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.