Fish camp Chronicles
Chapter 3.
“Earning my Dagwood”
“Look, there he is again”, I pointed down the beach directly towards our fishing sites. Our two-stroked presence motoring up the shoreline was an easy alarm. The bear was running up the beach like a thief, I wondered if he had a T.V under his arm.
I like predictable bears. Bears are supposed to run away from us. The more I see of this bear, the more I liked him. Sometimes younger bears that lack the experience and food gathering skills of the older bears, are more apt to explore non-traditional food sources... such as our cabin.
Case-in-point one year after installing row after row of plywood nail strips below all of our windows at our fishcamp cabin, a determined young brownie decided that it would be a good idea, to walk over the nails and break through mom & dad’s bedroom window. He then proceeded to bleed all over their bed and the entire floor, all the while pillaging and plundering everything as a matter of duty. As an exclamation point he left a rather large pile of shit glistening as a monument to his efforts, in the middle of the room.
I digress. With the bear out of sight, and the tide filling in, we went about setting our net high on the beach. I have to admit that I was a little nervous about the situation. We had spotted the bear very close to where we were planning to fish. A lively set net is quite a spectacle. Seagulls, eagles, and seals tend to hover nearby with mouths watering like Pavlov’s dogs. With such commotion, a nearby bear might be tempted to check it out. Also, I knew that there were a lot of fish around today. I had propped seven of them on the mile and a half drive from the cabin to our fish sites. A dull thud behind the boat is a dead give-away as the unlucky fish flounders in the prop-wash.
Today’s high tide was over 29 feet. Since the fish typically run close to shore, we wanted to be sure to have our net sweeping them up for as long as possible. I had the anchor under my arm; dad grabbed the buoy, dragging the net behind him up the mud. The consistency of the mud varies from shin-deep gloop, to hard-pack and everything in between.
Newcomers walking on this terrain often feel clumsy, awkward and off-balance. We've been at it for 31 years now and as luck would have it we too feel clumsy, awkward, and off-balance. We've come to accept our graceless inadequacies on the mud.
With our boots slipping out from under under us together managed to pull the net up the beach as far as we could. It was getting harder to pull. Once the net spills over the net-chute and starts dragging over the mud, the weight increases exponentially. Once we’d had enough, I wiggled and pressed the anchor as deep into the mud as I could. For good measure I glanced over my shoulder for the bear before making my way back to the boat over the glossy mud.
As I pushed the boat off shore, dad fed the net out the back of the skiff. It was still low in the tide and we managed to set the net entirely by hand. With my chest waders on I was able to push the boat far enough out to set the whole length of the net without any assistance from the motor. As I pushed the boat off the mud, the net fed out the back laying down its curtain.
The boat wasn’t twenty feet offshore when we claimed our first victim. "We got one!” dad chimed. Another one splashed along the cork line by the time I got a look. By the time we set the outer anchor the cork line was dancing with a dozen or more. As we motored away from the net to pick up mom and the kids, I saw a fish squirt out of the net, into the air. An escapee.
Our first pick-through the net yielded sixty fish, mostly reds. We returned to the other boat to offload the fish and grabbed two more empty coolers. Mom, Kynsey and Corey transferred back over so they could start sorting and icing our catch. I looked back at the net and it was popping again. Another dozen fish had already filled in. “Wow, nice day!” mom noticed.
“ Here we go.” dad said with a smile as we headed back to the boiling net. He knew same as I did that with just one net we would be able to keep up today. We would make several such deliveries in the next couple of hours and then we would be done; Fish bled, loaded into coolers and packed with ice we would be on our way back up river to sell our catch.
Our stop at Tide Creek was a brief one. With all the fish already in their places all we needed was a little fuel. Ten minutes after we pulled into the creek we were on our way back out. Everyone was zipping up their float coats, putting on hats and settling in for the two hour burn up river. Open skiff rides in Alaskan waters aren’t for sissies. Tucked neatly into the bow to duck the wind, Corey and Kynsey were already munching down on their sandwiches, happy as clams.
“Here’s yours” mom handed me a sandwich with SCH written on the zip lock in black marker. I set it on my console, as we got ready for blast-off. I wonder if any of the other set netters in Cook Inlet were lucky enough to have their moms write their initials on their sandwich baggies after a hard days fishing. Probably not.
“Thanks mom this looks great”. It did look great, but I didn’t fully appreciate the quality of it though until after we got under power and had snaked our way upriver a few bends. I peeled the bag back halfway and started in on my sandwich.
Mom’s river sandwiches are the best. To my delight I discovered that today’s special was a moose meatloaf sandwich. This wasn’t just any old meatloaf sandwich, this Dagwood was loaded: ham, slices of cheddar and provolone cheese, jalapeños, onions, tomatoes. What were those fresh greens I was munching on? They turned out to be spinach, cilantro, and fennel from the garden. A good smear of Inglehoffer stone ground mustard coated the top side of a torte sandwich roll bringing it all together.
I swerved to miss a large cottonwood branch floating our way as I took another bite. This sandwich was so good it was throwing me off just guessing the ingredients! After a hard days fishing, the sandwich hit the spot and would tie me over for a good while. All things said and done, I guess I had earned it, we all had.
