Lots of people have floated the Kenai River, the upper river can even get crowded on a summer weekend. 

 I wanted to do something different; I wanted to float the entire Kenai River from start to finish!  Starting at the outlet of Kenai Lake, thru the upper river and the Kenai Canyon, motoring thru 15 miles of Skilak Lake and then back into the lower portion of the Kenai River, thru the Naptown Rapids and all the way to the mouth of the river at Cook Inlet.  At first, Shanna was a little reluctant, but then she started to get her a little excited about a 3-day float down the 85 miles of the entire Kenai River.  She decided this was a notch she wanted in her belt and the plans were made.  My hand  was still recovering from surgery required after the bear hunting adventure.  I decided my hand was strong enough to make this trip using oars and we could trade off the "raft commander" job as necessary to give it a break.  We knew we might even get to see some bears.  We NEVER imagined bears would be a daily and nightly occurrence for the entire trip!

August 7, 2005 - Day 1

The weather was perfect, sunny and warm; not a cloud in the sky.  

We loaded up our red salmon fishing gear and the ultra lights, for trout fishing with beads.  Loren, our neighbor, picked us and our equipment up at 1:00 PM, as planned. 

We made the 40 minute drive to Cooper Landing and soon we were waving good-bye.  We fired up the 8 HP Honda outboard to give it a test. So far it was looking good; about 4 MPH was the best we could get without torquing the raft too much. We stopped at the Russian and Kenai River confluence to fish a bit.  We couldn’t see a SINGLE red salmon in the mouth of the Russian.  I fished just below the confluence and hooked into quite a few, but I didn’t get any to the shore. While I was fishing one of the resident brown bear cubs showed up at the confluence. When I saw it, it had a whole red salmon in it’s mouth. Shanna told me later that a guy had said, “Watch this,” to his family and threw the salmon to the bear. Nice……now this bear will know EXACTLY where to go for her next meal.  

We departed the confluence and worked our way thru the Kenai Canyon. It was more exciting than we remembered. The motor creaked the entire way thru the rapids as the raft was bouncing up and down. We were approaching Skilak Lake and started getting REALLY serious about finding a campsite. Shanna finally identified a gravel bar island that she liked, we walked it and checked it out.  It looked good, so we set up camp and found firewood.  I tried casting my bead for trout, but didn’t do any good. We drank some beers around the campfire and went off to bed around 11:30.

August 8, 2005 - Day 2

We had some excitement during the night. It started around 12:30 AM when I was awakened by a baby bear making bawling sounds.  Sleeping a little lighter now, I woke again, this time to the sound of heavy footsteps in the gravel right outside our tent!  I was thinking, "Here we go."  I nudged Shanna awake and quietly told her we had a visitor.  I sat up in the tent and yelled “HEY, HEY!” and clapped my hands.  Suddenly, there was a burst of gravel flying, then splashing sounds as something large left our island.  We then heard thumping sounds as it ran across the hard ground on the other side. I got up and went out of the tent with my revolver drawn while Shanna located the bear spray.  Peace had returned to the night and I didn’t hear anything else. Shanna noticed that as soon as I walked more than 10 feet from the tent she couldn't hear my steps anymore, so our visitor had been very close.  Once back inside the tent, I realized how dry my mouth was; the whole event had been pretty scary. Shanna was actually back asleep before I was.  I woke several more times during the night. 

We were underway around 9:30 AM and started our long journey across the lake.  Skilak Lake is known for developing some pretty large waves in the afternoons, so a morning start was necessary.  Shanna immediately began spotting black bears along the south shore of Skilak Lake. We took lots of bear video.  3 ½ hours after leaving our camp and the mountains behind, we re-entered the Kenai River and the flat country.   We started trout fishing upon entering the Kenai in the area we now know as "The Scallops;" almost immediately I had a small trout on.  We caught several more trout and some dolly varden.  We decided to set up camp next to a very productive looking red salmon riverbank. The water was so clear you could just see them streaming past, 100's of reds. On shore, there were trails everywhere (bear trails).  I even had to kick some bear scat off the bank into the river to clean up the camp.  EVERY possible campsite we checked out had bear sign.  I picked up a VERY bright chrome sockeye for dinner that still had some sea lice on it. We continued to fish the bank for quite some time with poor results, despite seeing so many fish.  To top it off, I fell down and soaked the inside of my waders.

August 9, 2005 - Day 3

Of course our last night on the river couldn't be bear free.  Around midnight we heard a boat pull up down the river bank about 100 yds away to fish for reds in the dark. They were close enough we could hear them talking.  Soon I heard the unmistakable huffing sound of a bear!  One guy said to the other, “did you see him?“, “did you see the bear?”   I heard the sound of them throwing their anchor in the boat and motoring away immediately after.  Shanna then spent a while staring out the door of the tent after that.  The night was peaceful after that until..........We awoke to the sounds of drift boats landing in our camp. A drift boat pulled up on either side of our raft and disgorged there passengers into our camp to pee.  I couldn’t believe it, they were walking 10 ft from our tent as we looked out the door way at them. The guides claimed there wasn’t another place to let them out.  Later, when we continued down river  we found this to be bullshit. It was really incredible.

Later in the day we saw a park ranger boat coming straight at us. He asked for our registration. It soon became apparent we didn’t have the proper registration for a raft with a “motor” mounted on the back. He took my fishing and drivers license and had us meet him down the river where he wrote out a ticket that he said would turn to a warning if I properly registered the raft within 5 days.  We don't use the outboard on the raft much and hadn't even thought about needing a full motorized boat  registration and AK numbers down the side of the raft. 

Our next challenge was the Naptown Rapids, these rapids are category II-III white water.  We had lot's of fun as we hooted and hollered our way thru the rapids with people cheering us on from the river bank.  The last day was a lot of miles, unfortunately we had to run the outboard quite a bit to make our appointed meeting time.   Loren and his wife Glenda picked us up precisely on time at the Kenai City dock.