Pre-season June 14, Day 15

Argh!! We tried to do so many things today (and I’m afraid that my knee is in trouble). It was blowing hard. I think if I were driving down Aurora with my head out the window, I’d have to be driving at least 40 MPH for to feel the same wind resistance. So I think it was blowing that hard. The weather said 23 MPH with gusts to 30. But I think it’s a little faster on the coast.

We went into town early (by the first mug-up, where the cannery provides us with snacks, like donuts and coffee) to try to get the boats ready. It’s an ordeal. It’s not as simple as plugs, outboards, anchors, bailers, fairleads, brailers, nets, tie-offs, extra gas, roller (still not here yet for the big boat), power pack… what else? We also have to make sure everything works. Power pack have clean oil and gas? Does it run? Need to find a hose so we can run water thru the outboard while we test that. Uh oh, where did we leave the battery for the outboard? And the motor mounts for the power pack are broken – luckily the port engineers at our cannery are not only creative and talented, they are good to us. We also ran around looking for stickers for the licenses for the skiffs ($65 in stickers from the hardware store!), our waders (first at Northland – yep, AGS did pick them up, then at the Baywatch plant as Big Brad had originally suggested – which is just where they were!), another cell phone – hoping the reception will be better. The GCI guys are supposed to be at the D&D restaurant on Mondays, except not today because they are in Dillingham. Sigh.

There was plenty we couldn’t do to finish the boats – too wet to paint; batteries not charged; the bow of the new boat hasn’t been blunted; the Ambi doesn’t have its roller. And they wouldn’t have dropped us in the water anyway because of the wind. I was straining to get home and grouchy.

Despite all that, we decided to put out the rest of the buoys tonight and get the net out. So we all geared up and traipsed (slogged is really the word for how we get through the mud), dragging the buoys (three per site), two anchors, one turning bar, the hardware, three anchor lines, the tools, and a rock because we can’t find the sledge hammer – it might have gone up in the fire. We paced off the distance between anchors that we could find to figure out where to look for the anchors we couldn’t find which is where we ended up placing the anchor we couldn’t find.

It’s a complicated process – we want to buoys attached to the anchor via an anchor line for the season. We must be able to remove it at the end of the season, but we don’t want it to come apart during the season. So we use healthy lines, smooth rings, shackles with wires through the eye and around the shaft. And the corkline of the net will attach to the ring that the buoy also attaches to.

We got it all paced off, the two new anchors down, the buoys attached. Several times I heard myself say, “This isn’t quite right, but we’ll fix it when we set the nets out here for the first time.” It’s a long way in to the beach to get whatever we forgot. And really, all we need is for the buoys to stay with the anchors until we get the nets on them. Which we won’t do until we have at least one boat we can use.
But we did put out the inside site. We got lucky on that one. We pulled both nets out of their bags, stacked them with the corks together near the line that runs from the buoy to the inside anchor (the running line) and the leads away from the running line. One pile of corks sure looked bigger than the other. Maybe the other was just spread out. So we piled the nets in our hands and started to walk out, dragging the bits of net between our handfuls behind us. We walked and dragged until it became taut and drop a hitch, walked a few more steps, dropped a hitch, and so on until the first pair (one on leads, one on corks) was empty-handed. Then the second pair started dropping a hitch, dragging a bit, dropping the next hitch and so on until the net was all laid out, through the stickiest of the mud. That sure looked like a long net. So I decided to pace it to see if one was a long 25 fathom piece and one was a short one (in which case, we’d have to be sure to always fish them together to remain legal: 50 fathom). The first 25 fathom piece was 50 fathom. Uh oh, that means we would have been fishing 75 fathom, definitely illegal. As it was, since we weren’t in the water, it wasn’t illegal. So we just reversed the process and picked up the 25 fathom piece and then decided to move the 50 in so we could fish some of it on the gravel and sand, instead of fishing it all in the mud. Wise since we don’t have the skiffs yet.

Now for tomorrow, we hope to catch some dinner, we want to finish getting the boats ready, and we must sort through bags and bags of clothing looking for blankets. Paul comes in tomorrow night.

Liz