Nelli Williams, Trout Unlimited Alaska’s Special Project Coordinator, recently spent a week on the Nushagak River, Alaska’ premier king salmon river. She helped run a fly fishing academy for Alaska Native youth from the Bristol Bay region. The idea behind the academy, sponsored in part by TU, is to train the next generation of fly fishing guides who can work at local lodges in Bristol Bay and become conservation advocates for this very special but very threatened swath of Southwest Alaska. Here is her account of her week on the “Nush:”

Describing a week on the Nushagak with a fly-rod in hand as “work” might be a hard sell. But last week, I was fortunate to blend those two seemingly dichotomous acts into an eight day stretch of fly-fishing educational fun at Ekwok Lodge, located on the banks of the Nushagak, one of the eight major salmon-producing rivers that drain into Bristol Bay. 

I was there for the 2010 Bristol Bay Fly Fishing and Guide Academy - a training program for Bristol Bay’s young people that gives them the opportunity to explore careers as guides – so they might stay in the region, earn a decent living, advocate for a healthy watershed and offer visitors an authentic experience in one of our country’s most special and pristine natural places.

The academy, sponsored by the Nushagak-Mulchatna Land Trust, Trout Unlimited Alaska, Bureau of Land Management and the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, drew students from Togiak, Ekwok, Manokotak, Naknek and Dillingham at Ekwok Lodge (owned and operated by Ekwok Natives Ltd. and Luki Akelkok, Ekwok’s chief and a fishing guide himself) where professional guides from near and far (including 2008 graduate and current guide Reuben Hastings) taught students many essential guiding skills, including:

* Fly tying and casting techniques
* CPR and First Aid, river and backcountry safety
* Alaska hospitality and hosting skills
* River ecology and the history of Bristol Bay.

Of course, there was also a lot of fishing.  On one cloudy afternoon I found myself in a skiff with guides-in-training Fernando and Preston of Togiak and their mentor and instructor Kirk Deeter (a reknown outdoor writer and fly fishing guide).  With their new skills and  exuberance, peppered with entertaining stories and some quiet coaching from Kirk, they managed to hook me into more Humpies (Pink salmon) than I could count and a bright fiesty Coho that, as I write, is making its way up through the pristine waters of the Nushagak river to continue to the yearly salmon cycle that makes Bristol Bay’s fishery so famous. 

It made for a pretty memorable day of work.

(Photo © by Clark James Mishler.)