Dip Netting

See the shiner on his eye from the trampoline incident at Grammy's house? This is only 5 days after his seizure and our ER visit...amazing how quickly they recover. I'm so thankful for that.

My little boy trying to put on his own shoe. Amazing how fast they go from being totally dependent on mom & dad to wanting to do things on their own.

As per our usual tradition we were able to dipnet from the Kenai river again this year. Jared & Kaye and their family came down a little early to hang out before the madness started. On the 15th, while Shayne and Jared went fishing, Kaye busted out the inflatable swimming pool for the kids (b/c miraculously we had a break for a couple of hours from the rain). They LOVED it! I never did bust out The Bug's swimsuit, but he didn't seem to mind just chillin' in his t-shirt and nothin' else. :) Malia and he had a blast playing in the water. Tyler, or Little T as we call him, was just a pleasant little boy watching all the action.

The next day, the 16th, the boys took the boat out on the Kenai. The boys consisted of; Shayne, Jared, Drew Clerc, and his father-in-law (I can't remember his name, is that bad?) Thankfully, for the first time since we started dip-netting I didn't have to go! Yeah!! They started at 6am, and by 2pm they had almost 200 Salmon. 99% of the salmon were Red, or Sockeye, Salmon. The other 1% were either a couple of small King Salmon, or a few very small Pink Salmon. It was a good day to go...a huge plug of fish and pushed through the river and they were lucky enough to be on the water when they went through.

It's awesome when you get that many salmon, b/c it replenishes food storage, and means you don't have to worry about fishing as much for the rest of the summer, and whenever we have guests we have some salmon to feed them. The bad thing is, we have to process all of those fish. So after a short nap for the guys, we started the sorting, filleting, vacuum packing/cutting up the fillets of almost 200 fish.

I think we finally finished around 2 or 3 am...it was craziness. But it always is every year. We froze about 25 fillets, and then either canned or dehydrated/made jerky of the rest. It's pretty insane the amount of fresh wild Alaskan Salmon we have. We eat a lot of it too...The Bug loves his canned salmon sandwiches.

I took a pic of one of the bigger fish and The Bug to show the size comparison. It's as tall as he is. I also took a pic of the madness in our garage. And...of course I had to take a pic of my amazing husband filleting all those fish. In fact, after he finished ours, he helped Jared with the rest of his. See the picture of that nice big salmon fillet sitting there...it's nearly perfect. That's how great my husband is! :)

So, while we are extremely grateful for the opportunity to dipnet and add this to our food storage, I'm always so glad when it's all over!!