Alaska Fishing

Legendary Alaska angler and writer Jim Repine, a pioneer fly fisherman here before moving to Chile more than a decade ago, has died of a brain tumor.

Repine, 76, died at home July 11. Longtime friend Charlie Gilman, a Colorado fishing guide and president of International Flyfisher, brought half of Repine's ashes to Alaska earlier this month to spread on his beloved Kenai River.

"He was a wise man, a very wise man," Gilman said. "He just loved the water and the river."

Over three decades, Repine wrote weekly outdoors columns in Alaska newspapers, hosted the "Alaska Outdoors" television show, edited Alaska Outdoors magazine and wrote four books.

"More than his teaching and his experience in Alaska ... Repine's real gift to us lays in the wealth of learning he has to relate on man's relationship with the wild he is forever drawn towards," wrote Troy Letherman, editor of Fish Alaska magazine.

Repine died at home under hospice care surrounded by family, Gilman said. He was diagnosed just a few months earlier.

"He worked right up to the very end," Gilman said. "He was bigger than life."

Repine's books included "Fishing Alaska," "How to Fish Alaska," and the most recent, "Pacific Rim Fly Fishing: The Unrepentant Predator" published in 1995.

His affection for fish was always paramount, as this excerpt from "Pacific Rim Fly Fishing" suggests:

"Sometime, if you have never done this, hold a fish in your hands that you've landed. Be very gentle. Keep it in the water and consider every aspect of this wondrous being. Examine the design. Let yourself by fascinated with the marvel of its coloration."

Repine worked and fished in Alaska from 1968 into the 1990s.

"For nearly three decades," Letherman wrote, "Jim Repine has been synonymous with the state's angling scene."

He profiled such angling giants as Lee Wulff, Lefty Kreh, Roderick Haig-Brown, Joan Wulff and Mel Krieger.

After leaving Alaska, he bought a lodge on the Futaleufu River in Chile's Patagonia region and settled there.

"He didn't quit Alaska so much as he moved to the call of another emerging fishery," Letherman wrote.

To Repine, the value of fishing was both aesthetic and economic, as he wrote in a Daily News op-ed piece published in 1987.

"Try to imagine," he wrote, "the income potential of the Matanuska Valley, had it been developed and promoted all these years as an outdoor recreation area serviced by carefully spaced resorts, parks, hiking and canoe trail system, its scenery still intact, its waters still filled with the fish it once had.

"It's hard to grasp, but considering the Iliamna-Bristol Bay area is already generating $50 million a year through sportfishing alone, wouldn't a thriving visitor destination have been healthier all around than a busted real estate industry and Soviet-style dairies and meat processors?

"... There exists now a desperate need for the various fishery resource users to end their insane war and bond together for their own obvious interests ... If you let your imagination go, it starts looking damned exciting."

Imagination was never in short supply for Repine.

Decades after he started fishing, Repine still preferred the supple feel of a bamboo fishing rod.

"But when he got into bigger fish," Gilman said, "he broke down and used graphite like everybody else. In Chile, he really became a dry fly nut."

But whatever his tool, it was simply a means to the beauty fishing provided.

"Tradition's only demand is that we learn from it while transcending it," Letherman wrote. "Stravinsky followed greatness with a sublimity all his own. The music of the Jim Repines of the world may not achieve the same level of distinction, but their achievements are no less inspired -- and no less inspiring."

Reach reporter Mike Campbell at mcampbell@adn.com or 257-4329.

ADVERTISEMENT