Journey to Salmon-land

Fish fever was in the air this week and I was determined to get a little piece of it. In the summer here in Alaska thousands of salmon come in from the ocean and run up the rivers in hopes of finding their place of birth to lay their eggs. At the same time thousands of people head to the ocean and rivers determined to stop those same salmon and put them instead in their freezers and frying pans. As a current Alaskan, I was called to the fight. A few guys from the elders quorum at church were joining together last week down in Chitina, the chosen battleground, to see what they could slay. (see www.acme.com/mapper and search Chitina, AK)

I better add in now, that what they do in Chitina is called dip-netting, and it is hardly fishing, but more like fish-harvesting. But if the idea is to get as many red and king salmon as you can, then why not? I’ll explain in a minute…

The state of Alaska is really big, and I didn’t get off work on Friday, and I wanted to go flying anyway, so Jeremy and I took his plane out and I got some good cross-country flying time. It’s about a 3 hour flight, with one stop, so we got to Chitina around 10:30-11:00pm. But it wasn’t dark yet so we found our buddies camping spot and realized some folks were still out on the river. Rodney and his boat came in with some fish, and I went out again with him to pick up some others who were left on the banks a couple miles down the river. It was an old flat-bottom boat with an outboard motor and made me feel Alaskan riding fast down the Copper River at 1am!

People were tired and fished out by that time and ready to head home the next morning, so Jeremy and I didn’t fish much. Did I mention I left my fishing license in my truck at the airport in Fairbanks? But let’s not dwell on that.

Let me wind up with an explanation of dip-netting. The best way to do it is to take a boat out on the river and troll with your nets as you float down. You use a pole with a net on the end, not unlike the nets we use to fish leaves out of the pool with in California. As you float down, you wait until something jumps into your net, then you just yank it up on board and—blamo! You caught yourself a salmon.

People also used these very interesting contraptions called fish wheels. It is a water wheel with big nets powered around by the flow of the water that automatically scoop fish out of the water for you. I’ve included some pictures, pretty amazing. You just sit on the beach and wait for your bin to fill up with salmon.

After 3 days of fishing, Rodney (with the boat) had around 30-40 Salmon, weighing between 8 and 50 lbs a piece. Kings are the biggest and you are only allowed to catch five of those.

Although I didn’t fish myself, I had a great time flying and riding around on a 4-wheeler, and seeing the beautiful sights. Luckily no bears came to take our fish. We flew back on Saturday afternoon, and I helped clean some of the fish and by so doing got to take a big one home---so all is not lost, and I lived to slay fish another day.