So when you wake up Saturday morning and the rain is pouring down, the first thing you think is: let's totally drive 3 hrs into no where in a packed car to catch some fishies. No? Oh, that's what we think! After a long wet drive we arrived at the mouth of the Kasilof River, on the Kenai Peninsula in South Central Alaska. I'm telling you all this so i sound like a way bigger badass than i am.
As you can see, we weren't the only ones.
I had a near panic attack about the car getting stuck in the sand---i got one stuck in Israel once, well Mace did, but i helped, and it resulted in 50 people 2 hrs of work and one nearly run over Ryan L@sh to free it. So i was not interested in repeating the disaster on a beach in AK.
Anyways, we sent Adam out in all his pretty gear (click on pictures to make them bigger) and the next thing you know: Yup, he was hauling in his first dipnetting salmon catch!!! GO BABY GO.
We stayed at this spot for about an hour and a bit and then we followed the guy just to the left of adam's hat (who was HILARIOUS) over to the money spot right at the mouth. Where people were literally running in and out of the water non-stop pulling in fish. I don't know how to explain it other than there were CONSTANT fish. We learned some valuable lessons. 1. You MUST bonk the fish with a bat, otherwise the little monsters don't die. 2. they still twitch minutes later (making gut extraction tricky). 3. A system is needed for efficient hauling/bonking/extricating from net.
This was our catch! 13. Adam swears there were 14 and that I hid one. right. where an i going to hide a slimy fat fish?? He did technically catch 14, but we thought one might have been a king salmon (currently protected) and threw it back. We are headed back next weekend to fish on Saturday again and try to limit out at our 35 for the year. I want to point out that they each weighed like 10lbs when we got them out of the water. And they are SLIMY. These 13 yielded 20lbs of edible meat--in part because this was our first time filleting . Essentially $200 + of fish--depending on how much a fillet is selling for.
The other thing this picture doesn't tell you is that i, martha teresa big girl, am the one who chopped off their heads and extracted all the guts.
So, we set up stations in the kitchen: and got to work. technique is everything and the truth is we butchered the first fish with our learning curve, but by the 13th fish, we were all money.
Neah supervised.
And in the end:
