Salmon is a staple in the Stark house. We bake it, fry it, smoke it, and can it. We mix it with several super-secret ingredients for the world’s best salmon patties and eat some form of salmon nearly every day. We have a deep freezer full on the porch that feeds our family of four through the long winters without having to buy and support the hormone & pharmaceutical induced meat from the grocery store. Salmon is the number one meat source in this family, and every health article, book, and professional will tell you how good a regular diet of salmon is for the body— so I don’t won’t go into the health benefits. But I will say this, harvesting, processing, and eating self-caught salmon is good for the soul.

This was the first year that we went dipnetting as a family and it went great. The weather was clear and warm, the fish were in, and the fun was on. Savanna stood in the chest deep river beside me with two babies in the belly and two daughters on the beach. She caught 9 by the time I caught 2, and by the end of the day we left with 16 salmon in roughly 4 hours of fishing. Not bad. That provided us roughly 50 pounds of meat for the freezer. With one more trip, we caught our limit of for a family of four and filled the freezer completely.

So what is dip netting, for the non-Alaskan readers? Dipnetting is a form of subsistence fishing where rich-with-salmon rivers open for a window of time for Alaska residents to fish with long poles attached to big nets no wider than 5’ in diameter.  Fishermen stand in the water, or hold a net over the side of a boat, and wait for the strike of one or more salmon as they enter the net and try to escape. Like most things, dipnetting has its good and bad qualities— some fishermen raise their noses at it while others travel over 500 miles one way to catch their 25 salmon limit each year.

I am deeply grateful to live where wild salmon still run. I hope that my grandchildren will depend on salmon the way we do. 

Thank you to Emmy Ryn for taking the excellent photos of our time on the river and for watching our kids.