Ranger is fixed - thank you, Bob!

We cracked 100K lbs on the last tide. Round the clock fishing is hard. I was rotated out on the last tide. Almost asleep, I helped set the nets at 6 AM, having come in from the previous one at about 3:30 AM. (Awareness is amazing. I knew I was due for a sleep-out. I was thinking I would wait for Erik and then Josh and I would go last, so that I would be there for all the heavy tides. But once my body heard that sleep was available - uhn uh - no heroics allowed. You're sleeping!) So after we connected up the inside ends of the net, I glanced over at the other boats and saw that they were OK, persuaded someone (Jake?) to unzip my dry suit (it zips across the shoulders in the back - hard for me to reach and hard for anyone to zip or unzip), and kept walking: back across the mud, past the inside buoy, past the outside buoy of the inside site, over the thick sticky mud, up and across the sand, the rocks, the gravel, over the tire ruts, up the 30-some steps to the top of the cliff, down the patchwork boardwalk, and into my cabin. I slept for about 6 hours. It felt great, but the problem with letting go like that my body forgot to keep ignoring the pains and strains. Ouch!

Bob was scheduled to sleep out the previous tide. I had asked him about looking at the ranger, but he was worried about losing little parts in the sand (we pulled it on to a blue tarp), or tearing the gasket when he removed the cover of the transmission (could it get any deader? And he already knew he could make another gasket). So we decided to call the guy who works on the rangers over the winter and he said he'd send a man out. The man turned out to be taking a skiff to Illiamna so he was gone for two days. Bob agreed to try, with amnesty for lost pieces and torn gaskets. When I told Josh that Bob had fixed it (we've come to expect miracles from him), Josh exclaimed, "Bob is God!" I don't think I even mentioned a few tides ago, nothing related to the Ambi's outboard worked - it wouldn't start, it wouldn't go up or down... The battery cables had come loose... and Bob fixed it.

So when I woke up, I heard the ranger pulling the Grayling through the mud, pulling the first of two loads from the skiffs. Once again, most of the fish were on the ebb. About 7000 lbs, following 8000 lbs from the tide before.

They got in at about 3 PM, and Trina and I had corned beef hash and poached eggs for them so when they realized that our next opening isn't until 8 PM, meaning they need to be up by 7 - yay! 3 hours of sleep.

We'll probably get in from this tide around 3 or 4 AM on the 6th (depending on how many ebb fish we get - the more ebb fish, the later we are because of the difficulty with delivery. We can't make it up by coming out late in the flood because then it gets too hard to set) and then go back out at 6:30 am on the 6th. Those who predict such things are predicting a good push of fish for the next several days. This is just the nature of round-the-clock fishing. We get lots of opportunities to fish, so our poundage is up. But boy, are we ever tired.

Liz