My Summer Experience

Cameron Schille
American Studies
september 10, 07

There I stood on a commercial gillneting boat in Bristol Bristol Bay Alaska and we started pulling in the net and then we realized that there was a whole bunch of salmon in it. As we pulled it in we were picking the fish out as fast as we could, it was just fish after fish.

It was the most fish I had ever seen in one set in my life, there is a thing called fish rope that I have only seen in pictures which is fish in every mesh of the net, it makes all of the net sink, and you have to pick them all. This wasn’t quite fish rope but it was close. It took us about three hours to pick the net but we did it. Normally it only takes about a half hour to an hour, but not with the quantity of fish we had in this set. A normal set usually catches anywhere from 0 fish to about 400 or 500 salmon but this set caught about 800 salmon. Which is about 6,000 pounds.

Now looking back at it I realize that i’m pretty lucky because at the end of the season we ended up with 160,000 pounds which is the best we have ever done and i got paid pretty well. That was my third year going up to Alaska to fish and I hope to do it every summer again until im 18 years old.