"Earning my Dagwood"

                                  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.

A Good Day

Chapter two…

                                           A Good Day

“One, two, three pull”, we leaned back hard, dragging the mess to the other side of the boat.  We each grabbed the webbing as low as we could for another go.  “One, two, three pull”.  With a little momentum, the blob morphed and slid across the boat.  The load was more or less balanced now.  To keep piling on the port side of the boat was to risk swamping the skiff.

     “ Okay, good enough, are you ready?”  With a nod, Pete got back into position.   He was on the lead line.  I had the corks.  We both reached over the gunnels as low as we could and with a somewhat coordinated effort, we lifted and heaved and coerced the next section of our net up, over and into the boat along with it twenty flopping, shiny, silvery salmon. 

    Down the net we slowly progressed fighting to gain each foot of net.  “They’re getting thicker”, Pete noticed.  He was right.  The rest of the net was plugged, writhing with hundreds of fish.  We had tried to pick the fish out of the net before pulling the net into the boat, but we have learned that sometimes you just can’t keep up.  This was one of those times and if we didn’t hurry the dropping waters of Cook Inlet’s tide would leave us high and dry.

    “Kynsey, how much water do we have?”  She grabbed the boat hook and dipped it over the side. My thirteen-year-old niece was glistening in her brand new raingear from the stern.  The neon orange and green piping were making quite the fashion statement.  I might have to smear a little blood on it for good measure.

     “ Three feet deep!” she announced.  Not much.  Just then Pete found some inspiration and along with it a shot of adrenaline, I could feel him pulling harder which inspired me to do the same.

   “ Pete you're an animal!” I shouted.  The fish were flying over the rounded gunnels in droves.   A fat chum flew into the boat catapulting itself into my face.  “Aghhh”.  A streak of slime ran diagonally across my beard.   
     We covered ten feet of net quickly before the surge died and we had to rest.   Over the side, I noticed a nice sockeye dangling by a tooth on the wrong side of the net.   In all its glory, the huge red salmon was idling in the current, unaware of it's predicament.  Just then the webbing slipped off the tooth and it began to drift back unencumbered by the the net. I lunged at it taking careful aim with my hands.  I latched onto it with as much grip as I could muster and quickly flopped it into the boat.  “Nice one Steve” dad noticed.  Once again the pile was tipping the boat hard to port and it was time to drag it back.

     With half of the net into the boat the skiff was sitting decidedly lower in the water.  Could the skiff handle all this weight?  “Maybe the other net has fewer fish” dad said. 

     “Maybe”. We knew though, that the last net had been loading up for even longer than the first, and was probably teeming with fish too.  We could do it, I told myself, we would just have to be smart about how we loaded the boat.  Today the weather was in our favor.  The glassy reflection of the waters revealed no wind.

     A lone seal bobbed seaward of our net, waiting for his chance.  The seals had gathered in greater numbers this week.  I had spotted over 150 on the sand bar yesterday.  I was glad there was only one hanging around us today.  The seals like to swim up to our nets and eat our fish.  Unfortunately they don’t finish what they start.  Systematically, they will make their way down the net taking a single bite out of each fish they encounter. 

Harbor seals near the mouth

 

    Finally we got to the end of the first net and pulled up the outer anchor.  Dad pulled the tiller handle around steering us towards our other net.   The bow dug into the water purposing downward.  We had too much weight int the bow!  Pete and I quickly scrambled over the fish to the stern hoping our fat-asses would help with the counter balance.  Our weight was just enough to level us out. 

     Dad ran the boat over to our second net and then into shore.  I hustled up the beach to retrieve the inner anchor from its muddy perch. “  Hey, here’s the bear tracks.” I shouted.  Alongside the anchor line were the muddy paw prints of an adult brown bear.  Canted inward pigeon-toe style, the tracks led up to the grass.

      We knew this bear.  We had seen him last night on our way to fishcamp.  We had arrived too early on the tide and it wasn’t deep enough to run our props. We had to wait.  The bear was a quarter of a mile off shore standing on a shallow sandbar.  He was fishing.  It appeared as if the bear was walking on water. Peculiar.  Upon noticing us, the bear walked and swam it’s was back to the beach disappearing among the drift and the grasses.  He would have plenty to eat on this tide if he was so inclined.

Cook Inlet bear fishing

      By the time we had loaded the last net, which not so coincidentally was just as full as the first, we were exhausted.  With a few final adjustments in the load and a long slug off the water bottle, I hauled up the last anchor and started the engine.  With so much weight in the boat we were unable to get up on-step so we were reduced to plowing our way back up river.  Barely out pacing the current we crawled upriver towards our staging area at Tide Creek.  We all knew that we had several hours of picking fish ahead of us. It would be a late one for sure. We would probably have to run the river in the twilight to get home. I was okay with all this though as a smile overcame me.  Today was a good day.

     Our wake, standing six feet or more, was rolling out the back of the boat like a series of rolling moguls. Catching them by surprise, the wake unveiled hundreds more fish that had somehow escaped our treachery.  Surfing, flopping against the bank, darting and finning, the waters were alive all around us.  Those were the lucky ones I thought.

Pete dad and I sorting it all out at Tide Creek.

Biding Time

                                        Biding Time   
    With the skiff up on-step we were making good time.  I angled into the wake of a passing jet boat.  I knew that once we got passed the last fish wheel there would be no more traffic.  We would have the river to ourselves just the way I like it.  
     The steady decline of the Alexander Creek salmon fishery coupled with the rising price of gas has cut lower Susitna riverboat traffic almost entirely.  Almost.  The last ten miles of river, flowing into Cook Inlet are essentially our own.
      We rounded a familiar corner.  I was sad to notice that the dilapidated trapper cabin was gone.  We knew it was doomed last year as the river slowly gouged the bank from under it.  The churning Susitna waters carve its will and way Indiscriminately.   Changing what once was into swept-away forever is the order of the river.   Powerless, we are but spectators and riders of the great glacial melt-off.
     The tiny sod-covered cabin was cool.  A snapshot to a different time, it sparked my imagination and adventuresome spirit.  I liked to think that Shem Pete took shelter in it during his travels between Tyonek and the old Susitna Station almost a century ago.   Or maybe Dr.Frederick Cook in his quest for McKinley stopped in to check it out as same as we have.  “ Look”, I pointed where the cabin had been. “ It’s gone”.  My eyes still searched for it though as we skirted by the mess of cottonwood trees that had also been sucked into the current.
      We were making good time.  The high tide at fish camp was at 8:30 it was important to be there on time.  Unloading the boat is much easier when you don’t have to hump it up the muddy bank.  It was almost 8 O’clock now.  Perfect.  The next few days we would set up camp.  We planned to fish too if the weather cooperated.  After setnetting for almost thirty years now, one of the most important things we’ve learn is when not to fish.
    At fish camp, the prevalent winds come from the southwest.  Stronger southeast winds spill down Turnagain arm sometimes too.  Both winds can build large dangerous breakers on the shallow mud flats.  I was relieved that the forecast called for calm weather.  Although we weren’t fishing today, we would still have to cross Cook Inlet waters to reach our camp on Ivan River.
     Morning trips are the best.   I wondered if we might see a bear this morning.  There was that familiar crispness in the air conducive to bear activity, but it wouldn’t last by the looks of it.  The sun was already peering over the trees casting its horizontal rays onto the river.  Near the far bank, the sun revealed a curtain of cottonwood seedlings floating high into the air.  From this far away it looked much like snow but the seedlings seem to stay suspended in the air. Summer snow.

    Last year, on another morning trip we did see a bear.  A few bends downriver, we came upon rather large brown bear swimming across the river in front of us.  Without startling it, we were able to idle the boat close enough to hear it breathing.  Big huffs of air were spraying water out from both sides of it’s muzzle.  It wasn’t until the bear drug itself up the bank that we could see how big it really was.  Water poured off its coat in a cascade of silty streams; the bear was a giant brown mop.  It looked back at us from the bank for an instant, and then disappeared into the brush without so much as a shake-off. 

Great shot from crewman ArtMannix

     “Are we there yet?” Hazelee peered her nose out from under her layers.  Like Ralphie’s little brother in “A Christmas Story” she was bundled from head to toe, a tight life jacket completed her ensemble and her snug-fit into the camp chair.
     “Not yet Haze, we’re going to stop into Tide Creek first.” Slowing down, I pointed the skiff into the tiny amber colored creek.  The creek drains a handful of surrounding marshes and spills unassumingly into the lower river delta. To the casual observer it’s just a slough.  For us it’s a sanctuary.
      Our self-proclaimed Tide Creek is staging area for our fishing efforts.  Here we collect ourselves before hauling a load up river.  On big fish days when our boats and nets are packed with thousands of pounds of salmon, and the tide is rushing out from under us, we know that if we can just make it to Tide Creek we can sort it all out.  From here we can always make it up-river no matter the stage of the tide.  Below this point the river becomes too shallow at low tide. Today we refueled, and dropped off some gas.
      With the load adjusted and the kids back in their places, I powered up gaining speed in the tiny creek.  We squirted back out of the little creek like a watermelon seed back into the silty waters of the Su.  We had descended the river and were nearing its mouth.   The river fans out into many braids here that span over five miles wide.  
     The mouth is a sight to behold.  The tall stands of cottonwood and aspen give way to the mudflats.  The grasslands dominate the geography here mingling and sharing their space with reams of twisting driftwood logs and stumps that line the banks like petrified guardians of the river. The eagles perch on the highest of these drifts waiting for something, watching.   The gulls are seemingly everywhere.   Long bands of the purple lupine run along the bank.  Just then I noticed a quartet of pintail were matching our speed and zipped along with us; together we head out into Cook Inlet.  The water was flat and I knew now that we would be there soon unloading the boat and falling into all the other usual fish camp duties and rhythms.  This made me happy and I was excited to have my family with me to share it with.
      “ Hey guys look, the seals!”  I pointed to what looked like just another pile of drift.  I knew better.   Eight seals muddling on a thin sandbar were resting and squirming and soaking up some early rays.  A few of them wiggled themselves off and into deep water as we scooted by.  Their perfectly round heads bobbed around waiting for us to leave.  Once we pass I knew they would worm their way back to the sandbar again.  The promise of the warm sun would be too much to resist.
      Around the next point we came upon a pod of Belugas whales.  Their smooth white backs rolled as they surfaced near the boat.  A calf rolled next to its mother in unison.   “What are they doing?” Corey asked as he scanned the water for more sightings.

     “They’re looking for fish”, Tamra offered.   She was probably right but I couldn’t help but think that it might be a fruitless effort today; it was too early.  The Belugas, along with the seals were biding their time.   We were all waiting for the great push of the salmon.


     
      

Lessons in Alaska Wildlife Biology

     "Lessons in Alaska Wildlife Biology"

    Sometimes in the fifth grade you have to speak in front of the whole class.  It was Todd Coulter’s turn.   “ I’m doing my speech on the Alaska Timber Wuff.  The Timber Wuff is widespread through out Alaska.  Hunting in packs, the Wuffs rely on each other to….”
     There it was again.  Is he saying Wuff, as in Big Bad Wuff?  I discretely looked around to see if any of my classmates were catching this gross mispronunciation.  With each successive Wuff of the speech, the conjured image of the cartoonish Little Red Riding Hood wolf came to life in my head.  The elongated snout, The sinister grin, the works.

Canis Lupis Arcticus?

     I cupped my hand and sent a whisper towards Cameron sitting next to me. " Is he really saying Wuff?"  We got the giggles as Todd went on to explain all about the Wuff as he understood it from his extensive research in the Encyclopedia Brittanica collection in the Homestead Elementary school's library.  After the obligitory applause faded concluding Todd’s comprehensive presentation ( Forty or so Wuffs later),  Mr. Rohlman announced “Okay, Steve your next”.  I took my notes with me up to the front of the class and cleared my throat. “ Today I will be speaking about the Kodiak Grizzly Barrr”.