Wild Alaskan Salmon

Every fisherman has wondered what the heck is going under that pretty water while he's standing for hours without catching much of anything. So i decided one day i should just stick my head down there and find out. The picture above kinda makes me think i don't want to know!

So here i have a couple of outings put together, one of salmon coming in from the ocean and fighting rushing waters, and one set of underwater images from a couple of days of wandering around upstream in calmer waters. Some salmon here have spawned out and are waiting to die, others were actively "mating" when i found them.

Tharr be fish in them waters!

Old timers say that Alaskan streams used to have so many salmon in them a man could walk across the water without getting wet. In some places that might still be true. This group of salmon had gone slightly the wrong way and piled up in a little boulder strewn alcove. All they had to do was turn around and swim 5 feet backwards but instead they constantly fought each other to inch closer to a rock wall.

I don't get to use my snorkeling housing very much in Alaska so i had it modified to attach a long pole to it. I had a plan to try and go out into Ressurection Bay and hopefully get some pictures of sea lions or whales underwater. Unfortunately the water in Ressurection Bay and the Chiswell Islands is so full of life giving plankton that i don't think the visibility is good enough for what i hoped to achieve. So the pole sat around for a year, until i took it out last winter and got some interesting pictures from down in ice caves over frozen streams.

Taking these pictures was more difficult than i imagined. It was a dark day so i had to use a high ISO and wide aperture to get a shutter speed that could stop the action. That meant a narrow depth of field and the fish vary rarely cooperate about positioning themselves into the narrow focus area of the stream.

Very many fish die horribly before they make it to the spawning grounds.

This sow and cub were wasting fish. They were already full, and the mother was simply teaching her cub practice, practice, practice. They kept catching fish, taking just one bite before discarding them.

Under the surface things were completely different.

This summer i decided to try out the pole at some local streams to see if i could get pictures of salmon returning from the ocean. First i had to find some salmon, which turned out to be really easy. But i also had to find a shallow enough stream with clarity that i could wade out into water where the fish were hanging out.

After some experimenting i developed a little technique that worked well enough. The fish are very skittish of course so for me it worked best to submerge the camera well upstream of and then let the current take it down past the fish. Meanwhile i tried my best to walk smoothly and not fall down, clicking pictures all the while. I had no idea what i was getting shots of so i ended up with hundreds of pictures that were thrown away, and far less than i expected that were even halfway decent. It was a fun time though. I may try it again this summer.

Salmon's bodies change dramatically after they leave the ocean. They generally stop eating and all the energy stored in their tissue is diverted for the purpose of getting up stream and reproducing. After they spawn, they literally begin rotting away, like the living dead.

Some nice humpies.

These guys were just waiting to die. You can see pieces of fish (maybe from them) lying in the stream bed. I did find a lot more salmon hanging out under logs than i would have expected.