Paul Herbert catches fish in his wheel - Part 1 of 2
Thursday, July 29, 2010 at 8:01AM 
This is Paul Herbert, last Saturday morning, just after 8:00 AM, driving his boat up the Yukon River from his house on the bank of a slough in Fort Yukon. He is headed to the fishwheel that he built two months earlier and hopes he will find a good number of salmon in the box.
Paul made this boat 22 years ago. He says it is an old, tired, boat but it skims across the surface of the Yukon quite nicely.
When he arrives, Paul finds some 15 fish in the box, including these. Driven by the swift current, the wheel keeps turning and the baskets plunge into the water over and over again. Every now and then, a basket will come up with a fish and then drop it into a chute from which it slides down into the box.
Fish in the box. The day before, there had been 30.
Paul transfers salmon from the box into his boat.
Paul spreads the salmon out across the bottom of the boat. A few of them are missing their anterior dorsal fins. Paul explains that this identifies them as having been born in a hatchery in the Yukon Territory.
Paul washes his hands in the river.
Paul checks his wheel two, sometimes three times a day. Each time, he adjusts it to make certain it is secure and aligned as he wants it. Each time the baskets plunge into the water, they should barely scrape the bottom. When we hear the sound pebbles tumbling through the wire mesh of the baskets, Paul knows he has the wheel properly set.
Note the fence that barely protrudes above the water between the bank and the wheel. That fence will direct fish that come to it into the path of the fishwheel baskets.
When he was a boy living out in the woods with his grandmother, Belle Herbert, Paul would sometimes fashion toy fishwheels from sticks. When he grew older and started to fish by wheel himself, he just made them bigger.
The structure that holds the paddles that the current pushes against to keep the wheel turning...
...and turning and turning and turning. It is an easy thing to stand for awhile and watch the wheel, hoping with each half-rotation that a salmon will appear in the basket as it rises from the water.
After watching for awhile, accompanied by the sound of the current, the paddles and baskets splashing into and rising out of the water and the groaning of the wooden axle turning in its sockets, I felt almost as though I was being hypnotized.
No fish appeared in the basket during any of the three visits that I made there with Paul.
Paul with a King Salmon. At sea, the salmon are silver, but grow redder and redder as they migrate upstream to spawn. When they reach this shade of red, Paul notes, the run is nearly over. As the red deepens, the flesh of the fish will become inedible. It has been a poor year for kings. The river has been unusually high and the drift of wheel-smashing, net-ripping sticks and logs heavy.
The silver salmon run should begin soon. Paul hopes it will be better. When the silvers run heavy, the baskets will sometimes pull one up with virtually every scoop - sometimes, the wheel will grab two, three, or even four fish in a single scoop.
This means a lot of work, but also a good staple of food to eat through the winter, and to give to friends, relatives and community members who, for reasons of age or health, may not be able to fish for themselves.
It is time to go back to Fort Yukon, where Paul will soon be cutting fish.
Heading downriver, fish in front.
A young couple from Norway had pulled up in front of Paul's cabin in a canoe several days earlier and he had invited them to set up camp. Julie takes a photo of Paul with the big red king, which he is hoping will still be good.
After Julie gets her photo, Paul gives her a fishing pole, tells her to hold it and pose with the fish and get her picture taken. Now she will have a good picture that she can lie about when she gets home, he tells her.
Paul has some serious work ahead of him. He transfers the salmon from his boat to a box on his fourwheeler. Next, he will take them to the cutting table in front of his smokehouse and then cut them, just as his grandmother Belle taught him to do.
The cutting and smoking will be the subject of my next post.
Reader Comments (6)
Cool stuff! Never knew how it worked. Down here in the south we have nothing like that, but we also don't have snow. Keep up the good work!
Charlotte, NC
has been a bad year for salmon in our province too, water has been to warm
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/new-brunswick/story/2010/07/28/nb-dfo-miramichi-salmon-pool-closing-1136.html
Looking forward to seeing how smokes salmon.
And, hey, you were right about Tim. He and Debbie will be moving to Alaska next week.
Thanks for the continuing education. So enjoy your blog!
Verrry interesting. And the photos are beautiful.
hey--just wanted to say that Uiniq recently appeared in my Barrow mailbox and it is beautiful--The pictures are great, of course, if a little too carnivorous for my tastes though as an old northern plains farm girl I do believe it is important to acknowledge and respect where our food comes from--but the stories really make it something everybody should read--weaving the way the way too many drunk or desperate suicides have impacted the lives of those who loved them down through the years is very powerful--thank you for a great piece.