June 4: Time to notice the wildlife

Beluga in the water, sandhill cranes warbling on the mudflats, eagles perching on the cliff, ravens on the rocks, flounders filling the nets (boo), and a fox at Jeff’s feet. I'm sorry to be disappointing here, but photos of the wildlife will have to come later. I hear that the bears are already out – so far, they are just at the dump. And we definitely don’t have any salmon to attract them yet. Except the smoked salmon I brought up for sustenance that is in the tundra-ator. Many years ago, though, I learned something about bears: they are attracted by brownies. It’s a good thing to be aware of if a person is baking out in the woods.

We tried something new with the inside site. But let me start at the beginning, something I really didn’t have time to do this season. Gill net fishing is where we use a net to catch salmon by their gills – they swim into it and can’t back out of it. We haul them into the boat and disentangle them individually. This is definitely a “high touch” fishery. Other fisheries also use nets, like seiners, but those aren’t meant to entangle individual fish – rather they scoop up schools of fish in a purse and use mechanical means to lift the purse into the boat and drop the whole bag of fish into the holds. Far more efficient. I don’t understand why seining is allowed in some places and not others. It must be that efficiency is not the only criterion in establishing those regulations, and I’m glad for that. If this were a seine fishery, many fewer boats and fewer people would catch the fish - which would be good for those boats and people, but not the rest of the fishing fleet.

Most people who are aware of gill netting think of drift fishing, where the net is set out the stern of the boat and the boat and net drift along in the current, intercepting fish trying to get up the river. When it’s time (maybe the nets are so full they need to be emptied to be reset or the crew has finished their coffee or they are picking up the net and trying elsewhere) they use their hydraulic reel to pull the net back in, picking the fish out as they present themselves dangling out of the net before it goes back onto the reel.

In Bristol Bay, the maximum permitted length of a drift boat is 32’. Most have a pointy bow and square stern, with a cabin in the bow containing a galley and sleeping quarters. There are also some bow pickers with a squared-off bow and a cabin in the stern. These boats set their net off the bow and that is their work platform as well. Harry tells me that configuration is really good for some applications, but that the stern-pickers work better in more contexts.

Drift boats are more or less fancy and more or less cramped. Mostly these boats dedicate as many of those 32’ as possible for holding salmon. Fish and game regulate when we can fish so the economically reasonable thing to do during those hours is to keep the net in the water, fishing. When the fishing is heavy, we all make every effort possible to fish through an entire tide. For the drift boats, this means holding the fish until the period closes and delivering then. Of course, that has to be balanced by safety – if they overload for the conditions, they could lose everything. So fishing boats tend to maximize the fish holds, often at the expense of comfortable living conditions.

Set netting is different. Each set net permit allows us to fish 50 fathom (300’) of net. (A drift permit allows 150 fathom.) Our group fishes four set net permits or 200 fathom. Our nets are anchored. We use screw anchors, 1” diameter rods of steel with an eye on one end and a 8” screw on the other. We put a long bar through the eye and walk around in circles, driving the rod into the ground. Then we attach our buoys to the anchor’s eye via a 50’ cable anchor line. Each site has two anchors, a “beach-ward” (inside) end and a seaward (outside) end, about 300’ apart and 300’ away from our fishing neighbors’ anchors. I think our beach, the north Naknek beach, is the only area in Bristol Bay that allows “double” sites. I am proud to say that this was an invention my mother came up with the same season as Jay Hammond, one of Alaska’s most beloved governors. I’m not sure what Jay’s process was, but I think my mother was trying to figure out how to expand our fishing operation – she was trying to supplement a nurse’s salary to support six kids – but all the sites along the beach were in use. We couldn’t squeeze in another because of the rule that requires them to be 300’ apart. Then it dawned on her that we could go seaward 300’ and set another net outside our original site. And since we had two sites, that would give us four sites.

As the 13 year old who, with my 15 year old sister, had to drag the fish off the mud flats those years, I can tell you I wasn’t quite as excited about the invention as she was, but it was quite an accomplishment, one that regulations were promptly introduced to prevent spreading to other districts and one that we benefit from today, now that we've found better ways to get the fish across those mud flats.

The drift fleet would reasonably object to having set net sites occupy those areas that just the year before were driftable. In 1969, the first year we had “outside” sites, it must have been a terrible surprise and navigation hazard when a boat would be drifting along as they had for years only to suddenly find themselves entangled in a set net.

Now we have one inside and three outside sites. When it’s time to fish, we string the net between the outside end toward the beach to the inside end. In the outside sites, this translates to the 300' from buoy to buoy. The inside site is a little different. Most people fish their inside sites up on the rock, near the mean high water mark. This is the traditional place to fish it and sometimes also the best place as the fish do favor the beach sometimes. But we fish our inside site out as deep as we can, while still maintaining the 300' from our outside neighbor. We believe that since this "gap" is relatively unfished by others, the fishing might be better there, and our nets are in the water for longer.

One more technical thing about inside sites, that will be needed when I explain the new thing we tried. I think all inside sites employ a "running line." This is a 1/2 to 5/8" line that runs from the buoy to an anchor located up on the beach. Ours is about 600' long. We may attach our net anywhere along that running line - we usually attach near the buoy. So from the air you would see a red buoy (with an accompanying white buoy with a black stripe to indicate a set net buoy) about 1200’ from the mean high water mark, a 300’ line of white corks that terminate in another red buoy. Then from 900’ to between 400’ and 600’ from the mean high water mark it would appear clear and until the inside site begins with another red buoy with a white one attached, then another 300’ of white corks terminating at about 300’ from the mean high water mark.

This annotated photo tries to show it from the cliff. Between the inside buoy of the outside site and the outside buoy of the inside site, it could be clear water, or some people run lines between those buoys for additional safety. Hmmm, previewing this photo, I don't think it shows it well at all. So here is a schematic of the same thing - maybe it will help the photo make sense:

We call the area between the outside sites and the inside sites “the quad.” We don’t string additional lines there, so it is an excellent place to anchor boats that we aren’t using and sometimes the tenders – the seiners that collect our fish – will anchor in the quad so they are available to us and out of the way of the drift fleet. I love when that happens.

We use the same sites every year. We have four 300’ by ~400’ “plots” of state land where we set our nets. It is not required, but we pay a lease to the state government to ensure that we have priority for these sites each year. They are on the beach directly below our cabins.

We often struggle with the running line on the inside site. With all our sites, we "tie down" our leadlines. That is, in addition to the anchor line coming from the anchor to the buoy, we have what we call a "v-line," that runs to the leadline. This does two things: 1) it holds the leadline down, even when the current is strong and the nets contain a wall of salmon; and 2) it makes the whole process of going through the nets much harder. We think it's worth it. But when we use a running line we have to manage those v-lines thoughtfully. The tide empties out to the south, pulling the nets in that direction. It comes in from the same direction, pushing the nets to the north. Without a running line, the nets just wave back and forth and it is no problem. With a running line, we often end up with the leadline crossed over the running line which creates the very problem we use the v-lines to try to solve. When the water comes in, it first lifts the corks, and pushes them north, over the running line. If the running line is slow to lift with the tide, and if we have much of a wind, much of the net will have gone over the top of the running line before the running line lifts up enough to force the net to go under it. If the corkline goes over, so does the leadline and if it follows all along the net, the v-lines at the end are crossed over the top of the running line, holding the net up instead of keeping it down. Dang.

So we tried something new - we took a small caribiner and clipped the corkline and running line together at the outside end, about 2 fathoms in. It is an experiment to see if that level of preventing the corkline from pushing over the running line will prevent the cross over that has been interfering with our catch for years. These solutions sometimes take a while to discover. Ahem.

A little more about the mechanics of set netting. This type of gill netting is very different from drifting. Until 1982, we didn’t use skiffs at all; we did it all on foot, following the receding tide in chest waders, trying to move along removing the fish (both flood- and ebb-caught) at the same rate as the tide was falling. If we went too fast, we’d have to wait for the tide; if there were too many fish and the tide got ahead of us, we’d end up picking in the mud and worse, having to haul the fish through the mud instead of floating them in, in our little fiberglass boats. In 1979, 10 years after we started fishing those outside sites, we got our first ranger (the tracked vehicle that can get through the mud without sinking into it – that one was the very same Killer Ranger we use with much caution today) which made a huge difference in our lives. In 1980, we got our second ranger, the Friendly Ranger we use most often today.

In 1982, we started to learn how to use a skiff. At first, we didn’t think about going out and picking the flood fish in the skiff – we just used it to get out to the deeper water sooner. But finally, we realized that if we get on the nets early in the tide and stay on them through the tide, we increase our catch and the quality of the fish we deliver. Though the skiffs can hold between 4000 and 8000 lbs (depending on the skiff and definitely depending on the weather), unless fishing is very heavy and no one is available to take the fish, we deliver 3 or 4 times per tide – maybe more. This does not present a hardship for us as it would for the drift fleet – our nets continue to fish while we deliver. Now, the fish spend little time in the net, and little time in the boat before they are delivered to the slush ice totes in AGS’ trucks. When the weather is hot, this fast delivery is even more important. So we have learned to stay on top of the nets and if the buyer is also on top of it so we have a way to deliver, our fish are the highest quality available. There. Now you know how to set net.