Triston Chaney

“Sometimes with Bristol Bay, you don’t know until you know. You’ve got to just experience the fishing and the beauty of the area. Pictures and even videos don’t do it justice. Not even close. Once you get up there, it’s a totally different feeling. You see everything, you’re experiencing everything, you feel everything— it’s so much different.

When you’re out on a boat, fishing, driving around, looking at stuff, life is so much easier. That’s all you have to worry about; it’s simple living out there, or it can be. That’s the allure.

There are so many resources that support commercial fishing. Think about how many millions of pounds of fish get shipped out across the world for everyone to eat— and that’s wild salmon. There is a pretty tough market with farmed salmon, but you can’t beat wild caught sockeye, kings, and silver salmon. At all.

And to see the diversity of wildlife—  you can see bears, moose, caribou, wolves, wolverine, and then there are rainbows and grayling, dolly varden, all five species of salmon, and pike, all that you can catch in one day. It’s something that most people really can’t comprehend. But once you think about it and then experience it, you are like, “WHOA. Holy smokes.”

—Triston Chaney, Fly Fisherman from Dillingham

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