Big or small...kill em all.

On July 31st at 11:59  p.m. the Kenai River gave out a sigh of relief, King and dip netting season is over. The King run went out with a whimper, the no bait restriction made the last 5 days difficult but we did manage to get some nice fish like this one being lovingly cradled.

Because of the restriction I'm hoping that the run makes its escapement goal, we need these fish to spawn but I kind of have my doubts. The record red run we have makes management so difficult of the smaller runs in a mixed stock fishery. Right now we have 1.42 million reds into the Kenai, the most ever is my guess. When all is said and done it will be records all around, a commercial harvest of around 9 million, a dip net harvest of around 1/2 a million and a sport harvest of around 70,000.....I'm just guessing but I'd bet dollars to donuts the those numbers will be pretty close....anybody see anything jump out in that deal????

With King fishing in high gear and a million sockeyes in the river Mile 14 has been a busy place to say the least. Hers a pic of our parking lot on August 1st, where I'm standing our friend Stan had his fish camp set up with 3 campers and a tarp...as you can see the attraction here is the salmon and not the peace and quiet.

July is just flat intense around here. Its hard work and I like to think I do it gracefully, I think the only day of the entire month that was bit much for me was the 8th, the day I had the procedure and went mano on mano with the seal. One of my tricks for staying focused is I always put a list of goals on my chalk board in the gear shed. It helps keep me on task and reminds me of what I need to do, what I want to do. But I got to realizing that I was only batting about 50% with my goals and some of them were simply unattainable, maybe that's the best kind, when you continually work at it and admit that theres no perfection in your life. So this year I just condensed it down to some important words to notice every day,  maybe its an easier way to remind myself of what should happen, maybe.  And yes, I know I misspelled perseverance.

I have a few days here to get ready for silvers. I take the trolling motor off the boat and all the King gear goes away. Then I load the smaller nets like the rubber one I use to release trout and load the boat with all we need, bobbers, divers, smaller Kwikfish, spinners and wobblers. The next pics you see will be of my favorite fish, shiney bright Kenai silver salmon...and soon.

Thursday morning I'll be at Central Peninsula Hospital seeing a lot of my friends and having my esophagus dilated, just like before I'll be fishing the next day.  Our friend Gena said she'd be my recovery room nurse so when I come out of the fog I'll see a friendly face right off...thats pretty cool.  Then me and MPeasy will go the open house / opening of our friend Dr. Craig Humphries Kenai Spine office where the conversation will no doubt get around to why I should chew eggs before I swallow them...oh well....so please, come back next week when I'll have some silver and trout pics up.