Reds Have Become an Addiction

I woke up this morning to Ryan's voice calling his mama to see if she had a good flight. Her flight turned out to be next to a not-so-fun person and American ended up losing her 40 lb box of fish and suitcase. What a bummer! Especially because we caught, cleaned, filleted, froze, then food savered, then froze all of those fish individually. I am thinking that this is like an early Christmas for the baggage handlers and they know how yummy the fish are. So they "lose" the fish. :) Sarcasm aside, I'm sure the fish will come in tomorrow and they'll still be frozen and just as delicious...hopefully.

We then hopped out of bed and immediately headed for the outdoors to smoke the salmon I caught yesterday and to start working toward our limit of reds for the day. I hit my limit (but two of them were pretty beat up, one had someone else's hook and line already in its mouth and another had slashes maybe from a boat) and Ryan caught 2. I have to give him credit though because the ones he caught were pretty huge (they are the two the left). That is Ryan's hand just to give you a frame of reference for how big these fish are. When they are snagged they fight so incredibly hard! My arms are so sore.

The salmon run has been slowing down in the past few days and we feel an obligation to get out there everyday and catch our limit. We'll probably end up with more salmon than we can eat but there's a sort of satisfaction in having food that you've caught yourself. :) They've also started to change a bit..and are looking a bit prehistoric. When the salmon hit the freshwater, their snout starts getting gnarlier and their bodies turn red. One of Ryan's big ones had the beginning of the gnarly snout...ewwwwwwww.