The Labor of Labor Day in Kodiak by Auntie
September 4th, 2008
Auntie Jude with a SLAB…Kodiak-Style.
All year long a small group of hopefuls get together over Labor Day and camp on a spit of land between the ocean beach of Kalsin Bay and the banks of the Olds River. No trees, just sand and scrub. Hellcat and Sal Monid have been there and they know the spot.
Salmon running the coast line on one side, cruising the river on the other. Usually it’s a real nice place to spend 3 days and catch multitudes of acrobatic silvers till your arms want to fall off.
Lately it’s been a mix of real bad weather and lack of fish. The former I’m attributing to the catch-all for weather woes, “climate change”, and the latter I’m blaming on a few salmon seiners, looking to save a buck on gas, who, starting about 5 years ago, round-hauled most of the Olds River run. (The river is about 20 miles from town by water.) I was there.
I was busy catching a coho about every 10 minutes! The run was spectacular and all of a sudden we saw 2 seiners setting their nets and hauling all of our fish out of the water. I swear, within an hour the catching stopped.
Every year since then it has gotten worse and worse for the sport fisherman and no one is paying any attention. The seiners have since abandoned the bay now that there are no fish for them. I plan to find out what the hell is happening so you guys can come back up and play. Sal, how do I get them to re-stock and keep the commercial guys out?
On the bright side, I was one of the 2 people (out of 12 in our group) that caught a silver this Labor Day Weekend. That is, before the hurricane hit and blew my tent apart and put an end to our annual fish fest a day early.
Anyway, there I was just farting around (I’m sorry nephew, I was using hardware….) by myself, casting diagonally along the shoreline – a tip I got from our local fishing guru, Hank Pennington – wishing and hoping that a fish was out there just for me (the guys were up higher on the beach playing horseshoes, the girls were hanging around the campfire) and BOOM! He hit hard and fast and took off running up the beach. About a half a second later so did I.
When I finally hauled him to shore, congratulating myself on beating the seal that was after my fish, I turned around and every person from camp had dropped everything and was screaming down the beach, pole in hand, thinking there were more where that came from. It was sad and funny at the same time; I’ve been that person. But THIS TIME I was the one with the fish. So, here I am with my 14 pound ‘chromer’.
I truly hope we can fix this river system; there are several areas and ways to catch fish here from the ocean to the river mouth, then on the tidal mudflats, to the river bends to culverts to the pond on the other side of the road. Plenty of fun and room for a load of people and it could all end. Any ideas anyone??????
