Mishaps

Ever had one of those days where you have everything planned out, and you were so excited for it, and just couldn’t wait, but then nothing actually goes according to plan?

Well that was our day.

It was the first day, the first opener we would be fishing (Openers are periods of time associated with a fishing district that are mandated by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to properly conserve and protect the natural resource of wild Alaskan salmon. They usually come in time incriments of 12 hours ranging from 12 to 84 hours. More about this later). 

We woke up early, made coffee, and waited for 8 am, the time we could start fishing. We planned where we wanted to fish and when 8 o’clock hit, we began our work day.

We didn’t expect much action because of the lack of fish we had seen the last few days, but not catching fish was the only part of our day we expected that actually came true.

After moving from place to place, it was around noon we were picking our gear when something went wrong. The net wasn’t winding on properly. In short, we had blown a hydraulic hose.

We scrambled to find the cause of the problem and then contain it. Once it was under control we set the net back out so it would still catch fish while we were fixing the broken hose.

Big mistake.

See hydraulics make our job so much easier. They do the heavy lifting, pulling the net on board with a pull of a lever. By setting the net back out we were banking on the fact that we could fix the hose. 

About an hour and a half later we were pulling in our net by hand. All 900 water soaked feet of it. 

By the end, my arms felt like they were gonna fall off and we still weren’t any closer to fixing the hose. The replacement we had didn’t work and now we were faced with a trip home. This would mean missing about 30 hours of fishing time and more money spent on fuel for another trip. 

Thankfully, others fishing around us had parts that would work. With help from a a few of them, we slowly started piecing things together, literally. 

About 4 hours later (it was about 6 pm now) we had something to work with. 

Returning to the fishing grounds we were left with two things on our mind: A reminder that there are so many things that can go wrong, and a wonderment of what’s to come next.