July 8: Back in the rhythm

Days can be so long here and each one so different from the ones around it that a day seems like a week or more. I was out of the boat for the last two tides - trying to get equipment fixed and a birthday dinner made during the early morning tide, and then taking my turn out during the afternoon tide. I woke up at about midnight to find the crew had just come in from the afternoon tide and I felt strangely out of touch, on a different sleeping pattern and doing different activities. After just two tides. I'm looking forward to getting back in the boat.

My sister and her kids have arrived in Naknek. When I went to the crew cabin to find out how the tide had gone, I found my niece Berlin, and her friend, Promise, standing there, in search of Chris and Joe who were asleep. It was a pleasure to see her. My mom comes in tomorrow. My nephews decided to scatter the ashes of their mother (my sister) here in the water of Bristol Bay. We're approaching the first anniversary of her death. At first, I was thinking of this process as their small private activity that I would help facilitate being the one with the skiff. But Harry persuaded me that it is an important part of the healing process and that her other sisters should have the opportunity to be part of it. So I talked to Chris and Joe about it and they agreed to let their other aunts know about it so they could come if they wanted to. Some just were not able to attend because of the short notice, but my younger sister did manage it. I think the scattering of the ashes will occur on Sunday, the 10th, Debby's birthday. It remains very sad for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. This part doesn't really have very much to do with fishing, but it began to feel funny to be holding the very significant part of the season back from this blog. So there it is.

Shifting gears, fishing continues to be slow and the weather is variable. This morning, the weather was quite calm to the extent that we were bother by mosquitoes. This evening, it's blowing pretty hard and the current is running hard. Sometimes, when we use the bow chain to clip to a buoy (instead of anchoring) we regret it when we go to disconnect in a ripping current because the current pulls the buoys down and it takes a great effort to pull it up enough to disconnect. Tonight's enchiladas were moving in the wrong direction due to the pressure exerted on them as we tried to pull up the ring that our boat and the buoy were attached to and an innovation was born. Once the ring became visible, we threaded one of our tie-off lines through it and cinched it through the rail inside the boat, then as the waves bounced us closer to the water, we took up the slack and pinched it to keep it from going back out. This provided enough slack to detach the carabiner and free the boat. I hope we remember that one.

Right now, we're waiting for the tide to go down a little bit so we can go out and go through, deliver, and pick up the nets. Chris is holding out for a big tide on the 12th. Fish and Game seem to be still expecting significant numbers of fish as they are still fishing us around the clock despite being only 3/4 of the way to their escapement in the Naknek and not quite that much in the other rivers. Come to think of it, we're about 3/4 of the way to the catch we hope for, for the season.

Today, Roger let me pull photos off his SD card. He hasn't taken as many photos as he did at the beginning of the season, but they are great. When David and Sarah came in, they brought fruits and vegetables, among other things. Hugh was enthusiastic about the pineapple.



He had wanted to get a good shot of an eagle so when he noticed that one landed on the roof of my sister's cabin just as we were coming in from a tide, he grabbed his camera and went on an eagle hunt. He says that the eagle put up with it for a while, but with mounting suspicion until he got fed up and flew away. Here he is, early in the process.













And finally, I guess I'm not the only one who thought it was worth giving up a little sleep to photograph the sunrise. When he handed me the SD card, he thought it was a sunset. (We do get night and day confused up here - in the hours between 6 and 10, if it's overcast, it's very hard to know whether it's night or day. That also makes it difficult to know when to brush and floss.) But it's possible to tell that it's a sunrise because in the summer, from the perspective of the crew cabin, the sun rises over the tundra between my sister's cabin (the corner of which is on the left edge of the photo), and the tripod that holds up my clothesline (on the right). And it sets over the water (or the mud, if the tide is out).

It's about 11:30 pm and we're about to head back out to the nets. We have another two-tide opening beginning at 6 am on July 9 and going until 4 am on July 10. We've fished every tide since 6/28 except for the one with 30 MPH winds predicted. We're still doing fine.