Alaskan Dipnet Video


It’s that time again for the annual trek down to the mouth of the Kenai River in Soldotna to fill freezers with nice red salmon for next winter.  It is called the personal subsistence fishery or as Alaskan’s call it . . . Dipnetting.

This year we have had a run of reds of biblical proportions with last weekend’s one day sonar count of fish passing the weir 19 miles up river at 230,600 fish in a single day.  The previous biggest one-day total was 218,000 salmon, back on July 21, 1987, according to a newly revised figure from Fish and Game.  The state began compiling its database on Kenai salmon counts in 1978.  The last several years we have been lucky to get over 100,000 fish in a single day.

What the Fish and Game try to manage to ensure enough sockeye salmon eggs get spawned into the river for future returning fish is roughly 700,000 to 1,400,000 sockeyes.  The Department is projecting a run size in excess of 2.3 million late-run Kenai River sockeye.

Here is a nice video from The Alaska Dispatch showing people what to expect and inform those who live in the Lower 48 what this party is all about.  This video was taken a couple of days before the main surge of fish arrived in the mouth of the Kenai River.



I had several different groups of friends who were working it this past weekend and they had some astonishing stories.  From a boat using a dipnet, one group of three harvested 206 fish in 45 minutes.  Another from the bank as shown in the video was able to drag in 65 fish in one tide change at one point having 4 fish in the net at one time while the person next to him . . . she dragged in 5 sockeye.

Stories like that were heard around the water coolers all over Anchorage these last couple of days as everyone anticipates those same fish to swim upriver the 50 to 75 miles to the confluence of the Kenai and Russian rivers in 5 to seven days where they can again fish with rods to catch either 3 fish or possibly 6 fish a day if Fish and Game raise the limits once the fish arrive.

I hope you enjoyed.

Ice

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