It seems the calendar has little bearing on my life these days, which is a pretty drastic change from much of my formative years, primarily spent staring at a bunch of little numbered squares on an elementary-school wall, waiting for May to hurry up and arrive. Now I routinely miss birthdays and most holidays and I usually get to my taxes about the time I hear someone else complain about needing to file an extension. July is different, however, and not because of fireworks or anything like that, but because I suddenly find myself thinking about second-run sockeye on the middle Kenai.

There are plenty of fish—and fishing excursions—worth setting your watches to, but for me that annual one-week getaway to the peninsula for a haul of 9- to 14-pound, sea-lice carrying chrome screamers takes the top billing. First, despite all the fishing I do, it’s the one time of year my family actively looks to put fillets on ice. Second, it really is a family deal—the river and fish are plenty accessible, of course, and the furious nature of the action during the height of the run ensures lots of teaching opportunities. I’ve seen people—youth and adult—go from utter novice to competency with a fly rod in a single afternoon on the Kenai, and unlike getting your lessons at some casting pond, this comes complete with advanced coursework in handling big, strong fish.

Throughout my other travels in Alaska, I do seem to run into sockeye a lot, especially while sojourning in Southwest, which for the last 4,000 years or so has been home to some of the densest fish concentrations in the world. In fact, two of the most popular reasons for traveling out there—the bears and the trout—can have up to 80% or more of their body weights traced back to the annual sockeye returns. But despite their obvious importance to the tundra landscape and the rainbow fisheries I love in the Bristol Bay region, none of those sockeye strikes me with anything like the force of a single returning Kenai fish.

It’s not that they’re not fun to catch, or even catchable, out west, which was the sockeye mantra among sport anglers for many, many decades. In fact, there was actually debate about whether or not this amazingly energetic fish, capable of leaping ten-foot waterfalls, even deserved to be called a gamefish at all. Fly-fishing for the species in Alaska didn’t begin in earnest until around the early 1950s, and as recently as the 1970s, institutions like the International Game Fish Association still hadn’t recognized the species as a legitimate target for sport anglers. Until then it was believed this most diffident of the Pacific salmon could only be taken in nets or by snagging, a practice the Alaska Department of Fish and Game mercifully ousted from freshwater regulations. Then in 1977 the kokanee salmon, the land-locked version of sockeye, was finally added to the IGFA record books; a year later sea-run sockeye, too, received their just recognition as a sport fish. Some minor and usually poorly informed quibbling might still be found, but for the most part, questions over whether or not the species will take a fly have been amply answered.

But getting back to my calendar-watching, it’s only in late July and only on a certain section of the middle Kenai—barring any major complications brought on by El Niño or La Niña, in-stream predation, ocean mortality or even Pacific Decadal Oscillation—that I start to tie-on Comets, Brassies and the bonefish flies I didn’t lose in the Bahamas. While at sea, sockeye will eat a variety of larval and adult fishes, especially sand lance and luminescent, shrimp-like euphausiids—another tidbit that goes against popular assumption, which typically has the fish down as some kind of sea-going herbivore. Like the other species of Pacific salmon, they stop feeding after entering their natal streams, but in any given day on the water the prepared angler will almost surely have sockeye move to and take a well-presented fly. Other fish will inevitably be lined, and when working through such congregations with sinking lines or weighted flies, it’s impossible to think there won’t be the odd snagged fish as well. Still, by using tippet that’s not better suited for dragging around waterskiers, that’s solved easily enough.

What we’re left with on the better days is nearly non-stop action with one of Alaska’s most determined, robust sport fish. Sore arms and backs follow, and a cooler of fillets comes home.

It’s July.