June 24: David and Sarah arrive... not!

The phone rang very early this morning. I stumbled from my bunk and found it, but by then it had stopped ringing. So I took it back to my bunk with me and it rang again. I found it faster this time and it was David telling me that they wouldn't be coming until tomorrow because today's plane had mechanical problems. After an hour of not getting back to sleep, I finally wondered why they didn't just take a later flight. I called back to ask. Because their luggage might not arrive.

So now, at the end of the day, Rohan is heading to the airport to pick up 150 lbs of frozen food (I hope it's still frozen) and whatever other luggage they had. David and Sarah will follow tomorrow and still we won't be able to pick them up because again we have an opening. (Not complaining.) This one starts at 1:30. David and Sarah come in at 12:12. It would be close but we definitely don't want to miss the opening since that's when we've been getting all the fish.

We had a little more than 7000 lbs today. This is darned good for this time of the season.

When I headed down the stairs today for the 12:30 set, I noticed that the tideline was much higher than it had been - yikes! All the way to the cliff. This is a problem because we left our equipment (red truck, ranger, green four wheeler) parked in the way of the water. It is never a good feeling when the ground all around the equipment is wet and there are no tire tracks in the sand. I tried the ranger and it started. I was relieved and thought everything else would be OK. But Luka ran the green four wheeler into town and back at high water hoping that the starter for the New Boat's power pack had arrived. (It hadn't.) Then Rohan took it in to then take the white truck (the one with reliable brakes that was waiting for David and Sarah) to the airport, but once in town, at about the gas station - the green four wheeler just died. Non responsive, dead. Probably because, as Roy put it, it went swimming. My fault.

We decided that Josh should take the red truck in to gather up the disabled green four wheeler and deliver it to Roy. But when Josh parked the truck the night before, he forgot to turn off its lights and the battery was dead. Sigh. We have a spare charge battery thingie, but of course, it wasn't charged up. He took the generator down to try something. (I'm not sure what, but I was thinking about the car in which he used a coat hanger in the place of a battery cable that subsequently burned to the ground, and then netted him a parking ticket because it took him more than three days to get the carcass towed away.) Finally, I remembered a battery charger I have that has an "engine start" level and he was able to get it started with that. By then Rohan had identified a burned out fuse, found replacements and burned out many more. That was when he got the swimming-related diagnosis.

So the four wheeler will either stay at Naknek Engine for rehabilitation or go to Roy (not sure how it might get there, so Naknek Engine is the more likely solution). Rohan will leave the truck for David and Sarah again and come back on the old blue four wheeler after stowing the frozen food in the freezer in the net locker; and Josh will park the red truck and the ranger out of the way of the tide.

Final difficulty of the day: even though we try to leave the keys in everything, just for this kind of problem, the blue four wheeler didn't have a key, so Roger took the now-running red truck to town to bring a key so we would have a four wheeler on the beach. Time for bed!