![]() I couldn’t imagine enough fish to feed the masses, but I needn’t have worried every few seconds, a dip netter broke from the line and lurched toward the land, a sea-bright sockeye thrashing in the mesh. Up the beach, hundreds of dip netters huddled like wading birds, nets extended into the incoming tide. Brandon assembled his dip net, a long aluminum handle culminating in a hula hoop-sized mesh bag, and splashed into the estuary. It all felt familiar: The eclectic crowd resembled a more purposeful version of the hordes at Coney Island. A church group distributed hotdogs and bibles scrums of brown-skinned kids wrestled over footballs a Chinese family in matching lime-green hats cut fish in coordinated effort. On the beach, a sprawling tent village flapped like prayer flags in the salt breeze gusting off Cook Inlet. The fish counts had spiked that morning, and most of Anchorage, Homer and Seward seemed to have gathered at the Kenai’s mouth. But when my friend Brandon headed to the Kenai one July afternoon to net his winter meat, I tagged along to witness the action. ![]() My own fishing privileges are still restricted to hook-and-line. The head of every household can take 25 sockeye by dip net, plus another 10 fish for each family member. Then again, when the sockeye run, Alaskans don’t fish, they harvest. Some days, when a pulse of sockeye in the Kenai River set online fishing forums abuzz, my office sat empty as a fairground in February, coworkers vanished by unspoken agreement - no ”Gone Fishing” placard necessary. As a native New Yorker recently arrived in Alaska, I learned this truth the hard way: My emails went unanswered, my calls unreturned. When the sockeye salmon start running, all bets are off. Summer on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula is a bad month to schedule meetings. Like Tweet Email Print Subscribe Donate Now
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