Steffani And The Salmon

An Epic Tale Of Survival In The Alaskan Wilderness

Robyn Sinead Sheppard

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Photo by Marco Tjokro on Unsplash

I lived in Alaska for twenty years. For much of that time I was married. My first daughter was born in Petersburg in 1975. Her sister was born 4 years later in Juneau, where we lived until 1989.

My wife’s brother and his family were also there for much of the time. Our children were similar in ages, and we frequently would vacation together. Over time, we developed something of a tradition.

On Memorial Day weekend, we held our “Annual Joint Family Freeze Your Buns Off Picnic And Campout.”(AJFFYBOPAC) We’d pack up our camping gear and enough food for the weekend and head off into the “wilderness” all of 15 or 16 miles north of Juneau. Since it was fishing season, we decided that for our first meal — Friday’s dinner — we’d have whatever fish we could catch that evening.

One year we held our AJFFYBOPAC at a popular spot called, appropriately enough, Fish Creek, where the salmon were running.

Alaska has some pretty strict (and weird) laws regarding recreational salmon fishing. The weirdest concerns fishing for salmon at the mouths of freshwater creeks and streams. You could snag (hooking the fish anywhere on the body) salmon so long as they had not entered the creek, but once they had, you could only hook them in the…

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Robyn Sinead Sheppard

A happily retired technical writer, I write in order to understand what I'm thinking. I'm walking wounded from the Sexual Revolution.