Matt and Chelsea's Alaskan Summer: Week of Fishing

Matt and I just spent the last week fishing on the Kenai River. The sockeye salmon were running last week which means that they were swimming in from the ocean to begin their journey to the spawning grounds where they were born. Some salmon travel over 1000 miles to their spawning grounds. We were fishing during the second run of salmon, which are much bigger numbers. On monday there were almost 83,000 salmon that entered the river from the ocean. And over 1 million salmon make up the entire second run, lasting a week or so. Thats a lot of fish.

The sockeye salmon (reds) are supposed to be the strongest fighting of all the pacific salmon pound for pound. We saw many people snap their lines and even their poles trying to get these fish in. An average size is about 6-8 lbs.

So the limit is 3 fish per day that you can catch. We caught 12 fish last week. We filleted them and froze them. Now we have like 50 lbs of alaskan sockeye salmon sitting in our freezer. We are planning on smoking most of it although we're also thinking about lox... yum.

Yes. We did dissect this fish. The egg sacs are huge! The gills are on the left, the heart below it. The esophagus is attached to the stomach, the small intestines are those strings, and the liver is next to the small intestines.

We've seen a bunch of moose, they're like deer up here, but huge! A mom and her baby walked through the backyard at the kenai house right next to the window. She was the size of a large horse.