Do what I'm thinking!

This is Jake, speaking for me. I thought it was great, considering my misnomia affliction under stress. It's not quite the same as a-nomia - instead of not finding or saying the word I mean, I say a different one. Sometimes, it's not because of stress and not finding the right word; instead it's because it takes too long to explain when things are happening fast. But I felt a special kinship with Jake when he came out with that.

I forgot to mention yesterday that Trina grilled us two salmon yesterday -- and I ate half of one. Yum...

The good news is that we fished this morning from 5:30 AM to about 2 PM and ended up with about 8100 lbs, taking us up to almost 86000 lbs for the season. We have another tide tonight from 7 PM to 2:30 AM and then two more tides the next day. This is a lot of fishing.

Also good news is that Josh's hand is doing well, though it's not as healed as I would have liked. It turns out that when they stitched his hand up, they stitched through a nerve. Aieeeee! He said he's regaining feeling in his fingers - and his hand is taking that task very seriously. So he's still on the bench for part of the tide, coming out mainly on the ebb.

We've started rotating out three people at a time per tide, by social security number (we had to pick something!) So Chris, Jake, and Trina slept through this morning's tide. Next tide David, Bob, and Jeff will sleep out. They're probably giddy with excitement over it. David and Erik actually had the SSNs to step out in the first rotation, but David thought it would look rigged, so he waited. We're trying to be sure we keep two experienced crew people in all the tides. One per boat. The experience people are David, Josh, Erik, and me. (David did comment that I have more years of experience than all the others added together. I thought about my fish pick, which I've had for more than 20 years now - hard to believe - and wondered if it gets to claim experience too.) I think I'll let Erik step out next (tomorrow morning) and I might step out tomorrow evening.

The bad news is that the Friendly Ranger is down. I hope it's temporary - it is stuck in second gear. I was tempted to use a rock to fix it, but Bob cautioned against that approach. I was able to reach Mark Watson at Pen Auto, the man who works on our rangers for us. He's fishing in Egegik right now, but he said he'd have someone who works for him come down and fix it. I hope he is able to - we rely on that machine. If we can't get it working, we'll have to break out the Killer Ranger and take our chances with it - it has smaller treads so it won't be able to handle the mud as well - I figure anyhow we can use it to pull a rope out to the boat and pull it in through a pulley with a truck.

I'll let you know.