When I first came to Alaska as a 19-year old, I was fish-crazy. I went out every summer night with pole in hand to all the ponds behind Eielson Air Force Base, expecting to catch a fish with every cast. That did not happen. I caught almost nothing, and discovered the fishing was much better in my home state of New York. I stopped fishing for a long time.

Years passed, and eventually I joined the hundreds, maybe thousands, of Alaska residents who dipnet for salmon in the Copper River. No tackle boxes required in this fishery, no fishing line, no poles. Just a three-foot diameter net on a 20-foot handle, a tool you could use to catch a Labrador retriever.

I prefer driving a small car down to Chitina, a charmer of a town that peaked in the early 1900s, and driving a few miles of the old railway bed of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway. I park, I sleep, then I get up a few hours later and take a charter boat ride, this time from Mark Hem.

For $90, Mark dropped me off on a sloping rock bench a few feet above the Copper River. He nosed his boat into the rocks, pushed the throttle forward to keep it there, and then joined me on the rocks.

He picked up my net and swept it along with the current of the big river. On his second pass, he caught a sockeye salmon about two feet long. He turned the net over to drop the fish back to the river. After four more passes and two more fish caught and released, he nodded to me. I thanked him for the tutorial and watched him drift away in the current. I was alone for the day, or however long it took for me to catch my family’s quota of 30 sockeye salmon or I got too tired to fish anymore.

I hurriedly set up my nylon cords I would use for stringers and pulled from my backpack a square of plywood I set on the rocks, along with a hatchet. Then I plunked my net in the water. The Copper River is brown with the silt from glaciers that slowly grind mountains to dust upstream. Because of this, you can’t see your net when it’s an inch beneath the surface, nor can you see the thousands of fatty torpedoes with fins heading upstream through Wood Canyon.

Most people find eddies where the reverse current seems to attract tired fish and also keeps the mesh of the net open. My spot required me to sweep downstream to keep my net inflated and ready for salmon headed to their destiny upstream.

On my fourth sweep, I felt a delightful resistance in the net, just a bump, that told me to lift up. When I did, a five-pound sockeye wriggled in my net, its fiberglass shaft bending. The sockeye's skin was silvery and clean, fresh from the ocean where it had spent most of its short life.

I moved the net over my square of plywood, positioned the fish there, and bonked its head with the blunt end of my hatchet. When its life faded, I stuck a finger in its gills, lifted it out of the net, and set its tail on the plywood. I flipped the hatchet over and cut the pointed ends off its tail, as the department of Fish and Game requires. Then I placed the fish on my stringer, washed my hands in the river, and pointed to the sky like Big Papi.

“Thank you.”

In the next four hours, I said “Thank you” and pointed like Papi 29 more times. On three occasions, I pulled up the net to find two fish inside. Once, after telling myself “You haven’t caught fish on consecutive dips,” I caught fish on two dips in a row. Oh, and it wasn’t windy or rainy as it sometimes is. I wore a T-shirt.

Thirty fish, about five pounds each. That’s a generous bag limit. Does it exist anywhere else?

I can’t believe how lucky we are to add to our freezer those wonderful, brilliant red filets that are some of the best food on Earth. I hope when my daughter gets old enough to hold a dipnet that the Chitina experience will be one of her early fishing memories.

Two in one sweep!