- Cozy morning program
- Seaplane flight from Soldotna over Cook Inlet
- Flying low over Double Glacier and the volcanoes of Lake Clark National Park
- Grizzly family and black bears watch closely as they fish
- Fish salmon right next door
- Continue to Seward in the evening
It rains again in the morning and since the planned tour doesn't start until 2 a.m., we can take it easy. We have breakfast, shower and get our things ready for what will hopefully be the big day. Since we are still too early, we go to the Fred Meyer supermarket again, buy the most necessary things and use the wifi. At 1 a.m. we arrive at Talon Air Service. It is still raining, but the weather should allow the flight over the inlet. We and a family take off on the house lake in an ancient seaplane. The machine from 1952, but equipped with a brand new engine, rises surprisingly quickly out of the water.
We fly at about 800 meters above the Cook Inlet over to Wolverine Creek. The wilderness there is directly connected to Lake Clark National Park. At low altitude we cross the impressive Double Glacier and the two 3000m high volcanoes Mount Redoubt and Mount Iliamna. That alone is an amazing experience despite the heavy cloud cover. After the half-hour flight, we land on a lake. There we change to our guide on the boat. We drive into a bay not far from the landing site. A handful of other boats are already lying here, most of them fishing for salmon. A few meters further back in the bay of the small stream mouth, a grizzly family eats the remains of the countless salmon carcasses. The ground is literally littered with salmon and you grizzlies seem pretty full. One of the already impressively large cubs is playing in the water, the mother and the second cub stand on the bank. A great sight, even if the other boats and their fishing rods restrict the view a little. As late arrivals, we have to join the line of a dozen boats and watch the bears from a greater distance. Then the two young bears even begin to play and fight in the water. A drama that we only know from documentaries so far. We manage to take some fantastic shots. Suddenly another actor enters the stage: a black bear carefully approaches that of a much larger relative. When we finally moved all the way forward, the bears pull back a little to take a digestive nap.
Now let's try our hand at fishing. It's the first time for each of us, but with the local salmon density it won't be too difficult. For me it takes a while for one to take a bite, but pulling it in is a very simple matter. Menu is less fortunate, as the first three all escape. When the silver salmon (also called Coho salmon) are too old and inedible, they are thrown back into the lake. In any case, Chrigu and I soon caught two stately specimens each. In the case of Mänu, that still takes a while. Three salmon each would be allowed, but this amount of fish would simply be too much of a good thing. While fishing, a mother black bear shows up with her cub to feast on the remains of the grizzlies. The cloud cover is hardly able to clear, but at least the rain is holding back to some extent.
After 6 hours our time in this fanatical place is already coming to an end when the grizzlies become active again. Again the young bears measure their strength in the water and this time we have a much better view of the spectacle. Always in the watchful eye of the mother bear. With the seaplane we fly back over the bay to Soldotna. This is the end of an extremely impressive day for us that none of us will forget. Even if we only spent the whole afternoon in the same bay, the tour was worth every dollar and more than just a consolation for the broken dream of the Katmai adventure. We could even try our hand at fishing. The six salmon caught together weigh almost 12 kilograms. In the coming days, self-caught silver salmon will be on our plates more often. But first we still have to find someone to gutt the fish for us and fillet them.
We quickly cook pasta with pesto and buy ice cream to cool the catch. Since our program has now been mixed up a bit, there is still a considerable distance waiting for us. Because tomorrow morning there is another highlight in Alaska. It's a two-hour drive down to Seward. The small, remote harbor town in Ressurection Bay is a well-known starting point for boat tours in the Kenai Fjords National Park.
