Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

Obviously this post isn't about the four legged kind of dog we all know and mostly love. I say mostly because my neighbor has decided to dog sit for a friend of theirs whose dog is unruly and loves to stick his big mouth out the window and bark-for hours on end. I so wish I could live on my own private little estate away from unruly dogs, neighbors and other riff-raff. However, I digress. This post is about fishing for chum, or dog salmon as they're known. It's about the only game in town right now. The king season is closing tonight, and it has been poor, and so far the humpies and cohos haven't shown, even out on the ocean. I'm not sure what to make of it. The upside of such poor fishing is that the price to the fishermen is good. The downside is that there are few fish, and the consumer is going to pay a lot more.The second picture shows the difference between ocean bright chum, and one that is ready for the creek. The closer they get to fresh wa...

Last week I took my daughter Jen out fishing with me. We always have a good time, and for the most part she seems to bring me good luck. Most probably because she has such a positive attitude most of the time, as opposed to my rather gloomy outlook on life. We had to deal with those consarn horseflies again, but I got my revenge on a fair number of them. If they dare to come into the cabin and up against that side window, they're dead meat. I like to knock them down with the hose too. I just wish it  had about ten times the pressure so that when I hit them with it, it knocked their little mean heads off. I read years ago about a guy in England who liked hunting so much that he loaded his shotgun shells with dust so he could shoot butterflies. I don't like that idea so much, but blasting horseflies would be grand fun. Of course I wouldn't be getting any fishing done if I had some of those dust laden shells.   As you can see, we had a fairly good day, fi...

 The sorting table  Ron Juan at the scales  Heading blackcod  Putting the black cod on trays for freezing   Thorny head Rockfish  Small halibut  End of the line   I hope this blog post downloads. I thought of making two separate posts out of it, but I didn't want to break up the process- it might be hard to follow. The top picture shows Bill- I don't know his last name- weighing a load of round Chum salmon, also known as Dog salmon. The person who brought in this load is a hand troller and typically they catch fewer fish than power trollers because they have less gear in the water and they have to manually bring in the lines themselves instead of using hydraulic power. The second picture shows Ron D Williams standing by the two scales used. The hanging scale is used if there are fewer fish. The floor scale is used when there are enough fish to put in a tote and weighed. Ron is a unique character. There used to be...

Finally! I was successful in getting the pictures to upload or download or whatever it is that they do. I tried to do this blog a week ago, but the pictures wouldn't cooperate. Whine, bitch, complain. Anyway, if I don't hit the wrong key with my clumsy fingers I'll get this blog done tonight. For the past few weeks I've been pretty much hanging out over at Homeshore fishing for Dog salmon or Chum salmon as they are more properly known as. I doubt many people would pick up a can of dog salmon at the grocery store. They probably wouldn't snag a jar of Humpy either. Sounds like an add for a geriatric sex product or something. However, most moms wouldn't thing twice about buying their family a nutritious can of Pink salmon. To most fishermen here though, we refer to Pinks as Humpies, a shortened version of Humback salmon. They're named that because of the pronounced hump that the males develop as they get closer to the streams where they spawn. It's been re...