The Maccabees: The Alaska Trilogy #2

Imagine a clan of fishermen traveling in a hodgepodge caravan of trailers and fifth-wheels. After a long journey, they find a place to rest: a sandy lot encircled by conifers and deciduous trees. Just across the way, the bountiful waters of the Cook Inlet. This place will do.

They situate the wagons along one edge of the lot, deposit their supply trailers in the middle. Under this expanse of Alaskan blue sky, there is plenty of room for their watercraft, trucks and a tractor, and the paraphernalia of the fishing trade. They set up a low platform upon which they place folding chairs and place grill their catch. A dog or two keeps the area lively.

Yes, this place will do nicely, indeed.
Picture this enclave and you’ll have a feel for the Maccabee fish camp on the northern outskirts of Kenai, Alaska. From this camp, the Maccabees and their band of deckhands tend to the family site: five set-nets in the shallows of the Cook Inlet.

Shortly after 5 AM, the creak of an aluminum door fissures the silence, followed by a swift metallic slam. A shadowy figure emerges.

Then with a similar report, other shadows emerge. One looks to the bright, cloudless sky. “Gonna be a warm one.”

“Hmm,” another confirms.

A truck pulls out of the lot. The crew ambles down the short drive to the roadway that terminates at the bluff’s edge.

Shuffling in their rain bibs, the crew walks to where the pavement ends and the path drops straight down the face of the bluff. The slope of ankle-deep sand is so steep they had to install a guide rope to help you climb back. Sometimes, at the end of a long day, a crew member will challenge another to do the climb without using the rope—Fisherman’s bravado.

“It ain’t easy,” one of the fishermen says with a chuckle.

All along the shores of the Cook Inlet fish camps are waking up. Some of the fishermen climb out of nylon tents cloistered in the birch groves. Others emerge from rustic cabins, while others still step out of the modern family homes that have sprung up along Kalifonsky Beach Rd. By the thousands, set-netters are greeting the 7 AM opener with a similar hope: lots of fish, heavy nets.

The Maccabee family has been fishing the Cook Inlet for over 50 years, and now George Jr and his younger brother, Adam run the site. “My granddad got his first site just down the beach in 1963,” George says. “I was born in ’69 and have been coming down here since. Our uncle came in and started fishing ’88 and when he retired my brother and I took over.”

“We’ve got our fourth-generation fishing now,” he adds, nodding to his 16-year-old nephew lumbering down the beach in front of him. “There are families that have been at it for eight generations.”

The sand on the beach is hard-packed from the receding tide and makes for easier walking. The inlet is calm, almost glassy, and it throws back the streaked hues of blue and pink that reach across the water toward the mighty Mount Redoubt.

When most people, in the Lower 48 anyway, conjure images of the commercial fishing industry, few of them picture the small-scale operations that typify set-net culture. They likely imagine trawlers, purse seiners, and massive processing ships rather than these Bohemian family operations with 25-foot outboard skiffs that motor along the shallow fringe of the inlet, setting their nets on the sandy bottom.

A short walk down the beach, you come upon four boxes on stilts: two small cabins, a gear shed, and a bright green outhouse. Two of the Maccabee’s crew call these cabins home for the summer, scarcely more than plywood boxes that on a morning like this when a gale is not blowing rain sideways off the water, remind you of a castaway’s reckoning with paradise.

A beast of a work truck, half a century old, lends heritage to the site. Their skiffs rest on timber frames 3 feet above the sand alongside stacks of ubiquitous fish totes.

Now into the six o’clock hour, the crew awakens into their duties. George works with a team stacking nets on one of the skiffs while others check the spreaders where they will set their first nets at the stroke of seven. Another group loads nets onto a platform mounted on the back of the tractor where Adam is perched.

The rumble of the tractor and the rhythmic thud of net corks on hollow aluminum, the call of a Skipper’s command, and quick whistles that grab attention. No one is idle until ten minutes before seven when they finish the prep work and are ready to set—ten minutes for coffee, a smoke, a quick bite to eat and a few ribbing jokes. As soon as seven hits, the nets hit the water and the day begins.

Observed through one lens, set-netting is one of the simplest forms of commercial fishing. The mechanics of the Maccabee operation look much like they did when it was run by Adam and George’s uncle and their grandfather before that. Tractors and open-hull skiffs, buoys anchored to the sandy bottom of the inlet, and the nets. The only modern aspect is the hydraulic rollers that make it a little easier to draw a net bursting with salmon into the boat.

As soon as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game opens the fishery, the beaches come alive with men and women, rendered virtually indistinguishable at a distance by the neutralizing effect of layered clothing, hoodies and Helly Hansens. Skiffs hit the water and the nets drop.

But commercial set-netters play a role in more than just the harvest of a prized natural resource. For ADF&G’s fishery managers, set-netters are a vital part of their management paradigm.

George explains. “First they like to get the drifters on the fish because the drifters can go to where the fish are, but once they get to a certain point, then all that’s left is us, the set-netters, to try to keep it under control so they don’t over-escape the river.” Biologists cite an optimum escapement as one adequate to sustain the species, but not so high that the next generation of salmon fry overburdens the river’s means to sustain life.

In other ways, the business has changed quite a bit over the years. “Back in the day, my grandfather would put his nets out in May and leave them out until the inlet started to ice up in October.” Even into the Nineties, 24-hour openers were not uncommon and nets would stay in the water around the clock, crews heading out once per tide to pick them.

“No more,” George says. The number of openers has dropped, sometimes dramatically.

The worst year in recent memory came in 2012 when ADF&G became concerned about the number of King salmon making it into the river. “That was a bad year,” Adam says with a nervous chuckle. “I had a house, that if I wasn’t able to sell, I would have had to declare bankruptcy.”

Now three years later, George remembers that season down to the dates. “We fished on the 16th of July and they closed us on the 17th.” Then three more days of fishing in August and that was their year.

The scarcity of King salmon has sent ripples throughout the state, both economic and political, as different user groups fear that environmental changes or conservation efforts could compromise their access to this prized natural resource. But for fishers of all stripes, it’s about more than access to a particular fish, it’s about this way of life. And it is as meaningful to the set-net crews, scrambling around their beach site before dawn, as it is to the sport fisherman slipping into his waders on the Kenai River’s cobbled bank. As central to the drift boat captain’s identity standing in his wheelhouse sipping a cup of coffee as he motors out of the Kasilof River as it is to the dip-netter, lowering her net into the tidal flow at the mouth of the Kenai.

But today, the nets are in the water. “They’re hitting,” Adam says and points the arc of the net where tails thrash the surface of the water, and the cork floats are already starting to sink.

“Yeah,” he says. “Today might be a good day.”