Three hours after breakfast I poured my fifth cup of coffee and stepped outside into the milky glow of a drizzly Alaska morning. There was little to see. The mountains I’d stared at all week were guillotined at the shoulders by low clouds, and I barely made out the floatplanes at their moorings just 50 yards away. Down on the dock, the lodge’s two pilots were each busy in their own way, the first wiping invisible spots off his plane’s windshield like a latter-day Macbeth, the second mouthing an unlit cigar and whittling at something in his hands. It was a cigar box he was fashioning out of driftwood—his second of the morning.
“On days like this,” he nodded sagely, “a pilot must have hobbies.”
When visiting Bristol Bay’s array of great lodges, the fishing is almost always exceptional—except when low clouds ground planes. When that happens anglers and guides play a waiting game, with pilots radioing back and forth until conditions at departure and arrival sites are acceptable for flight without instrumentation—that is, by human eyes alone. That was the situation on the last full day of a week-long trip to the Bay—waiting for an “all clear” that might or might not arrive. We’d enjoyed good fishing and fair weather for five days, and most of the lodge guests were in high spirits and happy to exchange their coffee for cocktails, to embark on fish stories instead of fish sorties. But I wasn’t so keen to call it a day. Rather than donning my Crocs and pouring a Seven&Seven, I slipped into waders and grabbed a 7-weight. Dress for the job, they say.