When you start talking about fishing in Alaska with Dave Lisi, you can hear the sheer enthusiasm in his voice.

That Lisi, owner of Cooper Landing Fishing Guide with his partner Jackie Bowman, loves to fish is a given. The business, located on the Kenai River in Cooper Landing, allows him to enjoy his passion while sharing it with visitors.

But what he really likes to do is share the magnificent feeling of catching a salmon with visitors to Alaska who may never have been closer to one than the dead-eyed frozen fare at their local fish market.

The experience for his guests is key for Lisi when he’s taking them out to nab The Big One.

"One thing I recognize is that a lot of people come to Alaska, and it may be their first time or their last time or their only time, so we want to make it a spectacular experience,” he said. "We’re really passionate about that. We want this to be on their itinerary. We want this to be the highlight of their visit.”

The guides at Cooper Landing are so passionate, in fact, that they offer a money-back guarantee that you’ll have a great time, and maybe, just maybe, you can coax one of the underwater residents onto your hook. But more on that later.

He’s willing to go out of his way to share his infectious energy. It’s all in the name of making people happy while they’re fishing. He knows the fish might not be biting in a certain place, but he still manages to make the experience more fun than, well, a barrel of salmon.

"There are a lot of things we can’t control, but we can control our attitudes to make it a great day for them,” he said. "I would say I’m really laid back, but at the same time, I can adjust to a sense of what people are thinking. We confer before the trip to get a feel for their sense of the trip and find out if they’re really hardcore and want to get their limit of salmon.

"That ups the ante as you get a little more intense. Where are the fish biting? You can get a feeling minute-by-minute about how things are going and what our next pivot should be. Some people will sit in the cold and rain all day and go and go. But we want it to become part of people’s itinerary.”

Dave – it really doesn’t sound right to call him just Lisi; he’s that kind of approachable guy – has a long career in fishing.

In fact, fishing set in early in his life as a passion.

"When you say, ‘when did you start fishing?’ I have an old Polaroid photo of me in diapers holding up the sunfish I caught,” Dave said. "I was so proud of myself. I have always loved the water and enjoyed fishing. I don’t know that I ever skipped school to go fishing, but it seems I was fishing more than I was in school.”

That was in his hometown of Corning, New York, where there was plenty of water for angling. Like many others who migrated to The Last Frontier, his move to Alaska was not in his life plans.

A former lacrosse coach, Dave was settled into his life in St. Louis when he went to a wedding where a family of Alaskans was present.

"One of the brothers-in-law was a fisherman at Cooper Landing, and we got to chatting,” he said. "He said, ‘I’m a guide in Alaska. You should come up sometime, whenever. Do you want to come to Alaska and hang out?’ I was in a transition in my life and didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself.”

So, it was off to Alaska. He sold "a bunch of stuff,” headed off to Alaska, bought a boat, and started his own business. That was in 2014. He and Bowman – herself an Alaska transplant from Mosinee, Wisconsin – took over Cooper Landing in 2017.

"I never thought I’d be a fishing guide, but I kind of stumbled on it as a career,” he said. "It was kind of random.”

That quirk of fate has brought Dave to a place where he can fish and show others the joy of pulling in a big salmon.

Of course, patience is crucial to fishing, and naturally, Dave has fish tales, including one where a guest got a bite, but the fish was so strong it pulled the fishing rod out of his hands.

But Dave was philosophical. There goes a rod, he figured.

"We saw it go downriver,” he said. "But I decided to go downstream. The water is quite blue, and you can see a lot. It’s quite beautiful. But I saw a yellow rope under the boat. The guest grabbed the fly line and ended up pulling in the rod and the fish. The rod had no damage at all.”

Dave’s job is unpredictable, and patience really is required. But that diligence can pay off.

"You can change flies and lures, and it can completely change the day,” he said. "It can lead to things that completely change the day for better or worse. There are so many variables. It’s not like you show up, and something else is happening every five minutes.”

OK, so has anyone ever taken him up on his money-back guarantee?

"We took one guy fishing, and his girlfriend just wasn’t all that into it,” he said. "I said, ‘let’s go again. It’s on me.’”

No word on whether the girlfriend liked it the second time, but Dave is always willing to satisfy a fellow angler, whether a newbie or an expert.

"We don’t want to just burn through people,” he said. "We take time to make it a special experience.”