Fish Weir | Turning Heads Kennel

The phone rings at 7:57 waking me. I answer my cellphone only to have it die. I guess the charger hadn’t been plugged in all the way. I jump out of bed because I know what will come next and before I have time to walk into the living room, the house phone starts ringing.

Great. I can’t find the handset and I know it’s Travis.

It rings half a dozen times before the answering system picks up:

Hi Honey! Uhhh….Anyways we got to willow…but we had an adventurous night.

We’re about to drop the dogs and go water them and then we’re going to find a spot to go run. But we had a very very adventurous night…long story short we are going to have to put the truck in the shop…we didn’t crash or anything but… THE BRAKES CAUGHT ON FIRE…I hope you are listening to this cause seriously…MY. BRAKES….CAUGHT ON FIRE…and for once Grayson failed, he wasn’t Mr. Fix-it like, he just sat there laughing. Anyways. We’re all fine. There’s a truck auction in an hour somewhere up here…Maybe I could go…cause my brakes. CAUGHT ON FIRE. Seriously. Yup. Uhhh…And with that news, have a good day.

Talk to you later!

By the end of the message, I’m laughing so hard I am on the floor. I know, I know, the transcript does not convey hilarity whatsoever but Travis’ tone of voice is right on the edge of laughter and its infectious. I finally find the phone and return his call.

“So I hear your brakes caught on fire,” I say when he picks up.

He laughs. “Yup. Grayson just stood there laughing. I told him you know, you could at least pee on them or something.”

I start laughing.

“Instead he threw the last of our coffee on them…That was the crappiest part about the whole thing. That was good french vanilla coffee! I mean it wasn’t a big flame or anything.”

I had envisioned a small fire, you know, the type that happens when you cook steak on the grill and all the fat drips off and the fire wooshes up suddenly but just as quickly disappears.

“Yeah. That’s good,” I say.

“It was only like four inches or something.”

“Oh. That’s pathetic! That doesn’t even count!”

He laughs.

“But how did your brakes catch on fire?” I ask when I can finally stop laughing.

“The truck was acting funny. I pulled over two times before. I checked the rims on the trailer and the truck but everything seemed fine. I thought I had a flat. Nope! Then the next time I pulled over they caught on fire. It’s like they just locked up or something. So then we just slept in the car for like 4 hours. It sucked. We were like right outside of Girdwood and had no cell service. So we just like let everything cool for awhile woke up at about 5:30 and started driving again.”

“And then they were fine?” I asked, skeptical.

“Yeah.”

“Weird.”

“It was an adventure. You would have liked it.”

I laughed. I probably would have. I have weird sense of “fun.”

“Anyways, I thought you should write about it, you know, cause well, my brakes caught fire and we had this adventure and stuff,” Travis says. He is trying not to sound too delighted.

“Ok,” I laugh.

“Hey honey, guess what?”

“What?”

“I can’t wait to go run the team!” Then, a long pause, “Also,” his tone of voice changes, trying to sound really sorry. ” you have to go do fish.”

Great. I think. “I guess I’m going to have an adventurous day.”

One of our sponsors is the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association. Every year they kindly donate us fish after they have taken eggs from them and in exchange we try to help them out when they need it. They use the eggs they collect to stock the hatcheries. They also monitor how many fish they get as it is critical to fish and game for determining when they can open up to commercial fisherman in the beginning of the season. They have to let so many fish return to their spawning grounds so that the salmon population will stay stable before they can allow fisherman to start catching them. Good idea, because they sure are tasty!

The Bear Creek Weir, which is where we get our fish from here in town, has two big salmon runs. In the spring, they have the Sockeye Salmon, also known as the reds (for salmon illiterate folk like me) and here in the fall they have the Silvers.

Not really knowing a whole lot about salmon, I found coming down to volunteer some of my time pretty interesting. The whole idea is that we are helping the hatcheries and keeping the salmon stock healthy. To that extent, we’ve collected about 140 silver salmon eggs and fertilized them so far. It’s a pretty interesting process. First, the salmon swim up to the weir. It’s approximately a 7-mile swim from the ocean to the weir and takes the fish about 5 days. Then, the fish are forced to swim up into the fish trap.

Salmon Fish Trap: This is the only opening in Bear Creek so the fish are forced to swim up into the holding pens.

Once in the fish trap they are sorted male/female. For every 3 females the weir takes 1 male. I’m still not exactly sure why they don’t do a 1:1 ratio, but I guess they have their reasons!

Salmon in holding tank. They are separated male/female.

When enough fish have been captured, the weir performs an egg take. That’s when we go in and help them. Although no one part of the egg take is particularly difficult, when you add it all together if you don’t have enough people it can be a lot of work.

The first thing we do is kill the fish. We only kill a few at a time so that everything stays fresh. I ended up helping bleed fish on one of the days I helped for the first part of the morning. Essentially, I cut near the tail so that the fish would bleed out. It makes it easier to take the eggs and, more importantly, to get a kidney sample later on.

They put the eggs of three females in one bucket. Then, they take a male salmon and (this is kind of gross) they essentially squeeze the sperm out of him to fertilize the eggs. Once this is done, the eggs are put in a salt water rinse.

These salmon eggs have been fertilized and are now being rinsed with salt water so that they will “harden”

Another shot of the fertilized salmon eggs. The salt water also helps the sperm live longer so that more eggs will get fertilized.

The fish, both male and female, are then taken and kidney samples are taken to ensure that they don’t have kidney disease. I guess it is a pretty prevalent disease among salmon and they are trying to ensure a healthy stock. From what I could tell (I mostly bagged kidneys) it seemed like the fish were healthy. If the findings show any of the fish have the disease, however, the eggs will be tossed out.

Opening up a salmon. We took kidney samples from every fish to check for kidney disease.

Kidney sample from the 80th female. This will be tested for kidney disease. If it’s positive, the eggs from this fish will be thrown out.

After all that has been done, Travis and I get to take some of the fish and the rest goes to other local mushers. It’s really a great set up and we’re really happy we have such a cool way to spend our time and to help out. We are extremely grateful that the Cook Inlet Aquaculture Association helps us feed our dogs tasty salmon all winter long and that they provide us with such an interesting volunteer opportunity!