Salmon

Had an interesting adventure this morning. Mark found out last week that the hatchery (Roaring Judy) is doing a free kokanee salmon giveaway on Fridays. If you're in line by 9am you'll get fish. So off we went and got in a very long line at 8:45. They had 1200 fish to give away and based on how many fishing licenses are in the car, its 5 fish per license. As you know, I don't fish, so we were one of the few "1's". Cars in line had multi coolers and jammed with people. You drove up to the water with the fishery people pulling out huge netfuls of salmon and then a lot of kids were putting 5 at a time into big paperbags. Hmmm, school is in session, not sure how they got out of that... Anyway, the salmon are BIG and we brought a little cooler (who knew). They flung the paperbag in our car and off we went with the bag making lots of noise hopping around in the back.

We drove up to a place on the river that Mark fishes, so he could clean the fish (as they were too big to fit in the cooler). It was 30 degrees outside and I don't even know what the river temp was (35?) Mark nearly had frostbite of the hands. Next we will do this differently - possibly wetsuit type gloves and a bigger cooler. And if you're wondering why the hatchery was giving all those fish away- the salmon have spawned and that's it for them - they just die. Nature is interesting...