June 10: Monster agate

The crew will start coming in tomorrow. The first to arrive will be Chris and Patrick from Montana, then the next day, Jeff, Evan, and Maeve from California, New York, and Seattle, and on until Sarah brings up the rear on June 27 (she will have to wear her waders on the plane because I think she'll have to step right onto the boat). Once the crew starts to arrive, we'll get serious about opening the other cabins and getting them ready for inhabitants; we'll bring the stuff down from the barge; we'll get the skiffs ready; we'll put out a net; we'll start some serious anchor hunting out on the mud flats and probably have to put new anchors down, and get the new buoys in service.

The new buoys are an experiment. When the current runs hard, it tries to pull the buoy down toward the anchor. When the anchor line and the net are attached to the same point on the buoy, that makes it really hard to reach the net on a fast incoming tide. The new buoys have attachments on two sides - one side to the anchor line, the other side to the net. The idea is that when the tide pulls the buoy toward the anchor, it will pull that side of the buoy deeper into the water, lifting the other side (the side with the net attached to it) out of the water. It sounds promising. I'd love to take credit for figuring it out, but Eddie gets the credit. They fish in a consistently stronger current than we do, with much less polite drifters out in front of them and have learned to use huge buoys (with two attachments) that the boats' electronics can pick up.

I went in to town today to learn how to replace the throttle and shifting cables on the Ambi. I am so glad I didn't persist and try to do it myself yesterday. Roy is a great teacher and thanks to him, if I have to, I should be able to do it myself on the beach. I hope I don't have to.

Walking to the truck, I saw Eddie's friend, Rob - I met him yesterday and Eddie mentioned that he is a birder. He had a spotting scope mounted on his partially rolled down window and let me look out at the birds, some of which I have never seen... a black-headed gull, called a Bonaparte Gull? They live here, but I've never seen them come after our fish. It made me wonder how many other things I've never noticed. He takes photos through the spotting scope and showed me the device he uses to mount the camera to the scope. It's about $150 online, but he made one out of the cap from a bottle of bug spray, some fishing hardware, and some plumbing fittings. That's one of the things I love about Alaska.

Also, I opened the permit envelopes - so far, 3 of the 4 that we'll need have arrived. Finally, a permit color that actually goes with our rain gear. Since we started having permits in 1975, we've had red, yellow, black, green (several shades), blue (several shades)... but never orange. I don't think we've ever had pink, either. Hmmm...

But with all these exciting events and near events, the thing that is on my mind is the gigantic agate I found.
Coming back from town, the water was kind of rough, so I went down toward the water's edge to try to get a picture of it and standing up and turning around, I just about stumbled over... this

It's about the size of my fist, or a little bigger. It is the biggest agate I have ever seen and I've been looking for agates for 50 years.

I don't think there's much more to say...