1-28 SS Dawn in Alagnak

Fishing in Alaska. Good friend Dawn Collias is a brave hearted soul who had a great affinity for Alaska and all of the sportsman's opportunities it provided. This story is but one sterling example. "Hey Annie Oakley, when you are in Alaska did you do any hunting and fishing of your own? All yes, yes. The first village we went to was Alagnak and we thought we would take fishing poles because I was raised hunting and fishing. Well you could not fish with fishing poles at the mouth of the Yukon because the silt was so bad. That is how the majority of the people die because they would fall in the water and silt would get in and fill their clothes and they would drown. Well the fish couldn't see. So you had to use fishing nets which we had never done. So we decided okay, this was when we first got there, in August and September, and they had a real good run of fall chum. These are fish that are between 13 and 17 pounds, a salmon. So my husband, the Eskimos taught him how to set a net and we had bought a little aluminum skiff and had it shipped out there to that sand bar. So he went out and set a net, the floats on the net had sunk because there were so many fish in it.