Mark just bought a 14-foot boat and was anxious to take it dip netting. He gave me a call at work on Thursday afternoon, wanted to know if I wanted to try it out as well, and I said sure. We left Friday afternoon for the Kenai river down on the Kenai Peninsula. It was about a 4 hour drive. We were in the river and fishing by about 6:30. I manned the net (which is 5 feet in diameter on a 15-foot pole) while Mark manned the motor. I'd catch the fish, move the next towards Mark who would pop the fish out in the boat. Then he would club it with his fish-club (think a tiny wooden bat - although we saw some people at there who actually used real bats) and rip it's gills out. Then he'd toss it in a cooler, or hand it to me to toss in a cooler.
Once we got going and I put my first net in the water, no joke we had a fish in the boat less than 2 minutes later. We made a killing. We filled up our first 2 giant coolers in about 2 hours. Then we went back to shore where Mark started cleaning our catch while I picked up 2 more coolers from the parent of our friends who lived in the nearby town. So we made it back on the water by 9:30, which left us an hour and half left to fish - you can't fish from 11pm - 6am. And in that last hour-30 we caught 17 more fish. Which brought our total to 52 fish. Not bad for a few hours of fishing, huh?
We decided to sleep in our cars that night at the boat launch. We didn't get out of the water until about 12:30am, so we were pretty tired. Banjo slept up front with me in the passenger seat. Banjo was a trooper the whole trip - I had to leave him in the back of the car the whole time we were out fishing b/c there was no room in the boat for him.
We got up at 5:30am the next day and went to Ames Bridge so we could finish gutting and cleaning the fish. Mark would gut them while I chopped the heads off. We were probably gutting and cleaning fish for about 2 hours. Then we were starved so went to this really good greasy spoon place in the city of Kenai. I had biscuits and gravy, hash browns, 2 poached eggs, and a sausage patty. I was so hungry, but I couldn't even finish it all b/c it was so much food. So Banjo got to finish the rest of my very-generously-sized sausage patty.
My share of our catch was 15 fish. Each 'head of household' is entitled to 25 fish per year, and you get 10 more per extra person in your house. Since Mark also has a wife and baby, that means we each can keep 45 fish. I kept 1 to eat that night, I'm shipping 4 down to Seattle, and the other 10 I took to Indian Meats to have filleted, vacuum packed and flash-frozen. Now I need to figure out where to put 53 pounds of fish????
All in all it was an awesome experience and I'm glad Mark invited me along. If the fish are running next weekend, I'm going to go down again and try dip netting from shore, which is about 10 times harder than on a boat. Hopefully dip netting from a boat hasn't spoiled me too much!
6 comments:
That is really a great experience. One you wouldn't have had if you weren't in Alaska. Can't wait till we can taste the red beauties.
Hey, are you in Seattle? My sister said she saw you at Molly Moons.
I am definitely not in Seattle. I walked around the dog park in Anchorage tonight after work in the pouring rain with Banjo. She must of seen some other extremely handsome and intelligent 6'4" specimen.
That was funny Neil.
I will let her know that the Earth has been graced with not one, but two handsome fellas.
Hahahah...I like your description of yourself Neil!
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