Radio Script
1998

Chitina Fishing
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STORY:

MASTRIANO: "Chitina fishing rules!"

Tony Mastriano has good reason to feel jubilant. Having arrived in Chitina from Fairbanks only a few hours ago, he's already caught his limit of thirty salmon. Most are sockeye--or red--salmon, each weighing about six pounds. But four of them are king salmon--lunkers that weigh forty pounds or more. Not bad for a guy who's not using a rod and reel.

Then again, no one's using a rod and reel. That's what makes the Copper River salmon fishery so unique. Instead, fishermen use dip nets to scoop migrating salmon from the water. A large net at the end of a ten- to twenty-foot pole might seem unsporting. But it's not as easy as it sounds. The fast-moving river is full of glacial silt, so seeing the salmon is impossible. Mastriano says you have to "feel" the salmon hit the net.

MASTRIANO: "Just sweep the net. Let 'em go in it and pull hard. All we're doing is letting the water carry it. We let the net hit the bottom and there's a little eddy there that's working for us. We've mastered the technique, what can we say?"

Each year, millions of sockeye and king salmon return to the Copper River to spawn in its tributaries and lakes. And although it's only mid-July, some 7,000 fishermen and women have themselves migrated to this famous Alaska fishing hole. Among them are Lee Cline and Bill Wallis of Eagle River.

Jan Priddy with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game takes a scale sample from a sockeye salmon along the Copper River. Biologists will examine the tree-like rings on the scale to determine how old the fish is and how long it spent at sea.

CLINE: "You couldn't ask for a better day. The fishing was excellent. We probably caught twenty fish the first thirty to forty-five minutes we were here. Bang, bang, bang. You can see the quality of them. They're beautiful fish. The first fish we caught was a king, bang. We thought boy, this is going to be dynamite!"

But before they could dip their nets into the near-freezing Copper River, Cline and Wallis first stopped at the makeshift building alongside a gravel airstrip at the edge of town. The building is summer headquarters for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. On this day, technician Molly McCormick is talking to a dozen excited fishermen. Each is eager to pick up a fishing permit.

McCORMICK: "We'd like you to fill out the top section of the card and drop it off before you leave the area. There's a drop box just as you start down the airport road hill. You need to punch the card immediately when you land each fish. You also need to cut the tail fin off the fish. That needs to be done before you transport them from the fishing area to prevent the fish from getting into the commercial market. Everything else is pretty much the same. You're all set, good luck!"

About eight miles of river are open to dip netting. A couple of sandbars that jut into the river are popular fishing spots. Beyond the sandbars, the river enters a narrow canyon with high, steep cliffs. Some of the best fishing places are at the bottom of these barely negotiable cliffs, where the water roils, and where migrating salmon take refuge in the slower-moving back eddies. But the rocks are extremely slippery and falling in is a real danger. Fishermen who opt for these spots are smart to wear a life jacket and tie themselves to a tree or a rock.

Go downstream about seventy miles to where the river empties into the ocean, and you'll find that biologists have set up a sonar station. The sonar automatically counts salmon entering--biologists call it "escaping"--into the river. From there, it takes about ten days to six weeks for salmon to reach the gauntlet of dip netters upstream. Even with all those nets in the water, enough salmon make it to their spawning grounds to replenish the stocks. State biologist Tom Taube helps manage the river's one hundred distinct stocks of salmon.

TAUBE: "Well, it's going pretty good. We've had a fair number of fish pass by the sonar. That's how we get our numbers of what the escapement is in the river and base our management on it. There are daily escapement goals and then we look at the escapement on a weekly basis. This year we're already at 400,000 escapement. Last year the escapement ended up at 1.2 million, making it one of the best years on record."

Much of the data biologists use to manage this fishery comes from the hard work done by Jan Priddy, a field technician with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Each day she greets fishermen at the river, and after some small talk, she examines their catch. She measures each fish and takes note of the species and whether it's a male or female. That done, she carefully plucks a single scale from each fish. From that one scale, biologists glean a wealth of information.

PRIDDY: "We're trying to see where they've been swimming and how old they are. We can tell how long they spend in saltwater and how long they spend in freshwater. We're trying to do six hundred a week now to catch up."

Because so many fish return to the Copper, fishermen are allowed generous catch limits. People with dependents are allowed thirty fish, while individuals may keep fifteen fish. In each case, four of the total can be king salmon. Tom Taube says the fishery is open to Alaska residents only.

TAUBE: "A lot of people have been coming here since the 1960s. For them it's very important. It's a yearly event. They plan their summer vacations around this. Then there are people experiencing it for the first time and for them it's a unique experience. The Chitina is a beautiful area. For most people, once they do it, it kind of gets in their blood. They return every year, just like the salmon."

OUTRO: For Arctic Science Journeys, this is Doug Schneider reporting from the Copper River in Southcentral Alaska.