The high of the day was the delightful pleasure of welcoming the Trainer family from Seattle for a brief visit. Melissa (www.melissatrainer.com), the mom, is a food and travel writer. She came to Bristol Bay with her family to begin to compile information, recipes, and oral histories for a possible cookbook on Bristol Bay.
This was the perfect day for visitors - calm weather and a respectable supply of fish, but not so many that we couldn't focus on the Trainers.
They just came for a few hours - at the predicted peak of the run. We were getting ready to go out for the tide, so we rounded up life jackets for the family and shuffled them off into the boats. Here they are, all geared up. The Bathtub bristled with people including Melissa and her two older children, Caroline and Will.
Here we all are, trying to get organized into the Bathtub to ferry us out to the Ambi. Will was determined to be part of the fishing experience and at first I think he thought he would miss out. I said I wanted James in my boat - it's the more stable of the two and he's only 8. (Compared to the Bathtub, the Ambi is the Queen Mary.) I was pretty sure Will, an accomplished Sea Scout, could handle the Bathtub (and be a help to his mother and sister if needed). The Bathtub is much closer to the water and the fish than the Ambi. Afterwards, Will agreed that he'd been put in the right boat. My crew loved showing them around. We even did the $3 tour (as one of the drifters we passed called it), taking the short skiff ride down to Pedersen Point where the Maverick was tied up. The Maverick is a crab boat featured on The Deadliest Catch that moonlights as a tender for Pedersen in the summer. (As an aside, I have a friend who captains a crab boat and sometimes tenders in Bristol Bay in the summer - and hates it... because it's so hard. Wait a minute - you think that's hard? The tender crew gets to sleep in a warm place, change into dry clothes, work hard mainly at the end of the tide, not all through it. So if that's harder than crabbing, and setnetting is harder than tendering, then by transitivity I figure setnetting is harder than crabbing. Eat your heart out Deadliest Catch! I think setnetters are the toughest fishermen.)
It was fun to have kids in the boat again. James and his older brother Will are definitely future crew material. (I hope they keep in touch.) And Caroline is a budding photo journalist (and she even pitched some fish!) I can speak for James, as he was in my boat. He knew what to do with the fish in the nets (pick 'em), the flounders (release 'em), and the fish on the deck (pitch 'em into the brailer). And he was the first to identify the Zombie Bullhead. Bullheads are ugly enough - but when they're dead, with empty eye sockets, they're even worse. When we delivered the fish, he was fascinated by the "floaters" along the tide line, piling them up in the hopes that Brad, the Gehl driver, would run over them and squish them. Euwww. What is it about boys?
They had a six o'clock flight to catch so David ran them up the beach to their 2 WD rental and came back to try to help with the rest of the tide. It isn't that we really like slow tides so much, but there are some benefits. David used the low stress tide to see how much service the rowboat could be. Here he is, going through a net in it. And I got to take pictures (everyone else fished). 
Sarah, Roger, and Evan were in my boat for the rest of the tide. Here are Sarah and Roger on the roller. Sarah is standing on the rail looking out for problems in the nets - "ghost" fish that we don't want to catch; "hangers" that we don't want to lose. Roger is picking something out of the net. 
And here is Evan wrestling a fish out of the net.
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