30 Hour Opener

This will have to be a quick post, since we are heading out in 15 minutes to pull our nets by midnight, so excuse the lack of flow from sentence to sentence.

We haven't had a 24 hour opener (where fish and game allow us to leave our nets in the whole time) yet, which has been very surprising, especially since it is so late in the season already. We just found out that we will be fishing every tide for 30 hours starting at 1 pm tomorrow. It seems that this is a sign that our season is wrapping up, as the past few days we have seen a lot fewer fish, and fish and game is trying to give us a last minute chance to finish our season with some good time in the water.

Yesterday, David and I went to Seward, 2 and a half hours away, with Hannah and Matt to deliver fish to one of our buyers, go hiking, and go out to eat.

I updated my picasa album. See link in post below.

gotta run. the tide waits for nobody.

Fish and Logs

Hello all. Sorry for the lack of updates lately. We have gotten into the groove of things and are working hard and often. We do have breaks and even an occasional day off, but during the down times we try to rest as much as possible...sort of. Often even our breaks and days off are full of adventure and "work." Tuesday, for example, we went razor clamming in Ninilchik in the morning and I went dip-netting at the mouth of the Kasilof River with Aaron and Anna in the evening. I got to drive the boat since Aaron was the only one of us who was an Alaskan resident and therefore the only one who is allowed to hold the net. We caught around 15 reds (sockeye) so it was a successful trip. We saw several seals. One had a fish in it's mouth, another we got so close to we could see the whites of his eyes.

The fish came in pretty strong this past Monday, when we got more fish in the morning pick than we had on any other full day of fishing this season...almost 3,000 lbs in the first pick alone. Yesterday we didn't catch a lot of fish, and the ones we caught were mostly smashed by debris. A storm had occurred somewhere down the inlet, and that, in conjunction with a twenty something foot tide (vertical feet between high and low) made for a difficult pick and pull yesterday. ("pick" referring to picking fish, and in this case trees, logs, branches, and stumps, out of the nets, and "pull" referring to pulling the nets out of the water and stacking them into tarps in the boat). David and I were in a boat with Aaron and we spent the whole time, about 2 hours, on picking and pulling one net. The only thing that allowed the other two boats to pick up our slack was that the raging current and debris had flagged (broken the net at one end and therefore caused it to wave like a flag in the current) several of our nets. It was not a pleasant evening. We went out this morning to set nets, but we could see so many logs still floating around that Mike decided not to set the nets. Even if we had set and had caught fish, the damage that the logs would have done to the nets (15 of them at $1,500 each) would not be worth it.

ps - i added some photos to my picasa photo album. the new ones are from the shooting competition we had on the 4th of July, dip netting, and one is of a 61 lb King Salmon (3 lbs smaller than the one i caught on a hook and line) next to the family's granddaughter, Elise.

Day Off

We had the day off today after four straight days of fishing. We fished from 7am to 7pm on Monday, 5am to 7pm on Tuesday, 5am to 8pm on Wednesday, and 7am to 7pm on Thursday. It was rough not only because we weren't getting a ton of sleep but also because there were way less fish than the authorities expected there to be, so we weren't catching a lot. We had a 36 hour closure from last night at 7pm until tomorrow morning at 7am, when we just heard we'll be fishing again. We expect the next two weeks or so to be pretty busy, with a few 24 hour fishing days probable, so I think Jackson and I will be heading back to the cabin soon for some preemptive sleep.

Salmon, Salmon, and More Salmon

On Monday fishing was open from 7am to 7pm, so we got up at 5am to put nets in the water. 5am came really early considering we got to bed around 2am the night before. The water was much smoother than it was on Sunday, which was nice. There was no fishing on Tuesday, which meant the crew had the day off. Jackson and I were up at 4:30 to meet a guide on the Kenai River. The guide trip was great, and Jackson caught a 64 lb, 47 inch King Salmon with a 33 inch girth. Unfortunately King from 46 to 55 inches in length must be released, so we couldn't keep it. There are, however, pictures on Jackson's Picasa site. Enjoy!

A Humbling Experience - Explained

Yeah, sorry guys. I know that was a little confusing. I got cut short and had to go and didn't get a chance to proofread or anything. The ocean was really rough - mainly that was the humbling experience, but also just fishing for the first day and not really knowing what to do or how things work. On top of all that, everything seemed to go wrong, and finally, after I volunteered to go out in the boat and find the missing net, we ran out of gas over a mile offshore and it was over an hour before somebody came to tow us back in. We finally all ate dinner at midnight, went to bed at 1:30, and had to be up and at the house by 5:30am this morning to fish again. Thank goodness, David and I more or less have the day off tomorrow, however we are getting up by 4:30 to go on a free guided King Salmon trip down the Kenai River with a guy that used to teach at the same school as Mike. Hopefully we will have some pictures of big fish up on the blog in the next couple of days.

A Humbling Experience

Today was our first day of real fishing. The Fish and Game opened us up for fishing this morning at 11am. We got out on the beach at 10 to set up the beach nets and get the boats in the water. There were three boats and we set twelve 210 feet long nets. As soon as we had finished setting them, we immediately went to the first nets that had been set and started picking. I was in Elliot's boat. The first net we picked only had 6 fish. The second, however, had probably around 20, and each one after had more. We stopped fishing around 2:00, came back to the house, and pitched fish into big totes full of ice water that were sitting on the scales to weigh the fish. We had 793 lbs of fish and altogether that was about 250 fish. All were sockeyes, aka red salmon, except one king salmon that weighed 11 lbs. We had a wonderful lunch of salmon salad sandwiches, grilled cheese, and tomato soup. It was incredible after the cold, wet, rainy morning on the water. k gotta run. we about to go back out at 6pm to do it all again. we have to have the nets out of the water by 11pm tonight and then we fish again tomorrow morning when they open us up at 7am.

nets, nets, and more nets

We've spent the last few days mending old nets and hanging new nets, and we'll be spending the next few days doing the exact same thing. Nothing really exciting to report. We processed (fancy word for gutted, beheaded, filleted, and froze) the fish we caught yesterday today, so that was a new experience, at least for me. Next Tuesday we are going on a guided fishing trip on the Kenai River to try and finally catch a King. Mike knows a guide up here and he hooked us up. We're really excited about it. That's about it.

P.S.
Happy Birthday Catherine!