June 13: Salmon dinner (and lots more)!

It's really too bad that when we do the most, I can write the least. Rohan arrived at 7 am on Wednesday and he got the same introduction as everyone else: find some waders and boots to wear; we have anchors to find and if necessary, install. Despite a rough few days of travel and adjusting to time zone differences, he stayed with us. (By the way, Alok and Sabita - Rohan said to say he's alive.)

June 12: At the end of every season, part of closing up is to remove all the anchor lines and buoys. In the spring, we hope to find and reuse the old anchors, but they usually poke up out of the ground just a few inches. Sometimes they are there. Sometimes they are buried under new mud, and sometimes, the ice that comes in in the winter pulls them out and carries them away. (The strangest find so far was an inside anchor for one of the outside sites that was almost all the way pulled out and had to be re-set. I've never seen an anchor before partially removed by ice.) This year, we had to replace 4 out of 8. The hardest part of resetting anchors is figuring out where they go, which is done by measuring from one of last year's anchors - harder to do, the more missing anchors we have. It is important to get the anchors within a few feet of square so the net fishes right and we don't crowd our neighbors. That means a lot of pacing between whatever anchors we can find, and then walking around in circles. And for a little extra pressure, the low tides during the day have been "hold up" tides, so they don't go out very far, leaving us less time to do low tide work. But everyone worked really hard and competently... and we got all the outside anchors down and most of the buoys out. Then we continued the job of unpacking the season's supplies and trying to find places and mattresses for everyone to sleep. (What happened to the mattresses in the bunkhouse??)

Once again, we have a terrific crew. They are all really hard working and all want to make a contribution. Even when we're all beat, Trevor makes a point of asking if there is anything else he can do to help. And he runs through the mud!! I feel like every crew needs someone who thinks to run though the mud, so I'm trying to figure out a way to keep him for our crew, instead of letting some drift captain snap him up. I am so glad to have Jeff here. For these first few busy days, he is the only other experienced crew person here, so it is great to be able to ask him to show Rohan and Luka... whatever they need to learn to do.

June 13: The weather remains hot. About 70 degrees, with a breeze. We couldn't ask for much better weather for us humans, but I worry about the effect of all this heat and lack of rain on the season. My water barrel, which depends on rainfall is running low. The tundra is dry and the lake we pump our wash-down water from is low. The water in the bay is warm. Yikes.

We started the day waiting for the tide to go out so we could place the last anchor and buoy, and set the net for the first tide of fishing. While waiting, we continued to work on the cabin. The shelves that hold most of the season's shelf-stable groceries were made of metal and... fiberboard. Argh! In this moist environment, with a lot of weight, those just sag. So Luka used the De Walt cordless skill saw and the scrap plywood I brought up earlier in the season to create new shelves. It feels so great to be able to stack canned goods without them toppling to the middle.

At the same time, Rohan started building a new walkway between the cookhouse (formerly the crew cabin) and the bunkhouse. As soon as the water was off the buoys, we went out to do a lot of pacing to find the location for the outside anchor for the inside site. The mud is wonderfully firm this year. That anchor is usually pure misery to put down, because the mud just gets deeper and deeper with each revolution, but this year, the mud didn't even cover our feet. Yay. (Should we be worried?)

Then we used the ranger to set the net, letting the net drop out of the back as we drive the ranger along. Luka and Rohan learned some of the knots we use, and we were ready.

Next stop, town - to get more supplies, to find nets, to check mail, to get gas (more than $6 per gallon). And then the trucks went in two directions: red truck to the beach to tend the net and white truck to King Salmon to collect Roger!! Roger arrived!! And we rushed down the beach to be sure we were there in time to help pull in the net. At this time of the season, fishing is allowed from 9 am Monday to 9 am Friday. But the tide would be just about high at 9 am on Friday so, especially without a skiff in the water yet, it is best to pull the net the tide before. But Jeff joined fishing after we were fully skiff setnetters and he doesn't have much experience with the old-fashioned ways. I happen to know that we really don't want to end up with a net in the mud that we have to then pull in.

We arrived to find Luka and Rohan, shirtless and in waders, going through the net in our little dingy (the leak is slow). The net had 10 fish so far, but seals had gotten to six of them. Here are Rohan and Luka with the remaining four, standing in front of the dingy they had actually fished from. Our regular skiffs are bigger. And they don't leak at all.









Between this pass through the net and the next one, we had fish filleting clinic. Luka went first - here he is, having made the first cut.

The trickier part of filleting a fish is in separating the meat from the bones. Luka did a great job, even removing part of the belly bones in the same step as separating out the backbone. If he can keep doing that, he could have a future as a processor.

This time of the season we have many eagles and sometimes, they'll swoop down to get the parts we toss to the beach. The eagles were a little too wary to come close enough to get the actual fish, but Roger, the tide's photographer, did get many photos of them trying to find a safe way to snatch the delicious entrails. this photo shows Jeff and Trevor near the eagle bait, apparently not afraid of losing precious body parts to the eagle talons.

I promised Rohan more than a year ago that I'd teach him how to clean a fish. As we were working on this one, my main thought was how glad I was to be keeping my promise now. His first efforts was much better than most and certainly better than some of mine.

By the time clinic was over, it was time to go through the net for the final time. This photo shows us all in action. Trevor, closest to the buoy, has found a fish, Jeff and Rohan are checking the net as they work their way toward Trevor and Luka is in the foreground, wrestling with one that was particularly tangled. I am just holding the dingy - the same one that Luka and Rohan worked from at the beginning of the tide. Now it will collect the fish that hit on the ebb, and after we work our way the whole 300' to the end of the net, we'll untie it and pile it into the dingy a handful at a time. I am trying to remain calm but I know that the tide is going out and we may run out of water before we get the whole thing in. Not the end of the world - just an extra several hours work and a mess.

This is Rohan and Luka, learning how to untangle a fish. It took me many years to realize the great teaching advantage of fishing on foot: the person picking the particularly difficult fish can be left alone with it with the time to understand it, while everyone else can continue to pick the rest of the net. The idea of going though a net is to get through it as quickly as possible and get it back in the water fishing. Or, if it's time to pull the net, to get it out of the water before it goes dry. When we're fishing from the skiff, we can't leave anyone behind to work on a particularly difficult fish, but the idea is still to get through the net as quickly as possible. In my boat, when my hands are empty and we have a lot of fish, the difficult fish are sent back to me making it very difficult for new crew to learn how to untangle the tricky ones. The only answer I can find for this problem is to try to go through the nets on foot as much as possible in the early part of the season. (Another solution might be more patience on my part, but so far, I've ruled that out as a solution. Maybe this year.) I think we had a total of about 8 more fish. We filleted them all.

This critter - it reminds me of what came out of the ears of people in Wrath of Khan - was found in the bottom of the dingy after we loaded the net into the truck. Any idea what it is?

All that done, Luka grilled two of the salmon while Rohan cooked some pasta (with butter and lemon pasta) and I salted the rest of the salmon with the plan of smoking some (in the as yet untried propane Bradley smoker) and pickling the rest. Then we got to take a walk on the beach to enjoy the sunset. This is Pederson Point, a fish processor located about a mile from our cabins.

The last section of today's post, before I head into town to meet the crew (who went in early, not wanting to miss mug-up at AGS) is some background for anyone interested who may not understand setnetting.

Background: We have four fishing permits and so we fish four sites, right in front of the cabin. Setnetting is a way of fishing with gillnets where both ends are anchored - we fish the same sites every season (pretty much). So I think of us as the farmers of the fishing world. There are many more drift gillnetters (known as "drifters"), and I think of them as the hunters of the fishing world. Their way of fishing is what most people think of when they think of gillnetting. The big advantage of being a drifter is that they can go to where the fish are. If it's a slow year for the Naknek/Kvichak (our river systems), they can decide to fish in Egegik. If they are fishing here and the beach is too warm, they can go hunting in deeper water. The big disadvantage of being a drifter is the stress of trying to figure out where the fish are. For us, we fish in our little location, for better or for worse. So the best thing for us to do is to do that the very best we can.

When we first started fishing in 1959, the nets were lined up on the shore of the Naknek beach. I was told two things about how our family originally got those sites. One was that they were of so little value, no one wanted them (they aren't especially productive and they are especially hard to fish because of all the mud) and that Gunnar Bergren gave them to my mom. Of all those things, what I know is that they are very muddy and some sites require much less work to get as much fish. No complaints here.

Each site gets a shackle of gear. In Bristol Bay, that is 300' (or 50 fathom) of net, 12' deep. A 1/2" line threaded through corks is tied to one side of the net (that's the corkline side) and a heavier line is tied to the other side (the leadline side). In gillnet lingo, that is the process of hanging a net. The twine that is used for that job is hanging twine. Constructed like this, when the nets go into the water, the leadline sinks while the corkline floats and the net hanging between them creates a curtain that the fish swim into and become entangled in.

Setnets must be fished "substantially perpendicular" to the beach, no closer together than 300'. Both ends are secured by an anchor - we use screw anchors. They are metal rods about 5.5' or 6' high with an eye at the top and a screw blade at the bottom. To set an anchor, we put the blade end to the mud and a turning bar through the eye. One person takes each end of the turning bar and we walk in a circle, screwing it into the mud. Then we attach a 50' anchor line to the anchor, and a buoy to the other end of the anchor line. Then, when we are allowed to fish, we can put a net between them. When the water comes in, viola! We are setnetting.

Here is an illustration of what it looks like when our nets are set.

The green part at the bottom of the illustration is the tundra, 30' above the beach (the pink strip). The cabins look west (hence, the sunset photos). The blue part is mud, covered by water when the tide comes in. Notice the two rows of setnets, one closer to the beach, one farther out. As far as I know this is the only place in Alaska that allows the double stacking of setnet sites. In 1969, my mom and Jay Hammond (at that time, future popular governor of the State of Alaska) each had the same brainstorm: the rules said that setnet sites could be no less than 300' apart. They reasoned that 300' is not just a lateral measurement - the 300' rule could also apply seaward. So Mom directed us to set two more sites 300' "outside" our "inside" sites and with that, the concept of inside and outside sites was born. Immediately efforts ensued to stop that practice because that takes away from where drifters are able to fish. So it is allowed only on this beach and we can go out only two sites, to a max of 1200'.

Before we started the outside sites, our family's sites were the white one on the inside marked "us" plus the site to the north it, now fished by the McClains. In 1969, Mom, my sister (Debby) who would turn 16 in July, and I (about to turn 14) marched 300' seaward and put down two more sites of screw anchors, anchor lines and buoys, and, when the time came, nets. We weren't mechanized in those days. We had only a pick up truck that could not go into the mud, and little 6' dingies. So we packed the nets in and out through the mud on our backs, and the fish on our fingers, unless we had a lot and then we towed out a dingy and a line, and used the truck to tow it in. And then hauled it out again. It's not as easy as it sounds - it built our shoulders, our calves, and our determination.

We did that for 10 years until 1979 when we discovered rangers, treaded vehicles that could go out into the mud. That completely changed our fishing lives. Then, in 1982, the year David was born, we started to use a skiff. It took us a while to learn how to fully use it. Now we are out on the nets for most of the tide. We set the nets out of the skiffs on the incoming tide starting at the outside buoy. Our opening time is usually when the water is low enough that we can set the nets on foot. In any case, we attach the net to the outside buoy and if it's shallow enough, we push the skiff toward the inside buoy, allowing the net to play out as we go. (If the water isn't that shallow, then we have the adventure of setting from a running skiff and it seems that that always involves nighttime, a storm, and either an anchor line or web (or both!) caught in the prop. We always hope not to have a deep water set.) After setting the nets, we usually run through them immediately to straighten out any problems with the set.

To go through a setnet, the skipper pilots the skiff up to the corkline so the crew can reach over the bow, grab the corkline and pull it up over the bow. We then gather up the leadline and pull it over the bow. Then we bring the whole net toward the stern and get it up on the roller. A lot of grunting is usually involved in this operation. We'll start up the roller to help us move the boat along under the net. We'll remove any fish that are in it and place them in the brailers (the bags that hold the fish). We continue that until we get to the end, and then we go to the next net and do the same thing. If there are a few fish, we'll stay out and to keep the nets clear and if the buyer is there to receive the fish, deliver them soon after. And of course, we are on the nets during the ebb. If we are required to pull our nets in at the end of the tide, we'll fish them as long as we reasonably can and then quickly pull them into the skiff, ready for the next set.

It's been about 20 years since we've had a new way of fishing. Maybe Roy has come up with our next leap in technology. The skiff we call the Bathtub has a very flat bottom, great for pushing through the mud. For the past several years, we have used the ranger to tow the Bathtub, full of fish, from the outside sites to the beach for delivery. Roy's idea is to turn it into a hovercraft. We already use a powerpack to run the hydraulics that power the roller. We could add an air compressor that would send air through channels we could weld into the deck of the Bathtub, with holes poked through the hull under the channels. When the air is sent through the channels, it should lift the boat, even with a lot of fish, and we could just push it in by hand. Oh my...