Arnie came in to help at the height of the Red Salmon run. We set up a small tapered net to catch salmon smolt, newly hatched salmon making their way to sea. The net funneled the smolt into a small chamber which we emptied everyday. We counted and measured the smolt and included the info with our nightly report.
A wide bend with a deep hole lay further down stream. I often walked up the gentle slope behind the cabin to the high ground overlooking it. The high perch gave me a bird’s eye view of the large schools that congregated there, sometimes in the thousands, swimming in slow circles before continuing upstream.
The three of us spent several days tagging fish. We used a purse seine to catch them. A purse seine has lead weights on bottom and cork floats on top. Ours was maybe a hundred feet long, and six feet deep. A person would see only the top row of corks if it lay straight in the water . It would look like a six foot fence below the waterline. We anchored one end to shore, and using the boat, pulled the other in a wide arc encircling a number of fish. The net was taken in and soon there would be fifty salmon thrashing about in the shallow water. We would toss a dozen salmon at a time into the tagging box which sat close to shore in a foot of water.
The fish were “tagged” with round plastic disks. Different colored disks might be used at different times and places. Each was two inches in diameter with a hole in the center. Arnie would place a disk just below the dorsal fin, shove a pin through it, the fish, and through another disk, then bend the pin with pliers. A survey of the upper river would be conducted by the ADF&G in September. They would register the locations along the stream where the tagged fish were found.GO TO: Part 8, A Fisherman's Paradise
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