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July 04, 2007
Where are the Fish?
Perhaps easiest way to judge a fishing season is by the pounds of sockeye we net and sell. Our worst year on record, the summer of 2003, we caught 40,000 pounds. The next summer represented our best total catch, at 215,000 pounds. The fish are fickle beasts and no amount of study or speculation has ever created a reliable system for predicting their numbers. When we have a bad year, the theories are particularly thick: El Nino is often to blame, as are open sea Chinese fishermen with their illegal mile-long nets. My favorite explanation is that clever beluga whales wait open-mouthed where our river meets the bay, eating our fish before we have a chance to catch them.
This year, so far, has the makings of a new historical low. To date we have caught just more than 5,000 pounds. The majority of our openings have yielded between 9 and 20 fish—which is both economically disappointing and fairly demoralizing. But we persevere. Just now I was driving up the beach on the 4-wheeler, up to the fishery where I can connect to the internet, and ran into some friends who fish on a boat. They claimed to have seen "jumpers" in the water this morning, that is, salmon literally leaping out of the water, hurling their bodies through space, and landing again with a splash. Jumpers are a surefire indication of good fishing ahead. Again, theories abound as to what makes the salmon jump. Some say it is that the water is so full that the fish jump thinking that there is less resistance in the air than in the crowded water, others say that only females jump and that they jump to shake their egg sacs loose in preparation for spawning, and others (Robbi, most notably) claim that the fish are just "excited to be going home and starting their families" or maybe because it's the 4th of July (for whatever reason, July 4th is typically the highest volume day in terms of catch from summer to summer). Robbi's theory does not take into account the fact that the fresh water in which the fish spawn is toxic to their saltwater systems and that they rot to death shortly after laying their eggs. The circle of life is completed when the hatching fry (young salmon) consume the decaying bodies of their elders for sustenance as they grow.
We are heading down to the beach this afternoon for a 1:00pm opening and will be permitted to fish for the next ten hours. Considering the jumpers and the fact that it is July 3, we could find ourselves "picking" fish for the entire opening. ("Picking" is the term for removing the fish from the net; our nets are "gill nets", made up of vertically oriented diamonds of net that snare fish of the proper size by the gills. The fish swim into the net, their gills are snagged, and they are not able to escape by swimming backward. The gauge of our net is sized to catch sockeye and not king salmon, which are much larger. Nevertheless, master fisherman that I am, I managed to catch a king a few days ago.
Here it is,
You know what they say about a guy who catches a big king.
Posted by bogenamp at July 4, 2007 09:51 PM