« Pittsburgh | Main | Ghetto Booty »
September 12, 2007
Fishing 101
Robbi ran into an old friend today, someone who grew up in Chestertown but now lives far from here. This friend told Robbi that she enjoyed reading about our Alaskan adventures on the blog, and that she was glad to have a picture of the place to associate with the stories she had heard over the years. People who have known the Behrs for a long time know about the fishing but have never gotten much insight into the details. I was pleased to learn the identity of another of our readers and was also reminded that there are several important stories yet to share about our summer in Alaska, not the least of which is how we go about catching the fish.
There are many tiny details which serve as preface to a discussion of fishing technique, just as there are many fishing techniques that could be described. But in the interest of getting to the point, I'll talk about the kind of fishing I did for most of the summer, leaving many tiny details out and adding others as we go along.
And so then.
To fish, we need a net and a raft.
Here is the net.
It is, in fact, two nets, each 25 fathoms (50 yards) long, clipped together in the middle to form one long net of 50 fathoms (100 yards). The net is in a large plastic tote on the back of a wooden cart that can be towed by the 4-wheelers. When the time comes for fishing, we deposit the cart with the tote with the net near the water.
Here is the raft.
Note that I am pumping up the raft because it is flat. The rafts are always flat. We really like this kind of raft and it is no longer in production. And so we use 15-year-old rafts that are full of holes. And always flat.
Note the nozzle through which I inflate the raft.
Though very helpful for inflating rafts, the nozzles are also a frequent cause of snagging for our nets. And since a snagged net can mean thousands of pounds of pressure suddenly exerted on whatever is snagged, snagged nets can be dangerous. And so we cover the nozzles with plastic, as shown.
Once the nozzles are covered, we "stack" the net into the raft, carefully keeping the cork lines (which keep the top of the net afloat) on one side of the boat and the lead lines (which keep the bottom of the net on the bottom of the river) on the other.
In stacking the net, we pull it directly from the plastic tote into the raft.
The Behr family operation has three fishing sites and so we put out three 100 fathom nets. While Robbi and I are stacking our net, Bob and Seiko are stacking theirs and Maiko and Roji are stacking yet another.
Once the net is in stacked the raft, we stand around looking great in our rain gear.
As I explained in an entry months ago, we are told by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game precisely when we may begin fishing. If we start a minute early, we risk heavy fines. If we start a minute late, we will miss the majority of the fish we might otherwise have caught. Therefore, it is very important that we bring reliable timepieces to the beach.
Seiko has hers:
And Maiko has hers:
Usually we get done stacking long before it's time to fish, and so we are able to pass the time by driving around looking heroic on the 4-wheelers.
Or taking artful pictures of dogs.
About five minutes before the "opening" when we may start fishing, I pull the raft out into the water.
I climb in.
And pull myself along the "running line" out to the buoy which marks the end of our line.
Eventually, I'm about 100 yards away.
Using a carabiner, I clip one end of the stacked net to a ring tied near the buoy. This ensures that one end of the net will remain tightly affixed to the far end of the line when I start to pull the boat in toward the shore.
While I'm out fussing with the net, Robbi stands on the shore waiting for the signal to begin fishing. When she waves her arms, I start pulling myself and the raft and the net along the "running line" as fast as I possibly can. As I pull forward, the net (which is attached to the ring) pulls out of the raft behind me.
It is an exhausting task, kind of like a sprint in a full rubber suit.
Sometimes I fall out at the end.
Once the net has been pulled in to shore, Robbi ties it to the running line so that both ends of the net are secured.
As soon as the net is in the water, the fish start getting caught. We use "gill nets", that is, nets fashioned of many small diamond-shaped openings. The fish swim in headfirst, their gills get snagged. The fish are too big to swim through the net and so they are stuck.
The next stage is "picking" the fish. That is, going along the net in the raft, and pulling the fish out by hand, ideally without breaking the net filaments.
Occasionally we pick near the shore without being in the raft and just keep the raft nearby to use as a giant creel as we pull fish out of the net.
Iggy, being a card-carrying PETA member, was disgusted.
Robbi is a champion picker.
When we have picked the net, we throw the fish from the raft into the plastic tote, but first we put a liner called a brailer into the tote. When the time comes to sell the fish, a crane will lift the brailer out of the tote to weigh and lift it into the buyers' truck.
It seemed odd to me at first, throwing fish in the throes of death. But the volume is so high that there's really no way around it. Sometimes, when my arms get too tired to throw, I use my magical levitating powers to move the fish into the tote.
Robbi makes fun of me when I do this.
When the tote is full, it's time to sell the fish. Usually we sell to guys in a truck with a big crane.
The brailer has four strong loops on the four corners. We attach these to hooks on the crane.
When the loops are secure, the buyer lifts the brailer with the crane arm.
Built into the crane is a scale with a digital readout. Once the brailer of fish is high in the air, one of the buyers takes a read on the scale and writes down the poundage. The wonderful and disgusting thing is that the buyers usually wait for a minute or two before taking a read because as the fish are lifted squeezed, tons of fish slime and blood oozes out through the mesh of the brailer. They wait because there is so much blood and fish slime that it actually adds poundage to the measurement. And although the buyers love buying fish, they prefer to leave the slime and blood on the beach.
Once the fish have been weighed, the buyer dumps the contents of the brailer out into a tote on the truck.
Our empty brailer is returned.
Since we all work on different nets, no one really knows how much fish we sell as a family until we get back home and compare notes. One of the ways we amuse ourselves in Alaska is to have a daily guessing game. After dinner, each of us writes his guess down on a slip of paper and hands them in.
Someone (usually Roji) then makes a tally of the "pink slips", the official chit the buyers give us to acknowledge receipt of a given poundage of fish.
Whoever guesses closest to the total catch without going over wins a Maryland scratch-off ticket.
We all watch intently as the winner scratches, wondering whether this is the day that we'll win the big money and have an excuse to sleep through the next fishing period.
It never happened.
Posted by bogenamp at September 12, 2007 09:30 PM