What day is it again? Yawn...

This was written on July 1st.

Hello All-

I thought I would sit down and write a bit to tell you what’s been going on around here. The fish have been coming into Naknek fairly slowly lately but for some reason the processors have decided to put us on limit anyway. This means we are only allowed to deliver a certain amount of fish per tide to them. In this case it was two thousand pounds per permit (we have 4) per tide. This can be very hard to work with because we don’t know how much we are going to harvest in a tide. We found out yesterday it was because Egegik (another fishing area in Bristol Bay) is getting hit hard with Salmon and the processors can’t keep up. Those fish will be heading our way soon, and we are ready for them.
David’s Aunt Jane and Cousin Hannah (Harry’s wife and other daughter) flew in from Anchorage on the 27th. They are here to cook and run errands in town for the crew for the season. It will be really nice to have them here.
A couple of days ago we had quite a wind storm which made it quite a bit harder to go through the nets and deliver. One of our boats had some trouble getting off of the beach after a delivery to the truck. The boat and the crew were beat up pretty badly by the surf and then the boat began to swamp (fill with water). We pulled the boat up on shore and bailed out the water to get it ready to be pushed back in the water for another try. After trying out the mechanical equipment the crew pushed the boat out into the water successfully. There are some good pictures of this going up on our Flickr Photostream.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/naknek_seafood/
During the night we ran into another sticky situation. The guys had finished up checking the nets during the night tide and were bringing in the remaining fish from the boats with our ranger (a tractor with tank treads) when they ran into some really thick, goopy mud on the flats. The ranger had about 400 pounds of fish in it and it was singing in the mud. The crew moved quickly to get a tote to put half of the fish in and some rope to pull the ranger out. We hooked up 200 feet of rope to the ranger and the truck and with a good pull freed the ranger from the hole it was sunk in. Some of the crew walked into the hole that remained and found that the mud came up to mid thigh. The fish were then delivered and the ranger was taken to get washed off.
Nothing else really exciting has been happening; just waiting for the Salmon to come. We have harvested about 60,000 lbs to date. We are doing better this year to date then last year, so it’s going well. The run hasn’t even come yet, we are going to get really busy soon!

-Sarah & the crew