Chum and King Spawning... check!

I guess it has been a little while since I posted a blog… sorry about that.

Well, what’s new? A few days ago, we finished up with spawning. It’s definitely been a weird year… we didn’t get all of the eggs we needed but we should have enough anyhow. We were shooting for 19 Takatz incubators full of eggs and we only got 11, but we got all of our Hidden Falls eggs. We took eggs for the Deep Inlet program across the island, but we may end up stealing some of those for ourselves. We were supposed to take some amount of eggs for the Port Alexander hatchery also but… well that didn’t happen. Anyhow, after chum we are supposed to do Kings but since things are so screwy this year, we ended up taking a few day break from chum and doing the kings. Then we went back to chum. Towards the end of the chum spawning, it seemed we had more OTHER fish coming up instead of chum… kings and coho and a few pink salmon. The coho are a later spawning fish but they are coming in THICK right now, which is pretty crazy. Even though we finished up the kings, there are still a lot of those guys coming up into the raceways too, so while we are trying to get as many chum done as possible, you end up spending more time on the table sorting out the coho and kings and looking for tags and just trying to get them out of the way. This is such a pain too because the kings are really big and we have to cut most of them in half before we can send them down the grinder.

Last Friday, we had a tender (a boat that takes fish from all the seine boats and brings them to town) come to take all of our coho that were coming up. See, the coho are coming up into the raceways but they are really nice, bright fish right now and not ready to spawn. That means their meat is really nice, and instead of grinding a few thousand great looking fish, might as well get some money for them. So we had to load coho up into fish totes (plastic insulated boxes similar to bulk boxes for fruit) to take out there. They were taking the kings too, so those got loaded also. Well, this doesn’t sound so bad… BUT… there’s always a but! We normally shock the fish in the shock box and then bring them up, but that will cause bruising to the nice fish that we are trying to sell, so we couldn’t do that. For a little white, we were shocking them just a little bit but I think they determined that was still bad. So they started bringing them up live, which is pure chaos when you have 50 or so live fish going nuts on the sorting table! Thankfully I wasn’t a part of that “hitting squad.” Well, after a few of those boxes of live fish, the shock box decided to stop working. That means no more transporting fish onto the table. The plan, then, was to just turn off all the water in 4 raceways, all the coho and kings would go into totes and we’d spawn all of the chum, but that meant lifting each fish onto the table one at a time by hand. Lemme tell you, that was one of the most miserable, STUPID days I have had here. This all sounds so morbid, but after a while, the fish run out of oxygen in the raceways so they all pretty much die. That made it a lot easier but for a bit, they were rather crazy. We had to get all of the chum out of the raceways before we could take lunch, otherwise the eggs would go bad. Unfortunately, the stress of the whole thing made a lot of the fish just freak out and drop a lot of their eggs, so we didn’t even get THAT many eggs that day. Eventually we took lunch around 1:30 or so, but we had to come back and deal with all the rest of the fish. We are just talking about a few hundred fish… we are talking about a few thousand fish! One by one… lifting them out of the raceways. It’s not so bad doing the few random chum left and the coho because they are a small, light fish… averaging like 5 pounds or so. But the kings average like 20-25 pounds!! And there are definitely some in the 30+ pound range. One fish at a time… Sure didn’t need to work out THAT day. I think we were out there until about 7:30 getting fish out… I’m not sure how many… a lot of them went to the tender but a lot we had to just cut and send down the grinder. I know we sent 13,500 pounds of coho and 13,500 pounds of king salmon to the tender… which, at about 25 pounds, is about 550 kings. I know we also had to lift about 600 kings out of the raceway to be cut and ground up. All in all, it was a pretty ridiculous day that I’d never like to repeat again! Anyhow, so the water is off so no fish can go up the ladder. That day, too, Adam hurt his foot in the morning by dropping a fish tote on his foot that weighed around 50 or 60 pounds. He was out for the rest of the day and it swelled up a bit and was pretty sore but he was alright. It’s a little sore now, a week later, but he’s good.

Well the next day, Saturday the 16th, was the spawning party (even though we weren’t done spawning at that point). It was a pretty fun night! The weather wasn’t very nice but no one seemed to care that much… a little rain never hurt anyone. I spent the earlier part of the day making sugar cookies in the shape of salmon and bears. Adam, the day before, made my potato salad for me, and made smoked salmon dip. I also made a chocolate cheesecake for Adam’s birthday the next day. The party started later with a feast of Hidden Falls proportions… that means lots of meats and some other stuff. Then we began our horseshoe tournament (which we never did finish, but Adam and I won our game). Then, our came the amusement. See, a few days before, I was telling Jess, one of the seasonals from last year, that I was going to be making a cheesecake for Adam’s birthday. Somehow, piñatas came up… the next day she said she was going to buy one. So she did… A Superman piñata that they decided to stuff with some random candy and miniature booze bottles! It was supposed to be a secret but Deena told Adam… so he had to act surprised. So the day of the party, Jess and I tied Superman to the forks of the loader and Shannon drove it out. Watching Adam swing at that piñata with his eyes covered and using a little spawning bat (looks like a Police bat) was probably the funniest thing I have ever seen! Shannon was moving it around so he couldn’t get it… then once it hit Adam in the back of the head as he’s swinging wildly! Finally he whacked it and the whole thing flew to the ground but didn’t break, but since Adam was blindfolded he just kept swinging at the air like crazy. They tied it back up and I think that’s when he took down the blindfold and just whacked it and mini booze bottles flew everywhere! It was hilarious and a pretty funny way to turn a piñata into some good ol Adult fun!


Lots of viewers for the horseshoe tournament...


Ready to attack!

So after the piñata shenanigans, we did our spawning games. Pretty much the same as last year… the bucking contest (umm shooting the contents of the male fish), the chum toss (literally throwing a chum), and a second chum toss as pairs. I was ready to win in the bucking contest this year and I was in the lead with a distance of 20 feet 4 inches for a little bit, but Dan and Deena both beat me by a good two feet… so I got a t-shirt for coming in third place. I got a video of it for Dad, since he thought it was really funny and wanted to see. Then I ALMOST won the girl chum toss… I jokingly blame Jess for beating me because she stole the fish I was going to use! The boys were funny though… Clay ended up throwing his behind him into the bushes and Scott’s fish flew over the spawning shed and down the roe shed roof. Then we did the pairs chum toss… two people held the corners of a towel and had to throw the fish using that towel. Most pairs just ended up twisting the towel around the fish. Pretty funny stuff! Then we just stood around the fire all night, with Benji watching for bears. The next day was Adam’s birthday so we had a chocolate cheesecake feast. It turned out pretty good too for my first real cheesecake!


This is our nice firepit... it's a half of a metal bouy that is big enough to fit a pallet in. Angie made and cut the design in it, and I thought it looked pretty cool with fire.


Chum cookies...


Adam made this "bear eating salmon" cookie... with blood and everything...


I've never showed the babies at Hidden Falls yet... this is Lora, Steve's wife, with their 7 month old daughter Eliza. She's a pretty big baby!


These are Josh and Brandi's two little boys, Tytus (in the back - 2ish) and Leif (in the seat - 8 months old?).

The bear traffic the past few days has really picked up! Last night we saw 11 bears at the weir at one time. The bears are starting to pick on each other a bit too! Last night I watched a bear steal fish from another bear a few times! It was pretty daring of that bear too since he was stealing from a mom with a few cubs. But he did it a few times! There was some fighting too… mostly like “Get away from me and my fish!” fighting, but Adam saw two bears actually standing up and slapping each other around a few times. Apparently some bears are starting to walk around on site during the day now… the mom and triplets were today. We’ve decided it’s going to be pretty crazy here when the fish start to go away… that means I’m never leaving my house! :-) We just saw one on our side of the water when we came back from the bunkhouse and Adam shot it with a rubber bullet to scare it a bit, but it didn’t really seem fazed. There has been about 20 different bears around, according to one of the seasonal’s count. Lots of them mothers with cubs… We have 3 different mothers with two cubs, one with three, one with one and the rest are single bears. There are a few pretty big bears too… but we’ve also seen some pretty tiny ones for bears on their own. We’re just going to have to keep our eyes opened at all times.

Lately the weather has been CRAP! It has been really foggy, rainy and cold for the past few days but thankfully we have been doing inside work. We’ve been getting all the incubation stuff done. This year we got a bunch of those metal box incubators so we didn’t have to use the R48s but we still haven’t received them all. We’ve been setting up as many as possible though. They put in longer water systems so now instead of rows of 16, we have rows of 24. Incubation looks pretty packed.


I know you've all seen the eagles but I'm pretty proud of this picture! Now that's a good National Geographic shot!


This is a sockeye salmon aka a "red" salmon. It's just a stray salmon that got lost or something... we only saw one and didn't see any last year. Pretty cool looking though. That's what they look like when they are ready to spawn... big hump and the big hooked nose...

Well, this was a long one… I originally planned to NOT relive that day of picking up hundreds of king salmon from the raceways but it all just spilled out. I hope it all made sense.