For years there have been rumors of non-residents sneaking into the Alaskans-only dipnet fishery at the mouth of the Kenai River to score salmon before scurrying South for the winter, and now the Alaska State Troopers claim they've caught one of the scofflaws. Troopers have charged a Colorado real estate agent with illegally obtaining an Alaska resident fishing license so he could get one of those coveted, Alaskan-only dipnet permits.

Realtor Anthony Bartell calls the allegation "total crap." He and troopers have been down this residency road before, he said, adding that Troopers were wrong the first time and they are wrong again. Bartell does not deny he spends most of the year Outside. But, he added, this is because his time is split almost equally among four residences. He established legal residency in Alaska back in the 1990s, he said, and he has maintained it ever since.

"I'm a well-to-do guy," he said. "I'm not trying to save $100 (on a fishing license). I'm an Alaska resident. I've been on the Kenai 20 summers. It's where my heart is, and home is where the heart is."

And, he adds, he did not dipnet. He picked up the dipnet permit with an eye to trying out this wild-and-crazy technique for catching fish, but he never joined the mob at the mouth of the Kenai slaughtering salmon. He preferred to catch his fish with a rod and reel.

No matter how he caught them, however, this is a touchy subject in the 49th state. Oil might be what fuels the Alaska economy, but fish -- especially salmon -- drive northern emotions. Alaskans tend to think of the bounty of salmon that return to the 49th state as "their" fish. More than a few residents are prone to get upset about the coolers full of salmon flowing south through Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport every summer.

A brief exchange from a popular outdoor forum is indicative of the heated feelings on this topic: when one commenter notes that Alaskans really "hate" non-resident fishermen, a purported local responds that vitriol stems from, among other things, summertime RV traffic.

"Many of us have seen stacks and stacks of boxes at the airport, or the rows of RV's that stay for the max limit of 2 weeks in campgrounds (before moving 15 miles down the road and repeating the pattern), complete with smokers, vacuum packers and chest freezers, etc," wrote a commenter named AlaskaHippie. "We've heard folks like this brag about visiting Alaska 'on the cheap' and then scurrying South with hundreds of pounds of processed fish to give away to friends or family or, in some cases, SELL for profit."

These emotions, of course, are a little out of touch with reality. Somewhere short of 200 million salmon were harvested in Alaska this year. About 176 million were caught and killed in commercial fisheries. State studies indicate about 80 percent of these commercially caught salmon are hauled in by non-residents, but the commercial catch by non-residents is little noticed.

What is noticed is the recreational catch, and Alaskans are extremely possessive about it. State law requires newcomers to the north must spend one complete calendar year in the state before qualifying for a resident hunting or fishing license. When it was alleged in 2010 that U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller, a man who had by then won the state Republican primary and looked to have a lock on one of the state's two Senate seats, might have once illegally obtained a resident license it became a big deal even though it had happened 16 years earlier when Miller was a law student at Yale. Miller eventually lost the election to write-in Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski.