Photos: A setnetting family on Amook Island

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Sara and family en route to their summer cabin on Amook Island.

When river otters moved under our cabin on Amook Island last winter, they tunneled oily dens through piles of insulation ripped from above. There were so many when Peter first crawled underneath in May they seemed to scurry out from every other piece of lumber. We had to burn the scrap wood and bleach the smell from the kayak they'd designated a latrine. Our dogs refused to go near the crawlspace all summer.

The otters were reluctant to leave, even after Peter put a stereo under the cabin and blasted Metallica at full volume. For the rest of the salmon season, whenever those otters swam past our beach they eyed the cabin as if they were just biding their time until they could reclaim the pink fiberglass palace they'd made under there.

It's hard to be uprooted. Even after 10 years of setnet fishing in Uyak Bay, it's still chaotic moving every spring from the town of Kodiak to the cabin on Amook Island.

Last summer we watched a rabbit trying to swim across Uyak. Lots of things swim for miles to cross the bay—herds of deer, mountain goats, families of bears. But it's the image of that sopping bunny, which kept circling back toward the shore before setting out again, that captures the frenzy of relocating.

READ MORE: A changing view: the seasonal migration of a fishing family