Copper River Salmon In Cordova, Alaska

bringing the people behind our food to life this is where we're at this is the harbor look where we just left and I'll zoom out and we're gonna be running out all the way out here we'll be putting the net in the water somewhere out there on the west end of the Copper River Delta the sockeye salmon runs pretty much over for 2013 and and we're hoping we catch you a couple fish today when we show you how to do this my dad got me fixing my own boat at the age of eleven so that I could have fish in some of those qualifying ears in which to be able to get a permit we call this the bow roller up here or the power ruler and what makes it a power or is the fact that this rubber roller is hydraulically powered of course this is the net reel and we use these reels to pull the gear in and what we're how we're using these two pieces of equipment now in conjunction with each other is I turn that one on to help pull the net off the reel typically what we'll do after we get the net in the water like this we'll wait an hour a lot of times we'll sit here and watch the net you'll look at the cork line in the water here and you'll look for quartz to start bobbing or maybe official you know be caught up high in the net and he'll actually come out of the water and splash you know those are indications that you're catching fishermen deliver the fish to the tenders out on the fishing grounds the fish tenders bring it into the plant we have these pumps down here this pump will go down inside the fish hold of the tender and it pumps the fish up it comes up underneath the dock if we're buying gill net fish off the Copper River it works kind of the same way but we get a lot of dock deliveries and when that happens we use the crane to offload the smaller boats what we call the roundabout cable and fish comes in from out on the belt we saw outside there around the melt and they take fish off for the three heading machines as just going around they're picking fish off of it when the belt starts to get empty and they load it again in our fishery I call it a river mouth net fishery the salmon that are destined to the Copper River were actually catching them right at the mouth or the entry point of the river system of Oregon for these fish this is a pink salmon and the way we bleed and we reach in the guild plates and we just rip and tear the gills we like to get them in the water immediately thereafter the region we call it live immersion bleeding it's because the salmon is is still alive but he's just had as well likening to us he just had a pro cut right so we put them back in their natural environment while they're still alive because that heart is the blood pump and right we want their heart to evacuate as much of the blood as we can and in this pleading method here gives us the best bleed out we started the business in 1996 and at that time the crisis salmon were real down and quality of the salmon that was going to market was wasn't real good fish farming started to come online pretty big then and so the competition was which was high so we as fishermen Scott Blake and myself were both we started the company and a man named Schaefer there's a lot of work when you're trying to fish and market your own product and getting it out the airport trying to get your boat ready to go and then making sure it gets down there and getting your order for the next period and then a gentleman named Billingham he was taking some of his fish and having it made into a smoked product and so we decided to lease a small section of this facility right here which is the smokehouse which you guys have seen that was that was the for our first area that's kind of how it got started you know was trying to improve the quality and trying to get a few more dollars in our pocket pretty soon none of us were fishing well I still fish I still maintain the fish I'll go out in the middle of May when the season opens and fish up till about the middle of June and then we get so busy I ended up having to come in here fish coming up all right we are allowed to use 150 fathoms of net which is apothem is equal to 6 feet so these are nets are our legal lengths that we can fish is 900 feet and we're also regulated by the depth of the net that we can use and for that depth is can moderate bending between the species that were targeting that looks like about a seven a half eight pounder we wish they were all that size actually I sold my shares out so this would be the last year working I'm ready to get my life back and I haven't had a life to speak I was really doing for the last since since 1996 you know just go go go and I'm not ready I'm gonna go back fishing full-time and grab the grandkids up and take them with me and get the iphone's out of their hands and a fish in the hands now it's over young kids we went out in the summer months and fish with the family all summer and that's kind of how it was in this community very much like you know in Midwestern states were give the farmers and the families the whole family participated on the farm the same thing up here with with fishing a lot a lot of people just grew up doing this you

Channel: Cooking Up a Story

Views: 77,383

Rating: 4.5604396 out of 5

Keywords: cordova, alaska, commercial fishing, copper river salmon, alaska fishermen

Id: u_aIGVqKItw

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2016