer and, while bacterial infections have been implicated in the past, the current die-off has the experts puzzled.
Many questions, many mysteries — the least of which is why we couldn't, on a beautiful October morning, catch a fish.
Nancy Lord is a Homer-based writer and former Alaska writer laureate. Her books include "Fishcamp," "Beluga Days" and "Early Warming."