Man Food

The source of the Kenai River

The Kenai River makes a hairpin loop before shooting its emerald waters past Riverbend, west toward the tree and sky-lined horizon.  End to end, the river winds eighty-two miles from Cooper’s Landing to Cook’s Inlet at the Pacific Ocean but few beyond the geologically inclined know this. The Kenai is both culmination and present.  Melt from glaciers far up stream send icy water and accompanying silt down to physically make-up the Kenai.  But users only experience the temperature, color, current, and content of the river segment right before them lest they get cold, sleeted upon, swept away, or starved. 

The Cho family has run Riverbend Resort for forty years now.  How a Korean family ends up running a fish and game joint in Soldatna Alaska, might be a source of story and intrigue if it were not for the fact that the Cho’s have been around for as long as anyone can remember.  It helps also that the launch at Riverbend Resort is the access point to one of the most coveted fresh water salmon fishing areas in the world.  Best not upset the family that literally feeds you. 

Every summer, millions of adult salmon make the swim to Cook’s Inlet up the Kenai river to the exact places where they were born-- sometimes a thousand mile journey.  Upon arrival the female salmon lays eggs into depressions called redds, which they make with their tails at the river bottom.  A male salmon then comes to fertilize the eggs and the savory concoction is buried with a swish and settling of sediment.  In this manner, female and male fish move-and-squat, move-and-squat, in an age-old do-si-do of programmed behavior and death.   In three to four days, mom and dad salmon will be floating belly-up in the river.  In six months, the eggs, if not picked out by diving ducks, will hatch. 10% of the “smolts” will ultimately survive the onslaught of forces and creatures designed to destroy them.  In 1-2 years these minority seven-finned adolescents will head to the ocean to become adults.  And in 2-3 years, this cycle will begin anew.

Mike, the fishing guide, waiting for us to load at a loop of the Kenai right before Riverbend

So the anglers stand, wade or float along one of nature’s most reliable migratory routes dreaming of startling bites, wild fights, masculine gifts and fish dinners.  In the fall, King or Chinook salmon are the first to move upriver. Next come Reds or Sockeyes in June and July and finally, the Silver or Coho in August and September.  The Kings are large-- 30-80 pounds-- and caught deep in the river with lures dragged by slow chugging boats.  The Reds are more plentiful-- white people would say the most tasty-- and swim quietly along the banks sometimes not 5 to 10 feet from novice fisherman.  The Silvers are 15-20 pounds and like to reside in slow moving water often where the river eddies beneath the shade of tilting birch boughs.  They are a fisherman’s dream as they are dumb to bait but aggressive to catch.

It’s bright but very early and though not an excuse, the sun never quite sets in the Alaskan summer.  Tony, Mr. Kim and I have joined a smattering of mostly men fishing for Reds between the Riverbend boat launch and below the vista formed by two wooden butchering tables sitting atop a tilted rocky knoll.  The temperature is still cool and many puff warm air into curled fingers and waddle in place side-to-side to circulate blood.  We came here because two days previous our group had chartered a couple of Donny and John Cho’s boats to fish for King Salmon.  We noticed numerous people casting directly from the Kenai bank in the process of pushing from shore.

“What are they after?” I asked Mike our guide as our boat moved down stream, “King too?”

“Nope, they’re after Reds also called Sockeyes,” Mike said, “the tastiest of them all.  You can’t get Sockeyes in the way we are fishing.”

“Why are they called Reds,” I asked.

“Because they're red,” said Mike, “less fat in their flesh.”

“Makes sense,” I said. I avoid the Sockeye question. “I wouldn’t mind learning to fish from the shore someday,”

“You don’t have to wait,” said Mike, “I’ll teach you when we get back.”

“Will save me money at least,” I said.

“That would be true,” Mike said, “but then you wouldn’t have the boat.”

“Sacrifices will have to be made,” I said.

Reverse trolling for King Salmon on the Kenai River

Four hours after our Red/Sockeye conversation, I finally got a bite—a big one.  Later, Mike would spread the word about how “Doc” caught the 40-pound King.  The game warden was pulling his skiff alongside ours to check Mr. Kim and my fishing licenses. I was calmly pulling out the folded document from my wallet when the clicker on my reel suddenly sounded. Mike yelled, “You’ve got one,” and reflexively I leaned forward to yank up the rod, dropping my fishing license into the water.  I swear at that moment I became like a horse, able to see and process both the quaking fishing rod on the one hand and folded yellow document in the river on the other.

Mike animated, screamed at me to not allow the salmon any slack while reeling him in.  He screamed even louder when I informed him while struggling to reel in the dastardly strong fish that my fishing license was now floating away.  “What the F*&k did you do that for,” he hooted as he put the boat into reverse to give paper chase.

By then the fish, obviously large by the parabolic bend of the rod and the high pitched zing of the line at each run, had zipped across the bow to starboard past Mr. Kim’s line towards a neighboring boat with its engines still running.  Mike who I had erroneously believed to be mellow man from Minnesota was red faced, livid and loud.

“Mr. Kim, pull up your f*&cking line!”  (Rule #1:  Pull up your line if someone in your boat has a catch)

“Hey neighbor, stop your ENGINE!” (Rule #2: Stop your engine if the boat next to yours has just caught a large fish)

“Doc, put down your wallet! (Rule #3:  Never bring Green Tumi mini-wallet fishing)

“Warden, one moment.  His license believe it or not is in the water!  (Rule #4: One is never too old to feel embarrassed and strange)

This is not a competition

The fish miraculously stayed on the hook.  A bonafide King Salmon was netted and dragged in.  Pictures were taken.   The warden appeased and at days end, even a short downpour presented to our boat peripheral rainbows.   I was so happy.  I couldn’t wait to tell Seongeun whom we had dropped off at the 5th hour to rest, give half of the body and the large head to my parents, and look at the picture of me trying to lift and flirt with an ancestral fish.  I felt vindicated from my previous fishing outing four years ago when the only thing I caught was a three-pound rainbow trout, which I had to throw back in the river because of local ordinance.  This was 100% contrary to my Taiwanese-American upbringing. 

Later that afternoon when I drove back to Riverbend to arrange the packing and freezing of the salmon, it became obvious that Mike had shared the details of our day with the Riverbend regulars, miraculously ingratiating me with the locals and making me feel like one of the crew.

“Heard you got a good sized King, Doc,” said Johnny

“Mike told me the news,” said Donny.

“Aren’t you the Doctor who caught that King earlier today?” said a man with shaved head on my way to the outhouse.   

“Doc, they don’t teach you to fillet your own fish when you were in medical school?” another man with a Seattle Seahawks baseball cap laughed. 

“Actually I’m a pediatrician,” I responded.

“What ever you say, Doc,” the man drawled, “now lets see if you can catch some Reds so we know this ain’t beginner’s luck."

The price to cut, package and freeze salmon at Riverbend is $1 a pound

Fishing for Reds happens via a technique called flipping.  By August, massive torrents of Reds are swimming up the Kenai not more than 10 to 15 feet from the shore, usually closer—as soon as the Reds are obscured by the water’s dark.  Reds have a singular mission:  To get up stream to spawn. They are so set on this goal that they don’t even stop for food along their journey though they they swim with their mouths open so water can reach, pass-over and exit the gills.  The gills contain tens of thousands of capillaries that extract oxygen from the water in exchange for carbon dioxide allowing the fish to “breathe”.

So the river goes one way and the Reds the other.  To complete the triumvirate, hook with tie and sinker are cast upstream.  The strong river current bumps the sinker along the river bottom with the hook suspended approximately three feet above it.   The rod tip is kept down and just ahead of the moving fishing line.  Just before the rod is parallel to the shore, the rod is yanked violently with the flex of the arm.  This causes the hook to slice through the water in the downstream direction, piercing anything in its way.

If no fish is caught, there is no disturbance in rod momentum and in a confluent motion, the line is lifted out of the water and flipped back upstream.  Thus the term “flipping”.

If a fish is caught, there’s about a 30% chance that the Red was hooked in its’ open mouth and not in its head or gill or body or tail.  You can’t tell until the fish is reeled in.  That the Red is hooked in the mouth is important because it is otherwise illegal to keep “snagged” Sockeyes. In fact, the fine is $110.  Never mind the Red is going upstream to die.  Never mind that either way, that fish wasn’t looking.  Fairness ascribed to catching Reds is constructed around the idea of the traditional hook-in-fish mouth view. The skill of fishing Reds then is:  Knowing how far to throw-out the line.  Knowing what angle is most likely to set the hook in the fish’s mouth. And I suppose for some, knowing who is watching. 

Tony catching a Red or Sockeye.  Boy "flipping" next to him.

Slowly but surely I am getting the hang of catching Reds-- One day and a half sure.  It turns out that for one day, I was setting the hook in the wrong direction, driving the hook in the same direction as the swimming Reds.  That was stupid.

“Doc, I don’t suppose you are catching anything with that technique,” Steve the 55-year-old bachelor said.

Then my line kept on breaking

“Doc, do you mind if I teach you how to tie a knot,” said Mike the King Salmon guide who was watching me from his trailor window until he couldn’t take it any more.

Then all I was catching were Dolly Vardons

“Doc, you need to get you some hip boots,” said a small child, “you’re not going to catch the Reds from the shore.”  The child spoke was she was reeling her fifth Red in.

The first Red I hook comes around noon.  Having never caught a fish in this manner, I am surprised.  Instead of the usual loss of momentum at the 11 o’clock position, the rod instead flexes the opposite direction and again I hear the high-pitched zing of the nylon line being pulled tight. Boy does Red Salmon fight!  As I turn the reel handle out, the base of the pole digs into my mid abdomen in a way that would normally hurt.  But the adrenaline is rushing and anticipation blunting any nominal pain.  How big will it be?  Where is the hook?  Is this a Red or a dastardly Dolly or even a tree branch? I move along the bank towards the small rocky beach keeping the line taught.  I eventually convince myself that this is a fish because a real fish attached to me is now flipping into the air, diving, then flipping again with a fantastical wiggle at the water’s surface as it tries to get away.  Mr. Kim once I am on the beach and the fish about 5 feet from us tries to grab the line with his hands and physically pull in the fish.  Tony looks unsuccessful for the club that we bought this morning to kill the fish and seems vexed by the loss.

We eventually bring in the fish.  The hook is in the fish’s neck.  It is a Red.  One can tell because it doesn’t have Dolly spots but a characteristic faint, pretty, and pink longitudinal stripe.

“Should we let it go,” I ask?

“Kill it,” Tony says.

I feel the stare of a large man filleting fish on the wooden table.

“I have to throw it back, right?” I say to him, “hook’s in the neck.”  Never get on the bad side of a big local I think. This is not our turf. 

“Sure looks as if the hook is in the mouth to me,” he says with a smile.

“Caught it right on the lip it appears,” the man next to him in a cowboy hat confirms as he nods his head up and down.

And so with the club missing and the locals approving, I attempt to euthanize the fish.  The first stone I find is a little small so my blows to the salmon’s head are ineffectual, repetitive and frustrating.

“You just have to kill the fish,” says a grandma without teeth next to me, “not beat it to death.”

“Yes,” I say finding a much larger stone.

This works much better but having never bashed in the brains of a fish before, I am surprised at the force needed to stop a fish from moving.  The sound and dull of the blows are sobering and disgusting.  We wash off the fish now breaded in dirt in the river and run a braided rope through its gill to suspend it in water.  The Sockeye dead looks more alive and I feel a little better.

The catch cooled by fifty five degree water

The next fish I catch ten minutes later is bigger— 9 pounds—  and hooked in the mouth.  After a slightly improved drag and kill debacle, I catch yet another Red almost as soon as I flip out the line in between Tony and Mr. Kim.  This time the struggle is less, not because the fish is smaller, it isn’t, but because I am beginning to understand the motions and movements of fish relative to myself.  I am also more confident, even proud, as I now know that the other Sockeyes were not accidents.  The others around me are not catching like I am. I went two days previous without a single bite!

I will catch my limit of six on this day:  Sixty pounds of fresh Kenai river Red salmon.  Three will be hooked properly in the mouth.  Three I confess will be snagged.  The third will be the biggest of them all, about thirteen pounds and hooked just proximal to the right gill.  Of course, I want to keep the fish.  I can hear my mom saying, what does a snagged fish (the law) look like in the stomach?  But I also feel guilty too.  I don't want to break the hunters' rules.

Looking to all and no one in particular, I ask generally but sincerely,  “What do you all think?”  But just as the question leaves my mouth, a forceful thud against the once moving fish sounds from behind.  Tony has found the club.

“Of course you are going to keep it,” he says now standing up, “we’re Asian.”

Mr. Kim helps extract the hook.

That's what I'm talking about!