HOT SPOT : COLD FEAT : Ninilchik, Alaska: A Hideaway Where the Salmon Is King

It was shortly after midnight and the sun had grudgingly dipped below the frozen peaks of the Alaska Range 35 miles across Cook Inlet. Two dozen boats, from 36-foot cruisers to 12-foot inflatable Zodiak rafts, slowly trolled along the shoreline at the base of a 300-foot cliff, all of them running parallel to the rocky beach. And all searching for king salmon.

Suddenly, a red Zodiak with two men aboard broke the trolling pattern and cut through the fleet, heading out to sea and infuriating other fishermen, who were forced to change course or risk having their lines severed by the propeller of the Zodiak’s 10-horsepower outboard motor.

Curses and insults echoed off the cliff for several seconds until the others realized that the Zodiak’s motor was not running and that the two anglers in the raft were unwilling participants in this breach of trolling etiquette.

Their raft was being powered not by 10 horses but rather by 1 salmon. One very big salmon.

The battle raged for 45 minutes and the Zodiak had left the pack of boats nearly a mile behind before an exhausted angler raised his fishing pole over his head for the last time and his partner slid a net under the body of an even more exhausted 60-pound fish, the jaws of the male salmon curled into the traditional hook shape of a 7-year-old spawner.

And then the angler, a middle-aged man from Portland, Ore., let out a whoop of joy, a shriek powered by the adrenaline that comes from hooking, fighting and finally beating the fish of a lifetime.

Back in the trolling fleet, veteran Alaska fishing guide Rocky Constant smiled.

“Nice fish,” he said softly, putting away a pair of binoculars that he had trained on the distant raft.

His statement seemed to be the L.A. equivalent of someone saying, “Nice car.” Sure, it was nice. But there are so many of them. No reason to get very excited about seeing one.

Constant’s world is one with enough scenery to raise the hair from your arm. In one direction, a volcano jutting from the ocean floor. In another, a pair of jagged 10,000-foot peaks, called Iliamna and Redoubt, standing as sentries over the water from the Alaska Range. And in all directions, bald eagles soaring just above the water, searching for lunch.

Cruise ships sail down the middle of Alaska’s Cook Inlet just to let people look at it. But Constant doesn’t live and work here for five months a year because of the scenery. He’s here because it just might be the world’s most productive salmon and halibut fishing area.

Constant is one of few people who know about this small and remarkable hideaway. Located 205 miles southwest of Anchorage, 30 miles north of the fishing village of Homer and just this side of Clam Gulch, Ninilchik is nothing, really. A store or two. A combination bar-hotel that offers plenty to drink but no rooms to sleep in. And an auto junkyard where rusted and mangled cars have an ocean view that mocks the view from the multimillion-dollar estates of Palos Verdes and Malibu.

But for fishermen, there can be no place better. They joke that Ninilchik is an Eskimo word dating back three centuries that means, “Hurry up. Get the net.”

Sandy Kellin found out about Ninilchik five years ago. The salmon? Giant and plentiful. The halibut? Bigger than Refrigerator Perry. The scenery? Overpowering. And the accommodations in the area?

“Primitive,” Kellin recalled. “You’d fish 16 hours a day and then come back to a cold meal--a cold, bad meal--and a night of trying to sleep on a ripped Army cot in a drafty room.”

Those were the fishing camps in the area that welcomed, more or less, hardy fishermen. And despite the best fishing he had ever encountered and sights that made his heart pound, Kellin swore he’d never go back.

But three years ago, he was flooded again by the memories of the area. So he left his home in Phoenix, returned to Ninilchik, bought three acres of beachfront property and carved a road to it through the forest and down the cliffs.

And just feet from the surf, he built Trophy King Lodge, a 12-guest hideaway. To its guests, the lodge might be considered grossly opulent and ridiculously lavish. If they didn’t like it so much.

“Let’s just stay here and eat for a week,” remarked Del Ellis, a bank vice president from Phoenix after sampling some of cook Steve Mark’s first dinner. “This is good enough.”

But tearing yourself away from the lodge really isn’t that difficult. Not when the kings come to town.

Every day from June to September, anglers troll herring or giant spinners along the Ninilchik shoreline in search of the salmon schools. When the fish are found, trolling patterns are organized by the boats’ skippers to minimize tangled lines.

Other anglers use a method called mooching, which consists of drifting through a hot area and jigging baits slowly near the bottom, where the salmon lurk.

On a night early in May, when the sun still beamed at midnight, Ellis, the Phoenix banker, and his fishing partner, Perry Overstreet, sat on either side of Constant.

They leaned back into the boat’s chairs and watched in wonder as the water all around the boat came alive with 40-pound and 50-pound and even 60-pound king salmon, some boiling violently on the surface in pursuit of bait fish, others coming completely out of the water before slamming back onto the surface.

The incredible life cycles of these salmon were nearly complete now. In just a few more days, they would stop eating, enter their rivers of birth, deposit the next generation of salmon in the gravel and then die. This feeding frenzy was, for most of them, a final burst of life, the last, salty hurrah in a wild and harsh existence that began between four and seven years ago.

The first spawning runs begin in May when the salmon gather in the turbulent waters of the Gulf of Alaska just outside Cook Inlet. Hundreds of thousands of them converge at the mouth of the inlet, waiting for just the right moment, just the right high tide, to trigger their rush into the calmer waters.

Once inside the inlet, they hug the shoreline, searching for the river they left as 6-inch jacks several years ago. There are four active spawning rivers in the immediate vicinity, the largest being the famed Kenai River.

The smallest of the fish that enter the inlet are the 4-year-olds. They weigh 15 to 22 pounds and often lead the surge from the ocean. The 5- and 6-year-olds follow, fish weighing up to 40 pounds.

And then come the big ones, the 7-year-old kings who have gorged themselves on herring in the sea for an extra year or two and have grown to outlandish proportions. Fifty-pounders are common. Sixty-pounders are often battled by wide-eyed fishermen. And they get bigger.

Constant, a 36-year-old fishing machine who has guided anglers in Cook Inlet each summer for 15 years, did most of the construction work on Trophy King Lodge and is now its head guide. Two years ago, he hooked and whipped a king that dragged a scale down to more than 90 pounds. The world sportfishing record is 96 pounds, a fish caught in the nearby Kenai River. Commercial fishermen have caught kings that weighed 110 pounds and more.

“The really big ones make your eyes water,” Constant said. “You fight them and bring them to the surface and your eyes water. Not sure why.”

Perhaps it’s the emotion that wells up inside an angler when he hooks up with the largest fish he has ever seen that wasn’t attached to the wall of someone’s den.

Or perhaps the moisture comes from the knowledge that a 90-pound king salmon on his last swim could overturn your boat and send you on your last swim. The icy waters, which dip into the 30s in the spring, would cause hypothermia and death in most people within 3 minutes, experts say.

Constant, in his orientation speech at Trophy King Lodge, points out that life jackets are in every boat.

“But you’ll only be wearing them for your family,” he says. “Just so they’ll have something to bury.”

Harsh words. But this remote part of Alaska is a harsh place. The primitive environment, however, combines with the natural salmon lure of the spawning rivers to make the area the hottest item in Alaska fishing circles.

“So few people knew about this place five years ago, you wouldn’t believe it,” said Kellin, a member of the 1976 U.S. Olympic bobsled team who now operates Trophy King Lodge, Inc., from Phoenix. “People in Homer, fishermen who live 25 miles away, never fished here because it was impossible to get to. I found it by mistake. Best mistake I ever made.”

There are no nearby marinas and only two boat-launching ramps. To reach the prime spots between the spawning grounds of Deep Creek and the Anchor River, boaters must launch 10 miles north or 10 miles south and make the long, chilling run through often choppy seas. In Southern California, such conditions would seem ludicrous to the average angler, who seeks easy access first and fish second.

But to Alaskans and many of the thousands of out-of-staters whose vacations just seem to fall at the time of the king salmon spawning runs every year, the problems of getting to the fish are a small price to pay for those few hours a day when the feeding frenzies of the kings kick into high gear.

Some of the largest salmon will pounce on a trolled herring bait in only 20 feet of water and only 100 feet from the rough shoreline. But the kings swim even closer than that at times. Constant, who uses the one day a week that he doesn’t have to guide fishermen to pick up a rod and try his own luck, knows just how close to shore the kings will swim.

“Last season I hooked two, casting from the beach,” he said. “A 47- and a 46-pounder. I know guys up here, the locals, who only fish from shore. At the right time and the right place, you can just about pick them off swimming between your boots. Trolling is OK and that’s how we catch our fish, but there’s nothing like nailing a big king in the surf.”

And, if an angler finds the thought of powerful, crashing salmon somewhat hideous, the area offers another type of fishing, a type not suited to everybody. Before you attempt this, however, perhaps a little test is in order.

Take your heaviest fishing rod and walk onto a freeway overpass during rush hour. Drop the line with a heavy hook and wait until it snags the rear bumper of a small foreign car. If you get jerked over the railing and down onto the pavement, concentrate on salmon fishing. But if somehow you can brace yourself and then begin to crank the vehicle back to you, perhaps you’re ready for the Pacific halibut.

That car business is a wild exaggeration, right?

Not exactly.

The average halibut in the area weighs 50 to 75 pounds. Hundred-pounders are common. Two-hundred pounders are caught with some regularity. And in May, 70-year-old Kathleen McCann of Ninilchik hooked and then whipped a 465-pound halibut that was not submitted for world-record consideration only because she and her husband couldn’t find a scale big enough to weigh it.

The fish’s weight was estimated by biologist Dave Nelson of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. He used a length and girth chart published by the International Pacific Halibut Commission.

Using salmon for bait, the woman fought the fish for 45 minutes before getting it alongside the 18-foot boat. Joe McCann shot the fish in the head 16 times with a .22 rifle and then harpooned the beast before it stopped fighting. Normally, the giant fish, which are capable of flipping most boats if not handled with extreme caution, are dispatched at boatside with a blast from a shotgun.

The residents call it “monster fishing.”

“Salmon fishing is terrific,” Constant said. “But if I had a choice, I’d chase halibut all day long.”

Luckily, anglers in Ninilchik can do both in the same day. Decisions, decisions. Alaska-style.