July 30: Season's goodbyes

This is my least favorite part of the season. Though I sorely miss the people I leave behind when I go fishing and am eager to see them again, some important part of me feels at home in the mud, on the cliff, in the wind (and even under water sometimes) in that part of the world as it does in no other. Still, even if that part of me can't actually be at home all the time, it is a great gift to know what home feels like and to be there for part of the year.

I cherish the time alone at the beginning of the season and at the end of the season as well (even though I miss the crew greatly). This year, I got to experience the joy in sharing the end of the season with an old friend (not that she's old!) Because of Jean's help, a few of things were different: 1) I'll be able to return to a clean cabin, probably rodent free, and I'll be able to find things; 2) closing up was a far less stressful experience; 3) I got to live side by side with an old friend; and 4) we were early to the plane.

After taking the crew and all the salmon to the airport on the 27th, we were too danged tired to stop at AGS to wash down the new four wheeler and the trucks. Instead we went back to the cabin to do some of the work waiting there, catch up on the blog and maybe get some sleep. We should have pushed ourselves through the tiredness, though, because by the time we got to AGS on the 28th, the water down on the dock was turned off. Dang. That'll be OK for the trucks because I can ask Eddie, who will work on them over the winter (and there's plenty to do on all of them) to wash them down. The new four wheeler, though, will sit there under a patina of salt over the winter.

Roy let us use the shower and laundry facilities in his bunkhouse, so we spent the afternoon doing that laundry, trying to change the oil filter on the Ambi (no good - had the wrong filter), and when we couldn't do that, we just tried to keep the winter off by using tarps and bags to protect the outboard and any plastic or rubber parts (like the steering console, the throttle control, the fuel lines). Maybe it'll be stored inside.

We hadn't been able to get one of the generators going so I took that in as well to ask Roy to have a look at it. He is very good to us - he stopped what he was doing (I think he was on task # 1076 of a 10,000 item closing list) to walk through the steps of figuring out why it wouldn't run. 1) Is it low on oil? It has an auto shut off if the oil gets too low (thankfully). 2) Is there goo in the carburetor? (Turn the little screw that releases whatever is at the bottom of the bowl through the tube - is it rusty water or gas?). 3) Unscrew the bolt under the bowl to see if it's full of sea monkeys (it was), but that didn't explain it. 4) Take off the cover that goes over the spark plug and look at it (is it wet with gas?). 5) Realize that you didn't check the most obvious thing: is it out of gas? (Yes. I was mortified. But I did learn steps 1 - 5 and will endeavor to do them in a different order in the future.)

We returned to the cabins with clean laundry (to carry up the cliff without getting it dirty again - no stairs) and tackled cleaning the top of the cliff of the materials used to bring up the stairs (pulleys, wire rope, other line, shackles, chains...), securing the stairs in case the cliff erodes a lot, and finishing the final sweep of the crew cabin (there are the graham crackers!), the bunkhouse (there are the missing headlamps!), Lynnie's cabin (sorry, Jake - you left your mom's yummy cookies and Jeannie and I felt we had a responsibility to them), and Debby's cabin (there's the lower unit oil, the hacksaw, my hammer, the tool bucket, the shackles...), before finishing boarding the windows, installing the padlocks, and boarding over the doors. It's a big job, much easier with help.

I went back into town and didn't get back till it was dark and the tide was high. Hugging the cliff as I picked my way along the beach back to the cabin, I worried about not being able to find "our" cliff face. Those stairs were a great landmark. Happily, I noticed our neighbor's fishing sign seconds before I saw a large shape bounding out of the dark on the tide line into the beam of my headlights and away from the truck. Of course, it was a bear, disturbed by the truck. And I admit that I was disturbed by the bear. I tracked its path as well as I could in the dark and saw that it bounded up the cliff between the neighbor's site and ours. Uh oh. I was planning to do that myself (except maybe more by "mincing" than by "bounding"). So I pulled up to the spot where we mince our way up the cliff and considered how to avoid further surprising the bear (and endangering myself). I decided on a preemptive surprise and honked the horn several times before getting out, headlamp in place, and purposefully making my way to the cliff belting out a stirring rendition of Delta Dawn, a belt-able song made popular by Tanya Tucker... in the 70s(?). The ascent and the trip back to the cabin were uneventful. Whew.

The 29th was spent cleaning up and packing up my cabin. The potential tools of destruction are now stored in the loft, along with about 6 sleeping bags and other bedding, and sleeping pads; the dry goods are stored in translucent or well-labeled plastic containers (that lemmings won't be able to chew through); the cans of food that won't suffer from losing structure by freezing are in other hard containers with rice thrown in to absorb moisture and prevent rusting due to condensation; the mudroom/porch is clear and organized; the shackles have been opened and oiled or discarded; the disused outhouse was completely dismantled; the blue glove liners were collected from all over and either washed or just dried and put in the laundry for the spring. Even though we weren't done and we had much food to finish eating, we decided to go to the D&D for a farewell dinner. It was a good decision, though it did nothing good for our schedule. Once there, the woman waiting on us said she was told to ask to see my driver's license. Huh? For hamburgers? She said she heard that I looked like a model in it. ??!! You bet!! (I thought briefly of taking up going to bars just for the chance of showing it off, but realized that no one would actually ask me to show it. More airplane travel? Actually, it's probably more a comment on the gap between my Naknek appearance and my Seattle appearance (on a good day) than on my Seattle appearance. Sigh.)

This morning we still needed to deliver our leftover food (some bacon, potatoes, milk, mayonnaise), create a board for one of my windows (drilling holes to match the holes in the cabin wall) and board all the windows, close up and bring in the propane, take down the Internet antenna, bring in the solar panels (except the 5 attached to the roof), empty out all water (except the big water jugs because it's nice to start the season with water, and water that came from the clean fall pipes rather than the dirty spring pipes - but I don't want to find dead lemmings in it in the spring, so it calls for care), cover cooking tools... We were off the beach by 10:05. Once I moved my bags to the edge of the cliff, Sage went over to sit by them. I think she wanted to be sure we wouldn't forget her.

Closing up takes a steady pull. Living with the tide puts defined beginnings and ends on tasks. Some tasks (like setting the nets or fishing them) require the tide to be in so that's the time frame of those tasks; other tasks (like working with the anchors or anchor lines) require the tide to be out so that's the time frame of those tasks. Others require certain offices to be open or support staff to be available. "Closing up" doesn't really have those limits. It starts when the nets come out of the water (except that David got us started earlier than that this year) and ends when the cab is taking us to the airport. For me, there's about a week between those points. For others, it's a matter of 1-3 days. I don't know if I'm relatively slow or relatively fussy - or maybe we just have more stuff.

The final photo in the sequence is the view from the window of the plane on our return to find Seattle still reliable in many ways including its beauty.

People have asked me how the season was. Several factors go into that computation:
1) crew health and welfare (max points - no injuries)

2) fishing productivity and price (this gets a solid "good" and if it's compared with others' season, that score goes up. We did miss an opportunity on that 30 MPH tide that we sat out (and could have fished), but I still value factor 1 more, so even though it turned out to be an overly cautious decision, no regrets). I learned today that we were competing with many drift boats that had come up from Egegik when that district closed up - that means the available fish are divided into more nets, accounting for this year's lower catch when compared with last year's catch in a comparably sized run; overall profit is related to this factor, but I don't really know how this worked out yet

3) weather conditions and other freight trains (challenging - I learned that this season set records for the consistency of the level of wind. I heard people say that the wind that caused our boat to swamp so many times was 45+ MPH. I bought an anenometer. And we had a lot of equipment problems - Roger plans to learn more about mechanic-ing (yay!!))

4) crew courage and competence (max points - whatever challenge came their way: weather, equipment, nearly impossible round hauls, exhaustion, cold, they faced it with good cheer, mutual support, and growing competence. The only exception to this broad claim has to do with cabin conditions. Euwwww. I think there's room for improvement there. I want them to think "ship shape" in living conditions, or at least no new life forms.)

5) interpersonal relationships (max points - it seems that each person was crucial to the season's success and everyone was supportive and cooperative through the whole season, no matter how tired or hungry or cold they were. And they were hilarious. At the end of the season, I asked for social security numbers so I could send W-9 statements at the end of the year. I noted that last year, I got a phone number instead of an SSN for some of the crew members. Hugh, with a perfectly straight face, asked, "Is there a difference?" Jeff, looking earnest, asked, "You just add a 1, right?" Even as I was grieving their imminent departure, they disabled me with laughter.

So overall, this season gets an A. Crew factors are weighted more heavily in my computation than fishing productivity and profit. And the negative points accrued by the challenging conditions factor were entirely overcome by the crew's courage and competence. Challenging conditions don't matter is the crew is equal to them and this crew was greater than them.

Thanks for the company this season (and Llyra, thank you for the cookies! They were delicious and I kept forgetting to tell you so. I even got to eat more than I should have (being the one to pick up the mail)). It was a pleasure reporting in.