This weekend on the upper Kenai, one angler caught something even rarer than a king salmon.
“She snagged something, and at first we thought it was a trout, ’cause of the way it was wiggling in the water, and it wasn’t pulling as hard as a salmon,” said David Finochio, of Anchorage. “At first I thought maybe she had my line or something. I saw her just reel this black object out of the water, and it turned out it was an iPhone.”
Finocchio was fishing on the Kenai River with his mom, who was visiting from the East Coast. Just as Finocchio was reeling in a salmon, his mom pulled up the cellphone, clad in a high-tech case.
“The tip of her hook had just barely snagged the lip of the case. And so she reeled it up, and we were like, “Wow, what are the chances of that? That’s amazing. It’s probably toast,” he said.
Finocchio brought the phone home to Anchorage, plugged it in, and miraculously, it came back to life. The home screen pictured a couple skiing at Alyeska Resort, so he knew it had to belong to a local.
He posted on Facebook, and quickly reconnected with the owner. It turned out the phone had been at the bottom of the river for four days.
Finocchio said everything about the process feels serendipitous.
“I bet if there was a phone at the bottom of the river, and you could see it, you’d have a really hard time hooking it, even if you were trying,” he said. “So the fact that she just got it, alone, that was enough for us. To think that we’d be able to return it to its owners, was definitely beyond what we thought would be possible that day.”
He said while it was a successful salmon fishing day for him, his mom ultimately just caught the phone.
The Russian River and upper Kenai River opened to sportfisherman a month early, and the bag limit increased last weekend, bringing an influx of anglers. The river reached its escapement goal with two weeks left in the early run.
