Figuring out when to go to Chitina to dip net for red salmon is always difficult, but this year was particularly challenging. The king salmon run was poor again this year, and they stopped letting you keep them after 19 June. But on average the reds run later than kings, so going early means you might get a king (this year you could keep just one), but you aren’t likely to fill out your permit on reds. That likelihood increases after the 4th of July, and the reds are generally larger then, too. And because the goal is to fill the freezer with fish, we’ve tended to forego the chance to get a king and go later.

Copper River salmon sonar data, 2016

This has been a remarkably wet year, though, and the Copper River level has been high. Reports tended to be that most people were not getting their limits. And then the water got so high that Mark Hem and Sam McAllister closed the charters for two long weeks of dangerously high water. So it was pushing August by the time I figured I’d better go or forget it. The water was beginning to drop, the charters were open again, people were catching fish, and except for a Monday-through-Tuesday closure (ADF&G Emergency Order closures) it looked like a mid-week run could be the best chance I’d get. The numbers passing the Miles Lake sonar were dwindling, but later fish move upriver more slowly, so there still should be a lot of fish in the water. I launched on Wednesday morning, figuring that would be a really busy day after the closure and that Thursday might have fewer people as the weekend crowd came in Friday through Sunday. Rose had just finished an intensive two weeks of Summer Arts Festival and didn’t feel like an arduous trip, so it was just me.

I arrived at O’Brien Creek at 4:30 pm and found it as crowded as I’ve ever seen it—I couldn’t even find a parking place. I double-parked a truck whose occupants were somewhere fishing and took my life jacket down to put it in line for the next morning’s boat departures. For the first time, they had a line monitor present to put a piece of tape with a number on it on your gear so everyone knew where things stood. It is a good idea. People get a bit jumpy when the lines are long. To my surprise, I was number 34 (that’s very high), and so it looked like I couldn’t get out until Thursday afternoon for an overnighter. With the water so high there are fewer spots to put people, too. I was not prepared to be out overnight, and we were discussing the possibility of using that spot for Friday morning when Mark Hem came up and pointed out a nice Dall sheep on the hill just above us with a lamb beside her. The lamb was bouncing around on the steep rocks as lambs will, looking very cute while cavorting on a surface that would likely kill most humans.

A colleague from school was pulling his gear together for an overnighter off the road (he’d brought a four-wheeler), and he suggested that I try fishing near where the charters pull in their boats; he’d had luck there before. I waited for a parking spot to open up, then got things settled and went down to look. The good spots were taken—a lot of those people in line had the same idea—but I could see an opening, and people were pulling in fish. So I grabbed my net and a pair of clippers and headed for the river. The only places available required sweeping, which is very hard work. You reach your net on its 12-foot handle upstream, plop it in the water, then guide it along the bottom with the current until it’s swept its length and you have to pull it in, lift it up, and repeat the exercise. I was doing my thing and felt a couple of bumps (misses), when a woman came determinedly towards me with her net. I asked if I’d taken her spot, and she stopped close by and replied “No, I’m fishing right here.”

Then she put in her net and caught one on the first sweep! Then a few sweeps later she picked up a double! It was awesome. It is fun watching people catch fish. As she cleaned her fish she let me work her spot, which she described as she pointed: “White rock, hole.”

And sure enough, in the fast water there was a rock cleft, behind which fish would hold up and rest a bit. I picked up a couple when she and her friend weren’t working the spot. Then, after they left I worked it hard and wound up catching 9 nice fish in about an hour and a half. I was tired and hungry, so I gutted my fish and took them back to the camper and put them on ice and had dinner. As I left the spot, there was a another guy ready to take it over. After dinner I thought I might give it another go, but the spot was occupied and did not become free again until some time after 10:00 pm, when I stopped checking.

For some reason my alarm either didn’t go off or I slept through it, but I woke up from a deep sleep at 7:00 am, well after the 5:45 am departures of the first boats. I strolled on down to see if that spot was free (it wasn’t), and stopped to talk with the people just in front of me in the line. It had moved much faster than anticipated. It seemed that at least some folks had done well enough on the river right there that they abandoned the line, causing it to shrink much faster than anticipated. The guys in front of me thought they’d be on the next boat, so I hustled and got my gear.

The charters were running out of spots on the river, so Mark asked me and another guy just behind me if we had strong backs and could handle sweeping all day for our fish. We both said “Yes!” (though I cringed; I could well feel last night’s efforts), and to my pleasant surprise we were on the next boat and headed down into the canyon. I was put out on a steep and narrow shore of rough scree and rocks. It was about 80 feet long, with a steady downriver current running along most of it and a weak back-eddy at its base. By 8:15 am I was sweeping away.

The fishing was slow but steady for the first four hours or so. I was picking up about one fish every 15 minutes. It was hard work, so I began resting on a rock and working the back-eddy, where I’d pick up the occasional fish right at the interface of the two opposing currents. I got more bumps (misses) than fish there, though. About every hour, one of the two charter boats would stop by to see how things were going. As slow as it seemed, I was apparently doing alright compared with others. Then the fish stopped. We’re used to a mid-day lull, but this one dragged on for almost an hour and a half. And I was getting tired.

There were two pairs of Kestrels here, one on each side of the river. They were holy terrors to every big bird that flew by, screaming their ki-ki-ki-ki-ki and dive-bombing the intruders. Two Bald Eagles worked the area, but with the little pests harassing them they moved on through and didn’t linger long. The Kestrels also fought each other out over the river. No people were in sight the whole time I was out there except for the occasional passing boat.

The long lull in fishing was suddenly broken by a big bump, and as I hauled in the very heavy net I saw to my surprise that I’d caught a nice king salmon! Because we can’t keep them anymore, though, I had to release it. That was hard. It was about a 25-30 pounder. That sure got the adrenaline pumping, and I felt like Superman for a little while, sweeping with renewed energy. And it wasn’t more than about 20 minutes later that the most bizarre thing happened: either I caught a second king salmon or I caught the same one twice. This one was (about) the same size, but it was much more tangled in the net, so I had to bring it right in to get it loose. I could see a yellow tag on the base of its dorsal fin. Wow, that was one tasty looking fish, and, again, it really hurt to have to let it go. This is really late for kings, but this fish still looked fresh and wonderful.

As I got more tired, I had to fish a little more intelligently, resting more on the rock and, when sweeping, using more brain over brawn in getting the net out of the water and back upriver. It was in this phase that I finally figured out exactly how to fish this spot. Remember, the water has such a high silt load that it is totally opaque: you can’t see a thing below the water’s surface. So you’re just blindly poking a net in the water and hoping that (just as blindly) a fish will get caught in it. Here there was a little structure in the rocks on the bottom. Combined with the interface of two opposing currents, this structure created a small spot where the fish would hang out. Once I had that small spot spotted, I’d rest on the rock for about 10-15 minutes, working the back-eddy and letting new fish accumulate in the spot, then sweep 10 times in a row, usually picking up a fish and sometimes two.

This made it slow and steady again, and I just kept at it. The sun of the day before had given way to a heavy overcast with occasional spitting rain. Because it was cool and shady, I didn’t put the fish on stringers. Keeping your net in the water is top priority, especially when the fishing is slow, and stringers take time. Instead, I built up some sketchy stone dams on the steep slope to pile the fish behind. The routine is to bring in a fish, club it, snip a gill to bleed it, clip off the corners of the tail fin (a permit requirement for this personal use fishery), make sure it was dead and not going to flop down the bank, then lay it on a pile behind the rocks. I wound up with three of these piles. Even my few eating and drinking breaks were done while sitting on the rock fishing the back-eddy.

Once the lull ended, I picked fish up steadily, rocketing past 20 and then reaching my goal of 26. The last catch was a nice double, and I was done, 7 hours and 15 minutes after starting. The limit for our household of two is 35, which I’d done in two bouts of fishing (9 + 26). I re-counted to be sure I was accurate (I was), then started gutting and rinsing fish while waiting for pickup. Sam McAllister and his brother Roger and a boat of tired, happy fishermen were soon on the way back upriver to O’Brien Creek. We stopped to check on others, and things were not great—few had their limits, and many had few fish at all.

Fresh Copper River red salmon coming home on a bed of ice

I had my fish gutted, rinsed, and on ice by 6:00 pm and then headed back to Fairbanks. I gave Rose a call from Glennallen to let her know I would get back the next morning. I was too tired to drive the 6-6.5 hours straight through. (It’s a 650-mile round trip.) So a little after 9:00 pm I pulled into one of our favorite gravel pits and camped for the night, finishing the trip the next morning. It turned out that I had 124 pounds of cleaned fish (gutted, heads and tails removed), and Fred’s often has these on sale at $6.99/lb., so that’s a mighty freezer load of super tasty fish. That night we smoke-grilled a whole one, reminding ourselves once again why we do this.

P.S. So it was another good year—and lucky. It turns out that the water level came up again fast and the charters had to close. And the fishery itself will be closed for four days this coming week to meet escapement goals, further narrowing the fishing window for the many people who haven’t been able to go yet or who’ve gone but haven’t filled out their permits.