Saturday, July 9, 2016

Soldotna, AK - Dipnetting

Interesting day today: we saw dipnetting, old Russian villages and how they use tractors to launch and retrieve boats on a beach. Lots of interesting things here in this area and we’re anxious to get going.

We’re not in Iowa any more. In Iowa we catch northern pike with a hook, in Alaska they catch salmon with a dip net. It’s a phenomenon - when the red salmon arrive in Cook Inlet and begin to head upstream to spawn, Alaskans head downstream to catch them. There are so many salmon that there is an open season for dipnetting. We had heard that there was dipnetting down a long road on the beach but when we got there all we saw was one lone truck with several dip nets, 2 coolers, a fold-up lawn chair and some other paraphernalia in back. Nothing else but driftwood on the beach.
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Well, we expected to see hundreds, maybe thousands out here. Then we talked to some guys working on a highway engineering project who told us that the season started tomorrow. They were out here in force because they wanted to finish their project today and get out of the way before the hordes arrived tomorrow. ‘It will be chaos here tomorrow.’

We figure that the lone truck was someone who wanted to get ahead of the game and have his parking spot ready. Oh, well, we’re come back tomorrow and we drove on down the road for several miles when we saw a sign for a wildlife overlook, took it and looked over the bluff to see:
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What in the world? What is going on down there? Let’s go look. And here’s what we found: hundreds of people dip netting. RV’s, tents, sleeping bags on the sand - all interesting in one thing: netting their salmon.
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How cool. We got out of the car to wander among all the people here. The first people we met were sitting on the side of the road. Sam was actually cooking veggies over a propane stove while his wife, his grandson and a friend were just sitting around waiting. He told us that his grandson had caught a fish earlier in the day and was going out later. Only residents of Alaska can dip net but there are limits on how many you can get. The head of the household can get 25 while the other members can get 10 each.
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Lots of equipment is required: a long-handled dipnet with an opening up to 5’ in diameter, a cooler for those you catch, a knife to lop of the head, full waders with booties, a baseball hat - because life isn’t worth living without a baseball hat and a big smile.
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We noticed lots of ATV’s rolling around. This one was pretty special. ATV’s are so handy in many of the more remote areas of Alaska since they can go where no car or truck can.

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This was a free-for-all, ATV’s zipping everywhere, cars and RV’s driving in to find a parking place, tents everywhere, even on the beach grass which is supposedly roped off, several vendors with generators running, port-a-potties and people everywhere. This is fishing on the Kasiloff River: the salmon run isn’t as big and the fish are usually smaller than on the Kenai further north but netting here is freer, cheaper, less regulated, open all night, open earlier in the season and there are fewer people so it is pretty popular here. The crowds number in the in the hundreds, not the thousands but they are eager and having a good time.
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‘It's free. I don't like to pay for Kenai, and I don't like that it's regulated by hours,’ we heard a guy from Anchorage say. ‘The tides sometimes don't even work with the hours. And you have to jump swells (from more boat traffic on the Kenai).’

He likes to fish the outgoing tide, while his fiance’ was taking a shift on the incoming tide.
‘Two hours before, two hours after — incoming and outgoing. It just depends on what's your preference,’ he said. ‘If you can do it all, then do it all, and stand there for four hours. If you can get 10 a tide, you're normally doing good. That's two hours, normally.’

‘If you get 10 fish, you can't beat that. It's free food, you know.’

Here’s how to hold the net since, when a salmon gets into your net, you’ve got to turn it and swoop it around in the water to make sure the salmon stays in it while you walk back to the shore. The net is long and big so holding it this way for hours at a time is the way to go.

And, then there’s the cleaning. Yecch. Note the gulls waiting patiently for a bite.
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It’s not easy, standing in cold water for hours, handling a large unwieldly dip net, jumping the wakes, and, then, when you feel a salmon hitting your net, twisting and raising the net so the salmon can’t get away and then dragging it back to shore only to have to cut the head off and put it into your cooler. Then, it’s back out for the next few hours. But, it's fun and the thrill of feeling the salmon hitting your net can't be beat.
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When the fishing is hot, it’s a wave, you catch, twist, raise and run back to shore, then the next person, then the next, etc. and then you all run back out for the next wave.
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Fun, fun, fun. And, it’s free food.

On our way out we saw an old cemetery off in the woods and went to check it out. You can see two of the graves in back of this sign.
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They are slowly but surely re-doing the cemetery plots and have only this one left.
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