Venting over dipnet trip

The evening before we were planning to go hooligan dipnetting, I had ventured maybe four steps out the garage door with some gear destined for the motor home when I heard the noise.

It sounded like a grunt mixed with a growl. I stopped and turned to look toward the sound when I saw the cow moose coming across the yard on the double. Her ears were up, but she was losing no time in trying to reach me. As I ducked back into the garage, I noticed a baby moose frolicking only a few yards from the corner of the house.

Mama stopped maybe four yards from the building. She couldn’t see me and was reluctant to follow around a corner and into the open garage. I carefully peeked around the edge of the building and watched for several minutes as mama patrolled while baby played in the yard only feet from my spy post. I had seen this cow in the yard the day before and she was alone. She must have dropped her calf less than 24 hours before our chance encounter. I watched until mother and baby moved away from the house in the opposite direction from the RV before I finished my loading chores.

My wife and I were heading down to Twentymile River near Portage to try our luck dipnetting hooligan in saltwater. We had not heard of any hooligan in our usual freshwater haunts in the Valley and my wife wanted to try saltwater dipping to put some fish in the freezer. There were only two days left in the saltwater open season, so it was now or never.

The drive down the next morning involved getting reacquainted with handling a 21-foot motor home in gusty winds around Turnagain Arm. The weather was overcast with light rain and winds around 20 mph, gusting to 30 mph. We arrived about two hours ahead of the mid-afternoon high tide and my wife donned her hip boots and full raingear before grabbing the dipnet and heading for the river below the bridge. I put on knee-high boots and my raincoat before grabbing a 5-gallon bucket and following her.

I had dipped here several years before and had had little success. I remember ending up with 11 hooligan for about two hours of steady dipping, so I was in no hurry to grab the net. My wife was looking forward to catching some fish, so she waded out and started the dipping routine. Her net kept coming up empty.

A small lady was dipping just upstream of my wife’s position who was catching at least one hooligan with almost every pass of her net. My wife noted the lady’s technique and adjusted her own procedures accordingly. She started catching fish.

My job was to remove fish and debris from the dipnet, placing the hooligan in our bucket and tossing the debris. Altogether, my wife probably dipped for about two-and-a-half hours before deciding she was exhausted enough to call it a day. In that time, she caught 118 fish — not a bad haul when your fish are only coming, for the most part, one at a time.

We headed over to the U.S. Forest Service campgrounds along the portage road to get a campsite, clean fish and settle in for the evening. Our plan was to overnight and dip the afternoon tide the next day also. The weather, in the meantime, had turned to a steady rain with gustier winds.

As I was making a turn to get into the visitor’s center, I saw something fly by from the corner of my eye. I stopped and retrieved the rear roof vent cover from the RV! We immediately checked and found the front vent cover had also been torn off by the gusty winds. Two 14-inch by 14-inch holes through one’s roof in the middle of a driving rainstorm is not a good thing.

We immediately headed north toward the Valley, hoping the movement down the highway would cause most of the rain to blow by the open vents (it did). As we got closer to Anchorage, the winds and rain slacked off. By the time we got home to Big Lake, there was no wind or rain. I parked the RV out of the weather. Cache Camper made the necessary repairs the next day.

My wife is already figuring on buying chest waders, neoprene gloves and a lighter-weight dipnet for next year’s trip. You can bet I’ll be checking the RV vents more closely from now on, too!

Howard Delo is a retired fisheries biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. You can leave him a message by emailing sports@frontiersman.com.