NoHo(s)

It’s a coho no show. Coho salmon (occasionally nicknamed ‘Hos by fisherman with a bit more cold blood lust than my own) are a staple for us here in weirdly urban Juneau, where most of us have to gather our winter food with hook and line. (Yeah, we have grocery stores and Costco and all that, making it decidedly too expensive to justify harvesting our own food, but that’s another story.) In other parts of the state, you set your personal use gill net, get your 25 fish and be done with it.

This post is to mark the fall without a coho run –or certainly without much of one. Theories among us lay folk are as varied as the excuses for late UPS packages (security check, extreme weather, customs inspection). Some blame the December 2020 flood (which wiped out the water source to the local hatchery and killed that year’s coho brood stock), others point to warming sea water, others just say timing is off; they’re late. Customs inspection seems as good a theory as any.

A year ago, my buddy Steve and I waded the wetlands we both view from our houses and watched literally hundreds of cohos finning their noses at us in a slough. We couldn’t entice ’em with our flies, but they were there in abundance. I remember a day in the early 2000s when I worked for the university downtown and took a lunch break on a beautiful September afternoon, got into a bunch of fish with my fly rod, took my limit of six, dragged them across the mud and grass to the truck, threw ’em whole in the fridge, washed up, got back to work in time for my afternoon 1:1 meeting, then, after the meeting looked in the mirror to see a big streak of dried mud and blood across my cheek.

So, Cedar, she who is scared to death of halibut, knows nothing about the lack of cohos. Somehow, though, in long days of anticipation like Saturday on the water with bro Dave, she seems to sense something else should be happening.

Luckily, Dave’s as much of a dog whisperer as fish whisperer so she seems cool with BroHo.