Bear Fight at the Crescent River
I felt as if someone needed to pinch me to make sure I wasn’t dreaming when the bow of our boat touched the gravel beach in front of Snug Harbor Cannery. The placed looked exactly as I remembered it from last year. And although I knew I’d be back it just somehow seemed to much to expect. This year I have the added pleasure of having my wife along and wasn’t long before I was pulling her through all the buildings pointing out this and that.
We’ve lost some familiar faces, but some last years crowd was here, and we got to meet Seth who turned out to be a great guy and I’m sure we’ll continue our friendship long after we leave Snug. We only had one day to get things in order before the first batch of clients arrived and all hands turned to in preparation.
Two Grizzlies on the Crescent River fishing during the Sockeye run. (Photograph by Theresa Weileman)
Tides are everything here and our activities all revolve around them. Over the course of our clients stay the best high tide for getting to the salmon on the Crescent River just happened to be 11 PM of their first night. After we explained the situation, they were game to head out despite it meaning a late night. Of course being so far north light wasn’t a issue.
We shared the mouth of the river with 5 Brown Bears, but with the exception of one who just did a 360 around just to see what we where up to, they really weren’t interested in us and kept their heads down looking for dinner. Occasionally we would have to give a yell as they’d wonder a bit close seemly unaware of us. You’d see them pop their heads up at the noise, give a slight skewed glance as if they were thinking, “What are those things?”, then they’d trot in the other direction.
Apparently this casualness doesn’t extend to each other. This became all too obvious when two of them decided to occupy the same fishing hole. From a distance of a couple hundred yards we heard these incredible roars and looked up to see these brutes on hind legs swatting at each other. Despite the distance you could see fur flying as each tried to out battle the other. Eventually one backed down and moved on up the river, but it was much longer before we stopped taking about the rush of watching such a battle from just across the river!
