Going Hooligan Crazy
Ken Smith/Turnagain Times
A smiling fisherman with handfuls of Hooligan.
A smiling fisherman with handfuls of Hooligan.
Going Hooligan Crazy |
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Ken Smith/Turnagain Times A smiling fisherman with handfuls of Hooligan. |
By Jim Magowan
Turnagain Times Correspondent
It was a spring day in 1965, our first year in Ketchikan, when a fellow teacher asked, “Are you going down to the dock for hooligan?”
Since a popular sport was pulling the legs of “Cheechakos” the response was something like, “I’ll just wait until they come to class in the morning.”
“No, seriously, haven’t you heard about hooligan?” the teacher asked.
A few minutes later, still suspecting a joke of some sort, we were headed to the dock for hooligan.
At the dock we joined several dozen people, gathered by a couple of seiners, handing dollar bills and buckets to crew members who scooped the buckets full of small fish from the hold, and handed them back to eager customers. These small “buck a bucket” fish didn’t look particularly appetizing, but we came to Alaska for new experiences, so we forked over our buck and took a bucket of hooligan home.
We fried the smelt like fish, and they were delicious! The buck was well spent.
The next spring, we were at the dock, buck and bucket in hand to get our supply of fish oil capsules with a tail.
In Anchorage, a few years later, there were no seiners and no “buck a bucket” hooligan. Our first encounter with the hooligan spring ritual was a line of cars parked along the Seward Highway at the Twentymile River.
“What’s going on” we asked.
“Hooligan!” was the response of an eager fisherman heading to the river.
No “buck a bucket” deal, Turnagain Arm is a do it yourself, subsistence (‘personal use’ according to ADF&G) fishery.
Maybe we should call it “bucket of sweat” fishing. Pulling the dip net through the water, against the current, is a workout. The allure of hooligan fishing is elusive. It resembles gambling fever. Dip the net in the silt-laden waters swarming with invisible hooligan or not! You expectantly pull the net out of the water. Anything in it?” Sometimes nothing, sometimes a hooligan (or two) and sometimes—jackpot! A half dozen or more of the little devils.
It’s worse than the slots. You just know the next swipe of the net will be “The Big One.” Even if the last dip brought in a bounty, the next will be better.
Of course it is still fishing and fisher folk are fisher folk. How can you brag about a fish that might reach 10 inches in length? You can show its length between your thumb and forefinger. Fisher folk being fisher folk, hooligan tales take on a different but, truly fishing, perspective.
How many are caught in one dip! There is no official record. The unverified, unofficial record, from talking to a lot of fisher folk, seems to be somewhere between 15 and 6,227.
Turnagain Arm hooligan can be devious little critters. Take this season for example. When the run was “supposed” to start in mid-May, hooligan folk flocked to the shores of Turnagain Arm and beat the water to a froth with empty nets.
But the wily hooligan did not swarm into the Arm when expected. They held back (perhaps watching and chuckling) as the nets, fruitlessly, churned the waters. The late run appears to have peaked in the first week of June when the fishing was limited to the Twentymile River. Buckets were filled within 10 minutes as every scoop of a dipnet produced 15 or more fish. The fishing frenzy continued for nearly a week before the run tapered off.
Dan Bosch, Fisheries Area Management Biologist for ADF&G, Division of Sports Fishing, offered this tip: “The start of the hooligan run is not as predictable as salmon. Watch for seagulls and eagles in the Arm,” he said. “They are good indicators of when the run has begun because hooligan are not strong swimmers they come in on the tide. Fish when the tide is bringing them in.”
And he reminds prospective hooligan fishermen that “When the tide turns, hooligan spread out; they are not all close to shore,” he said. “The fishing may be better farther out so don’t just stand on shore, wade out if you can.” But not too far because the water flowing into Turnagain Arm can be hazardous. A careless act can take you from the top of the food chain to the bottom, in an instant.
The size of hooligan runs varies greatly. According to Bosch the size of the run is estimated from the number caught, not counted by sonar as salmon are.
“Estimates of the size of a hooligan run are more important as trend indicators than as exact measures of the number of fish,” he said. “Over the past 10 years catches seem to be averaging about 30,000 fish a year.”
Hooligan fishing in salt water closes on May 31. Fresh water hooligan fishing closes on June 15.
As this year’s hooligan fishing season comes to a close a few points should be kept in mind for next year.
First: Don’t invite Uncle Harry up from Arkansas to go hooligan fishing. It’s against the law.
According to Bosch, personal use fishing is open to residents only, not to non-residents. All you need is a resident fishing license.
The good news is that there is no limit, either daily or possession, on hooligan, so you can keep all you can catch.
Uncle Harry can watch you catch a ton of them and help you eat them; he just can’t help you catch them (if he wants to feel useful, let him carry the bucket up to the car). Just like the seagulls, that get so tired of hooligan they just pick at them, you may reach the point where you don’t want to look another “candlefish” in the eye (dried hooligan, wick in the mouth, were actually used by Alaska natives as candles because of their high oil content).
But don’t despair, by next spring, when the eagles and gulls start to gather, you will be ready once again, to take up the net and charge to the shores of Turnagain Arm after the mighty and plentiful hooligan.
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