Dip Net Fishing Alaska's Copper River | Smoking & Canning Sockeye Salmon

good afternoon everyone it is exactly 3 17 and we are heading out on an epic road trip yeah we're going on a really awesome drive i think it's like four and a half five hours yup take a lot longer with all the stops with the dogs good thing is it is the longest day of the year or the day after so we have the sunshine on our side we're headed east to a town called chitna on the copper river and we're going to be dip netting so exciting as residents you can dip net here this is gonna be our second year doing it and we're just super super thrilled yes last year just wasn't our year we got skunked the fishing apparently wasn't that good but we didn't know what we were doing we're a little more prepared this year we got the truck just fully loaded down we had to put a rack on the top we got two ice chests we got gear food we got two nets i mean you name it we got the truck is just loaded down and a whole bunch of extra gear and clothes because like eric said we're not really quite sure what our situation is going to be we're going to bring you guys for the trip we're going to stop and show you what it looks like when we stop and right now we are in a beautiful area mountains yep we're kind of taking a little shortcut it's not really a shortcut but it's more scenic we're heading over we're going to catch up with the highway over there right now it's raining it's forecasted to be pretty nice weather so we'll see what we can get into yep won't be in it oh please don't cross the roadway yourself come on let's hit the road let's do it okay ready let's go we got more weather ahead of us we're heading into the heading into the dense fog now i can't even see you can't see nothing all right first off we made it over the mountains it's cleared up got a beautiful view behind us that's the mataneuska river that's the town of palmer we've got four bags ice we have two ice chests one of them is our big one and that's strictly gonna be for hopefully putting salmon in the other one's our smaller one we're gonna put our food in there for now and if we get enough fish we're gonna put in salmon that one we're gonna grab a little snack and we're gonna hit the road again [Applause] yes all right third stop of the day road work i got us stopped here got a flagger up ahead but it's uh it's 4 45 we've been almost 60 miles and pretty much the plan for tonight is to make it there we're going to take our time this drive is like one of the most beautiful drives ever so we really like coming this way we don't come this way too often but we're going to get out there and we want to find a spot where we're going to fish um try to find a nice beach that'd be the perfect plan where we could bring the dogs down there and you know stay for a while we might do some fishing tonight but we're not quite sure we just stopped at one of my favorite spots to look at on the way out here it's the matanuska glacier you can probably see it behind me and it smells so lovely out here it's like all the wild roses are blooming it just smells like roses it's a pretty warm day it's about 64 degrees there's a nice breeze pretty nice weather not super sunny but that's okay not bad weather it's not raining there's a town here called glacier view and then we're headed up to another spot that is like my absolute favorite spot probably in all of alaska that i've been to okay so this is one of our favorite spots to stop uh honestly we don't know really what town it's in i don't think there's really a town here and it's absolutely beautiful you can see super far when it's clear you can see the wrangle mountains you can't see them right now because it's not clear but this place completely changes in the winter it is like deadly cold out here and everything's just covered in snow but right now it's a really nice spot the dogs had dinner and we also grabbed some dinner for us we made a stir fry back at the house and i just wanted to say that we come out here in the winter one time usually because it is so spectacular in the winter it's just picturesque and it looks like what i imagine alaska would look like it's so deadly cold out here and there's all this poor frost on the trees but we've got to get going because this is not our final destination well we're coming into a beautiful area we can now see the wrangle mountains and starting to clear up we're about 10 miles from a town called glen allen we're going to fill up with gas there and then we're going to take our cut off down to chitina and it's it's at least another hour from when we fill up gas so we still got a little ways to go but this has been a great drive so far 372 here it's expensive it's 320 when we left home all right 33 miles away we took another turn off we're getting close it's uh 7 56 so still light out uh both aaron and i were pretty pumped so we're definitely gonna try to find a spot do some fishing tonight we got our adrenaline rush going trying to catch us some salmon you coming well alrighty it's been exactly one year almost to the day that we've been to the town of chittina we've only been here once before very small town and we're about to take our turn off this is where the road turns to dirt we're getting real close i guess it doesn't turn right here [Music] well we made it to where we're parking the truck a lot of people here we got the last parking spot there's a lot of different places you can fish here this place called the canyon it's narrower it's better fishing there obviously it's narrower so it's a better chance of catching the fish it is 10 10 at night right now i think what we're gonna do is we're gonna fish just a little sand bar out here it's easy access we can bring the dogs out there we're gonna try our luck there we don't have any luck we're gonna wake up about three or four in the morning we're sleeping in the front seat of the tundra tonight and then uh we'll load up our gear and we'll hike out the canyon we'll see how that goes but we're gonna get the nets ready and we're just gonna hang out there have a good time see if we can catch the salmon that in there all right so that is the copper river behind me she's huge it's a massive river it's fast moving you can see it's cloudy that's all the silt in it and it's a very dangerous river if you couldn't tell just by the video we heard the fishing was a little bit slow when we got here but i think it has been good this last week so i'm hoping it picks up we allowed a few days for this trip so just with the fishing you know that's naturally happens and we may have to wait a little while for it to pick up but in the meantime we have this awesome scenery around us chains of plans we're heading up to the canyon was down there trying to fish off that bank and the current was so strong that i couldn't uh go faster than it was collapsing my net and i was trying it for a while and it was killing me so we're gonna hike up we're gonna hike up the canyon last year we bought the six-wheeler up here with us we did not bring it this year because it's extremely sketchy this is more meant for four-wheelers people do bring side-by-sides up here i just wasn't comfortable bringing ours back up here again there's a couple spots where the road washed out and you're like on a 200 that was an exaggeration you're probably like a 60 or 70 foot cliff down to the river anyways we just didn't want to bring the players this trip so we're gonna hike up uh there's a spot that we could see from down here that looks like there was no one there it's a pretty steep cliff so we're gonna see if we can get up there and hopefully we can get the net in the water and get some salmon it is 11 08 p.m we still got the sun out though so we're gonna head up the trail and see what happens okay we've hiked a little ways and i've hiked down a few trails to get down to the river see if it's accessible for us and the dogs first one wasn't this one looks absolutely perfect i think we can get all the way down to the river with the dogs it's not too steep and uh yeah let's go down there and check it out and see if we can get the net in the water alrighty epic spot um it's i think says it's so late it's 11 30 now a lot of people are taking off and they're gonna go camping their campers for the night eril and i are going to burn the midnight oil and we're going to we're going to see if we can catch fish we've never caught a fish here we're targeting sockeye salmon these are called copper river reds they're supposed to be some of the best eating salmon you can get i'm going to get my pool together i've done enough talking i'm excited to get this thing in the water i'll do a quick now let me just i just want to see how deep this is how deep are you and when it bumps are you gonna be okay at that level you want a rope it's 3 45 and we don't have any fish eric and i slept for not very long at all on a really cool bed and i think we heard the fishing has slowed down a little bit it was supposed to be pretty good and we're timing it trying to time it with a big number of fish that came through at the count a few it's like 60 70 miles downstream um but it doesn't seem like the fish are here right now so we're gonna go take a break eat feed the dogs kind of recharge and i guess maybe do some exploring sleep and then maybe maybe come back out i think we're getting a little discouraged we want to see if other people are catching fish too or not catching fish okay i'm pulling around baby this is where we slept i brought a blanket but it doesn't really fit two humans and two dogs so we all had to just sleep on top of each other for about 30 minutes dogs aren't having that much fun out here and they're tied up because it's it's pretty dangerous honestly the copper river is not a river you want to mess around with that we're not in the canyon but we're in a steep enough area the rock here is like slate and it just breaks and you can just totally go right into the river so that is why we have some life vests and some ropes and i've got the dogs tied up too we're both a little hesitant to leave this area because it's such a nice area there's a bunch of room even though it's steep there's a bunch of room and i'm having a feeling like we're probably not gonna get this little spot again but we gotta go back do you like climbing whoops we just hit four in the morning well i pretty much feel like i just slept in the front seat of my truck for about an hour because that's what happened everyone is like up super early here the charters there's fishing charters you can do here and they'll take you out on boats and drop you off on these cliffs and it'll come pick you up at 24 hours with your fish all those people came back super early uh arrow went and got some coffee this little coffee shop here expensive coffee but we needed something 7 30 right now and the plan is we're gonna let the dogs out we're gonna feed them walk them around and they're getting locked in the truck uh we want to take both of our nets we want to walk further and the dogs are holding us back this trip so that's what we're going to do we're going to go see see if we can catch some salmon legitimate lettuce wrap come on [Music] [Music] you okay yeah well i think we may have found a spot it's not horribly steep and it's about half an hour away from the truck so perfectly reasonable for one of us to walk back and i think it looks pretty good this probably goes without saying but this river is a big river and it's i mean i personally wouldn't feel comfortable operating our boat so that was completely out of the question for us this year i think we would need several years of much more experience on rivers before we ever attempted this one but a lot of other boaters out here it looks like the charters started taking the the folks out and they go further down the canyon but we're already in an area where it's restricted so hopefully that will increase our chances [Music] [Applause] so we're fishing a thing called a back eddy and the what that is is the current the main current of the river is going down that way and then along some of the edges it'll kind of swirl and kind of kick back up and what that does is it opens our net the way that the fish are swimming and then uh hopefully they swim into our net and we catch them but this is nice down here we got a good spot and we got some blue skies a lot nicer day today t-shirt weather pretty rare up here [Music] well unfortunately we are back at the truck for our second nap and we're just not catching anything uh it does not look like many other folks are either i think it's really slowed down last year when we came to the water was high the fish count was low everything was all wrong so i tried to check the weather this time the water rose up a little bit and that makes it a little bit more challenging here it's definitely a really intimidating river to fish uh we're doing it all just based upon our research and like observing you know we don't have anyone showing us how to do it but there are people out there still trying really putting in a good effort we have fished for hours and we haven't quite been here for 24 hours yet but we're feeling like it's slow enough that we want to come up with a different plan because it's just not painted out right now we can spend like four days five days out here so we may end up coming back to this location but we're gonna go head up the road and check out the bridge really cool area show you some fish wheels if we can see some fish wheels and see if there's anybody catching any fish up there well we're at another spot um i got my binoculars let me see if people are catching fish over here well last time we came here or last year this place this area in particular was like slammed and there's there's nobody at least here so i don't know if they're catching fish down here that's a good 30 feet oh oh [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] wow yep it's windy here on the north side of the bridge this is where the boat launches and the fish wheels the fish wheels are really fun to see lots of eagles of course too the bridge is important because that is the section where the permits change so down south of the bridge the permit that eric and i have is called a personal use permit and so we are allowed for our household 25 salmon sauk guy salmon and 10 for each additional house member so we're allowed 35 total above the bridge is subsistence fishing so it's a little bit different you can have fish wheels they're allowed a higher limit basically we can't fish this side we are restricted to down there it's turning out to be a nice day but it can get cold it could be windy and it may even get rainy well it's four now in the afternoon we gotta feed the dogs or dinner they're on schedule they get upset if they don't get fed uh we were just on the other side of the bridge and those guys were catching some fish i think we saw three fish caught and i think that was the most we've seen caught so far their poles are set up a lot different than ours they have floats on the nets because they're fishing in a really deep channel and their poles are also like three times as long as ours ours are about maybe 12 13 15 feet long and theirs are like 35 feet long so we couldn't do that fishing but it was cool to watch them it was really cool to see them actually catching some fish like errol said just not a lot of people are catching fish i was watching the fish wheels i didn't see any fish get caught in those uh there's a few guides out here with uh clients on their boats and they're going up and down river i've watched them for about 20 minutes they're not catching any fish and we're pretty much at a dilemma on what we want to do we did bring fishing poles because there's other places pretty close to here you can also fish for salmon you can do flossing for those but we really like this place and we really want to come home with a lot of salmon and we're just kind of deciding what we want to do and we're hoping that the fishing will kind of just pick up here and we can we can catch our fish oh heck no okay sorry dude it's got to sit for three [Applause] minutes so it's been about 24 hours since we got to chitna and started fishing we have fished many hours but we have not landed one fish so it's a little bit saddening to say i i really thought i timed this right but i guess i didn't this kind of happened to us last year too and we're kind of throwing in the towel we're gonna go to plan b which is to go a little further north the sockeyes have already been running for a little while and they have already traveled up north we're gonna try to intercept them on a river called plutino river there's a campground there and you're allowed through a day so that sounds much better than zero to me right now i think we're both a little exhausted from hiking in and out so many miles and going in and out of the down of these hills and these these uh hills actually get much steeper if you go further into the canyon and i think that's where the fishing's a lot better but we can't really go that far not only because it's so far away from the truck but mainly because we don't feel comfortable scaling cliffs and tying off usually you have to you have to tie off um because it's so steep while you're fishing you know this is actually pretty easy stuff believe it or not so we're going to head out and pack the truck and head down the road you're like vertical all right that was the hard part it's all downhill from here what time is it nine o'clock been a long day [Music] did you make it you did yeah watch [Music] [Music] okay we are headed out we're going up the hill just another beautiful day summer day in alaska let's go take your easy on the old girl so well this is so phenomenal we had to stop i don't even know what to say it looks like like a whole other world out there the sun is blinding me and we stopped at liberty falls too that's a waterfall that we have not seen and i wanted to stop at but this is so beautiful that's the copper river i'm assuming transfer days fish on [Music] nice one good job [Music] see the boat [Music] nice right here [Music] i'll come down honey and i'll help you with the next well it's been a while since we've seen you guys but we have fish we have 24 beautiful salmon we got the backpacks loaded down we just hiked up the cliff from where we were fishing we're done and we hiked out really far today like three miles so now we have like almost 200 pounds of salmon that we're walking out of here so let the fun begin [Music] [Music] [Music] okay okay that is that's heavy i'm on the second backpack arrow's gonna carry the other one and i may maybe have hitched us a ride back to our camp we'll see hopefully it's gonna be a long walk oh gosh are you okay [Music] [Music] i cannot believe we made it back on account of a very lovely family and gentleman that wrote us out on his atv and trailer that was a four mile walk in so eric and i were thinking yeah the project is two hours but those salmon we either got 24 25 or 26 i don't know which is not our limit but honestly it doesn't even matter it's so unreal the fact that we got them this is our third day here to bring you up to speed real quick we left yesterday we had pretty much given up and we spent the night somewhere we pitched a tent and we had a discussion when we said we're gonna head back to chet now we weren't that far away we came back today and decided that we wanted to hike way out to the canyon and just get it done and we did and thank goodness for that very kind person very thankful for that those are my hands we haven't showered for three days and that person didn't even complain that was heavy oh this one's way lighter [Music] do they all paint that is oh yeah good thing we didn't catch any more because that's that's it oh no it doesn't even fit they filled it up they filled it up they're bigger okay 10 o'clock exactly this trip so far we've driven 370 miles so now we gotta drive back and we're gonna try to drive through the night i don't know i can drive without getting tired for some reason we're gonna go if we have to take a nap we'll take a nap but here we go well i'm here to say we made it all the way home with our salmon we are so excited both of us had to take a shower had to take a little nap before we get to start processing them we ended up with 27 copper river red salmon so thrilled cannot wait to try them we haven't tried them before these fish swim hundreds of miles upriver and they have to have a lot of fat and energy stored up to do that that river is wild and it's turbulent they're supposed to be incredible fish have a great flavor we cannot wait to try them and eric's got a lot of work to do as far as processing them they're big fish much bigger than we were expecting i think we estimated it's probably like 200 pounds so it would have been a lot to backpack out and i'm thankful for that ride really grateful for the fish we would have been so exhausted if we had to walk the four miles out with these fish i can tell you that and i definitely am surprised that we're even here it feels surreal because i think we thought we were coming home with no fish again every year we go out there it's an experience so you always get to come back with that it's a beautiful drive and even if we don't get fish i feel like we learned a lot of valuable things so i definitely couldn't be upset but this year it did pay off and i just feel like we're both just can't even believe it so thankful for it and really eric was the one who dipnetted all of these fish by himself so he's probably feeling a lot more than i am right now i'm gonna go grab him and we are going to start processing them foreign well it is just after 5 30 a.m and i'm not gonna lie i am beat i'm pretty much taking all i can take but we still have a lot more work to do we have 27 beautiful fish that we're gonna play we're gonna fillet all these we're gonna get them on the smoker and we're gonna can them these fish are also known as the copper river reds and this is supposed to be one of the best eating salmon in alaska this specific run so we will find that out you might notice that the tail looks a little funny and that's because we clip off the corners uh that's just what you have to do when you catch these fish in that area we're gonna get going got a lot of work to do alrighty that is it gorgeous sockeye salmon beautiful and the cool thing about canning meat in my opinion is you don't have to be that careful with the fillets it's not gonna matter what they look like they're going in a jar you can leave the bones in there you can with the bones they just kind of turn to nothing so this shouldn't be too bad again ariel is gonna go and she's gonna scrape our salmon with her little spoon and she's gonna get a bunch more of our salmon burger meat boom one down beautiful fillets this i'm pretty sure was the first one that i caught in my net i remember that because it was really small and i was like oh man that's a pretty small one but the king season actually closed king salmon season closed one day before we got there and we didn't do a lot of filming once we started catching fish because we were on a cliff we were tied on with rope we had our life vest on it was extremely slippery once you started catching fish because all the water would hit these rocks but i actually caught three king salmon you know we had to put them back which is no big deal it was just awesome to catch them and two of them i actually caught a king salmon and a sockeye in the same net at the same time and the biggest king salmon that i caught in that net no joke was like three and a half feet long and this thing was just freaking heavy but it was an awesome experience i'm never gonna forget that place it was really great time so a lot of people like to uh clean their fish out there they like to flam and you know they can leave the carcasses out there they don't have to bring that mess home with them we prefer to bring our fish home whole because we like to make other things out of them i think we're going to make some some dog food out of the carcasses we'll feed the chickens we'll probably do something with the row so lots of different ways you can get these fish home i'm pretty sure by the time that we made it back to the truck with these fish i don't think i physically could have processed 27 salmon so i was already a little too tired so another one down this is a female right here so so we mentioned this was our second time going out there first time we got skunked we learned a lot yeah we didn't get any fish that's okay like i said it's a beautiful place to just go second trip we caught fish we learned an extreme amount more we it turns out that the the landslide that we were worried about that we didn't want to bring our side-by-side through because it was so narrow and you were on a cliff they actually brought equipment in there and they fixed it so the trail is like super wide and nice and we could have brought our side by side next year that may work a lot better if we decide we want to do that yes like i said we've learned so much next year we're gonna we're gonna bring the six wheeler we're gonna bring better equipment for tying off we're gonna bring better equipment for stringing the fish off we have a lot we have a ton of different things that we're going to do yeah we needed more rope because you you trying yourself off and the river actually dropped like two feet when we were there it was pretty crazy yep we need you need more stringers for your fish if you're taking that many you can't have that many on each one you need a way to hike them up the hill because we were about 200 to 300 feet from the trail down a cliff um on the riverbank and i think i hiked up the fish in my backpack about i did two loads of ten and i did the rest um just by hand but a lot of hard work and it requires a lot of gear and i think crazy people will do it yeah for sure it does this time around we really learned like so much when we did we covered so i'm not sure how much we hiked because we hiked those first two days a lot we had to come back a lot with the dogs the first outing we took the dogs and i had thought that would work out well to like sleep with them on rocks and stuff but it just didn't work out that well they didn't like it we didn't like it um so we left them more in our shell and that worked out really good i'm not sure next year if we would plan that to do that again sleep out there or if we'd maybe come back to our maybe camp or something yeah it'd be a little different next year and it all depends you know if the fishing's good and how the water is that's what we've learned both times the water was not really ideal even though the fish were great this year and that really can influence what's happening that's why we weren't able to to intercept them the first few days oh let's look at the fat i know and that fish it's crazy it's interesting very beautiful it's a thicker rit like line of so as soon as we started catching fish out there the system that we had errol and i working together it it worked out pretty good basically what would happen was i'd try to catch the fish in my net i'd flip him up to ariel she'd dispatch it she'd knock it on the head she'd bleed them out she'd cut the tail and then she'd put them on the stringer down the water and i feel like it would have been extremely hard with just one person yeah we saw people doing it but that takes skill on the hills yeah it worked really well i don't think we'd ever have two dip nets in the water and for eric he did all that that muscle work just to get your fit your net back in the water really was helpful yeah the fish kind of came in schools and it was something called the back eddy which i talked about earlier so the current's going down and then it kind of swirls around and it pushes the fish up so as soon as you start catching one you want to get that fish out of the water and you you want to get your net back in there because chances are you're going to catch another one i'm pretty sure that's it right there okay we're gonna do a weight and measurement on these fish i think these two are the bigger ones these are about average the biggest one the ones are 24 25 inches the smaller ones about 22 22 about 25 with the tail pretty good size let's see how much these things weigh we usually do not weigh them and measure them at all but i i want to know i want to know how much these are for us they seem so much they seem bigger they just seem bigger than the sockeyes we're used to catching well it's looking like they're about a six pound fish which is a little surprising because i thought the last ones we processed were six to seven pounds which were they were they were fat these ones are long longer but they're big so they're about about the same size they just seem bigger i don't know if they i don't know they fought harder maybe there's they seem bigger anyway we'll say though the plays on the other one you notice how chunky they were like long and wide on the other ones they were big their bellies were big so maybe that gives them more girth maybe yeah cool that fat look at that fat it's crazy i'm i'm seriously like about to cook some of this after this i know we made it to a mid-break snack huh jeez oh you got a girl again i'm headed over the chicken coop i'm gonna give him a carcass now and some eggs they love the eggs and all that salmon we fed them last time their eggs turned the most vibrant orange i have ever seen there you go look peace birds are saying good morning yeah really really pretty nine nine left oh what are you doing bro all righty last one arrow's got some scraping to do um she's gonna start filling her bucket for our dog food chum but i'm gonna get this one done and then we're gonna head inside because we haven't eaten breakfast yet and i need i need another cup of coffee i need no questions there's i'll tell you oh they're biting me so bad i have like welts on my neck gosh they're getting me good they're trying to bite you to your shirt i know they can't but oh they're fighting they're biting oh they're fighting they're biting they're biting me too i thought they're biting me on the scalp smoker fired up and get some smoke going yeah yeah they'll stop all right [Music] [Applause] [Music] ah [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] well we ended up with almost two five gallon buckets full so that means it's gonna be at least two batches and today we're gonna be doing the birch again and i think each batch will probably do for about three hours so i'm gonna get laid on there and then we're going to start the fire it was really smoky last time good thing is we don't have to baste this throughout i'm just going to do a little salt and pepper at the beginning add a little more flavor to it we'll start the smoker and uh we'll just keep throwing logs on there let her smoke you oh did you want to oil it no it's already down there i think it'll do good for next oh my gosh it's a slippery slippery one so you ever heard that saying don't tell me frog slippery has a copper over red okay what's that game leapfrog yeah let the smoking begin no i'm fine with the smoke i just uh how many more jam up getting on there three oh nice can i get a high five i got a double high five oh okay well the salmon smokey we're going to get started on some dog food for the boys we have a bunch of carcasses in here how many got in here maybe 10 or so and we fill up with water we're going to put it on the camp chest stove on low and it's just going to cook and cook and cook with the lid on it'll probably take about five or six hours it's gonna completely break down it's gonna turn into what we call chum it's basically just like a soupy looking mush and all the bones are gonna break down everything and then we put it in mason jars and we freeze it and we feed it to the dogs yes [Music] i don't know how but i can already tell it doesn't look like stuck to it it looks really good oh my gosh it's gorgeous okay oil check was like yeah key we used to be picking these off in the past i know do you have a rag out here i have a shotgun well these look amazing about three hours and 15 minutes these went on the birch these look really good i love the pepper on there i can't wait to try these out we've already got our stuff ready to pressure can these got it over on the counter we're gonna fill up this bucket with these bring it over there we're gonna take care of that and i'm also gonna throw on the second batch on here and get that smoking [Applause] that's gorgeous look at that meat that cross section well one thing i've noticed about this dog chump we've never made the chum out of the copper river salmon there's a layer of like oily fat on top of this and i believe that's what these fish are known for they're supposed to be really fatty and tasty and oily so i'm really looking forward to it and the dog is gonna enjoy the nice fatty oil too this is breaking down uh there's there's still a lot of bones in here like like these so you can tell this is not ready nope it's getting pretty close they're falling apart so probably another hour on this some nice dog food for them let's get started on uh putting our our salmon in some jars we're going to end up with a lot of canned salmon it's going to be awesome one of these fillets like not even that big of one is doing is doing over a jar so this is going to work out good and we're going to do multiple batches so this first batch we're going to do all dill we picked a bunch of dill and then probably do parsley in the next one maybe sage maybe cilantro maybe cilantro whatever we feel like too we don't have any garlic right now or peppers yeah that would have been good but this is this is going to turn out awesome it's always kind of interesting to figure out how many jars it's going to make because sometimes different fillets don't make as much or they make more than you think yeah and these are big fish this is we have like what did i say a little under 30 salmon jars so not that many left yeah left from last year and we're eating them so this is awesome to replenish and then we already froze a bunch from when we went down and harvested the sockeyes and seward so we have a bunch of frozen salmon yeah and it's time it's time to cannon them that's what we're gonna do with all this whole batch and we saved one big filet and we're gonna cook that up i am starving i'm really hungry i'm glad you're gonna cook the whole filet uh i don't know maybe half okay the juice the oils on this are just like i wanted to see about how much you're shoving yourself these look awesome we pressure can our fish for about a hundred minutes and we actually invested in a second question cranner we have presto kind it's been so good to us for years so we just decided we get another one and we're always running double batches double stack so this is gonna make it really quick today yeah each pressure camera we can fit 16. so we can do 32 at a time with our second pressure canner and we're doing like over 50 yards we're gonna do a lot and another question we get a lot is if is what liquid we add to here you do not want to add any liquid to these no you'll end up with a ton of liquid when the canning process is done it just pulls all the moisture out of the fish so don't add any liquid to it yeah we don't add liquid bo what are you doing over here he's extremely desperate for salmon look at that imagine all set people have lost out of their boats i'm thinking that we need to have i liked some people's systems out there and i know we're ready to improve i know not everyone did it but i like the guys there was like the guys that were like they were tying up up at the top so there was never even a chance and i feel like that's probably really that's probably the technique i'm gonna go yeah because i just want to be on a rope the entire time it should be good dude yes whoa you thick enough mister i like nice big chunks are they growing pretty well oh yeah you need more jars already or how you looking so yeah that's probably still hot yeah i did just need to warm up that chum looks really good already the fish stuff that's almost there they're hard when they get stuck together huh that we got both of our cameras ready we're gonna be doing these inside on the indoor stove this camp shift it kind of burns a little too hot for us so we're gonna bring them inside all right pretty sure that is the most beautiful thing besides ariel that i've ever seen that's nice salmon fillet we're gonna cook up about half of this let me see if we got any bones in it i know i got bones over here yeah we're gonna cook up half this we're doing it simple we're gonna do some coconut oil in the pan that's like our favorite way to eat i don't know it just gives a really good flavor and then we're gonna do some of the spruce tip salt and a little pepper and that's it we're gonna see how this stuff tastes you know what i think i'm gonna do we like to fry the skin too i'm gonna i'm gonna flay this off the skin and we're gonna have some fried skin it's my absolute favorite i know boom look at that beauty oh my gosh [Applause] uh that salmon fillet is done uh it looks really good i can't wait to try it i have noticed that i did put some oil in this pan but a lot of oil is coming out of that fish so it's oily and fatty which i'm really looking forward to give the skin a couple more seconds really fry it up and we'll be ready to try this stuff first bite copper river red salmon wow for sure more fat because it's crispy that's so good we've never eaten crispy salmon that you didn't put like we don't bread them or fry you know we don't usually put breading or anything that's uh wow that is the best well that's the best time i've ever had in my life i feel like it's it's really obvious there's more fat and oil that's all it tastes yeah richness is what i taste in it like really rich meat the usually when we get the socks like the ones we just got from seward it's just a real fresh yeah clean just clean meat this is like a real fresh meat but it's got like a rich flavor like a oily this and the other salmon have been so oh my gosh they've been really moist like almost like they're just they're moist they're super moist can i eat the skin yeah i'll eat it all right it's good it's more crispy they're always crispy but this one's extra crispy like puffed up like a pork rind yeah it's extra crispy there's that's the oil in that fish wow okay i mean right up my alley does that not taste like a pork rind yeah i could eat those all day phenomenal oh my gosh i don't even know what to say the best thing ever we've heard the hype about this fish saying that copper river red's copper river heads are the best ones you can get and it's this is the best salmon i've ever had in my life it's good very very happy with that smoker's still going i just put a bunch more wood on there that's got at least maybe an hour and a half left two hours chum's still going it's got another hour the pressure canners are venting we got to get back in there and monitor the the pressure in them this is delicious salmon i'm extremely happy with this stuff you know what i really like is the uh oh yeah this is a little more i really like the pepper okay round two is done it's 6 30 in the evening we're gonna get these put in jars the pressure canners inside they're done they're just kind of cooling off we're gonna take those out and we're gonna keep on rolling i smell it from here they stuck together huh they only think they're stuck to us together okay thank you baby he's prepared do you want to bring them inside for the pressure cooker then yeah when we do the swap yeah yep okay okay i guess i should have said watch out that's some good looking stuff so beautiful they darken so much that's crazy to me i mean they go back to being red it smells good yeah it does smell good was another long night of canning for us we ended up finishing at about 11 30 p.m last night and that's it that's our finished product we've got 54 of these beautiful jars of salmon and we ended up with 19 of the dog food yep and these have nothing like the salmon we've canned they've had this really cool layer of fatty oil in there so really good product we ended up with seeing all this fish laid on our encounter just reminds me of how awesome it is that the state allows you to go out and harvest this amount of fish this isn't like sport fishing or even hunting like a trophy animal this is strictly families and people going out and just getting food from the land we're both thrilled to take part in this i know people have been doing this for a long time this is going to be a lot of canned food for us for the winter and for summer as well yeah there's tons of ways you can eat this honestly i think the way we eat it the most is just straight out of the can or we throw like a little salad dressing in there make a a salmon salad we do soups with it i mean we make salmon patties the sky's a limb you can do a ton of stuff with this fish and canning the salmon has been for us probably the most realistic thing to do because storage it just works that way and we don't really have that much freezer space especially if we were to harvest another animal and produce we also freeze some produce so i'm really limited in the amount of food we can put in our freezer all in all grateful for this trip really thankful for the fish and i'm super thankful that eric puts all the effort and time into packing and going on this journey with me i wanted to go to chitina last year and we did and it didn't pay off but this year you know things worked in our favor yep and we've been on plenty of fishing trips where we put in just as much effort we fish just as hard and we walk away with absolutely no fish so we both know how extremely lucky we are to have all this food that lasts us through the rest of summer and all winter we hope you guys enjoyed this video and we'll see you on the next one yep let's put this fish away oh it's so heavy i can't even move it where are you going with that one you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 752,636

Rating: 4.9152331 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, cabin life, tiny house alaska, fishing in alaska, cabin living, off grid living alaska, off grid cabin, alaska fishing, garden alaska, homestead alaska, alaska salmon fishing, fishing salmon alaska, smoking salmon, preserving salmon, canning fish, canning smoked fish, red salmon alaska, sockeye salmon alaska, copper river alaska, dipnet fishing, copper river reds, canning salmon, dip net fishing alaska, dipnetting alaska

Id: APspuyNHAdo

Length: 63min 3sec (3783 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021