Jake brought back some special coffee from Indonesia. I think he said it goes for $70 - $100 per cup in the U.S. It isn’t that we don’t have a coffee grinder; it’s just that I don’t allow it to be used for coffee because I can’t stand the taste. It's just for grinding flax seeds. When Patrick understood the score, he just got a hammer and went right outside with the beans and bam!...bam!...bam!bam!... and he returned with gourmet coffee of a setnet grind.
We hurried into town this morning after getting a mayday from Harry that they were loading up on their subsistence fish and would need waders to pick them NOT in the mud, and ideally something to pick them into. (A subsistence net is a 10 fathom net that Alaska residents can get a license to fish for subsistence purposes.) Jake and Patrick volunteered so we packed up a couple of sleds and rushed into town. Their net was losing water pretty fast. Jake and Patrick geared up and I dragged down the sleds. Shortly after, Jake and Patrick arrived and got ahead of the fish (meaning that they started picking the fish closest to going dry and made progress on the net at a greater rate than the tide was falling). 
Makenzie dragged the sled up to the dock, loaded 4 or 5 fish into a five gallon bucket, tied the line that was hanging off the dock to it, and I pulled it up. We had many reps of that particular exercise. After she was caught up, Harry asked for her help in the splitting room, so Daniel took over her job and she and I took turns pulling.
It went smoothly. When the fish were all “delivered,” I headed to King Salmon to license the delinquent truck. I forgot to do it last year and Harry was driving when that lapse was brought to our attention. I also used that trip to get duplicates of the skiffs’ tags since after 3 weeks, they haven’t arrived.
Stopping into SeaMar on the way back, I was told that our buoy lights might have been stolen??? Here is a photo of the broken off light, next to an intact one. Apparently many setnetters have been having the same experience. It could be a buoy light thief, but it makes more sense to me that the lights may not be designed to withstand the pressure they are under on a setnet. On the drift boats, they just drift along with the current, along with the net and the boat (hence drift fishing). They feel the strength of the current in how fast they drift. It’s different for us. We are anchored so we feel the strength of the current in how hard it pulls against us, how hard we have to pull against it, and how fast the tide rises around us. We experience the same current, but it has different implications for the two gear types. The chicken soup in the keyboard incident is almost behind me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit our entire solution before, but it seems to be working now – with the exception of not having an ‘Enter’ key. Happy to report the space bar is working as a space bar, the backspace key seems to have reliably recovered its functioning. I think the ‘Enter’ key is the last hold out. So I’m copying the paragraph mark and inserting it where I would normally hit the ‘Enter’ key to start a new line. We’re all about workarounds and innovations here.
I’ve replaced a keyboard before (I wear ‘em out), so I was pretty confident that I could at least remove the keyboard and look for chunks of chicken or carrots and mop up liquid that I didn’t pour out and that wasn’t absorbed by the box of rice. Then I disconnected it and we put it into an egg crate filled with warm water and sloshed it around a bit, watching the chunks and bits float to the surface. (Yes, I cringed while I did it. David worked for an electronics firm and assured me it could be done safely.) Then I used Roy’s air hose and blew on it vigorously, chasing the water off. And then did it some more. Finally, following David’s instructions of putting it in an oven, I laid it on Roy’s metal workbench that is placed strategically over an oil stove and is therefore deliciously warm. When I reassembled the whole thing, the mouse was frantic and not normally responsive and the spacebar problem was intermittent, but by morning the mouse had settled down and the spacebar seems to have recovered. Now I’m just waiting for the ‘Enter’ key to come back on line. That is lots less troublesome than a spacebar that acts like an ‘Enter’ key.
The Internet is back to being intermittent, which is an improvement over not functioning at all. It feels like a welcome surprise when it’s there. I think it will become more reliable now that the winds have died down. Meanwhile, I’ll borrow Roy’s connection when I’m in town.
We fish at 5 AM on Tuesday. I’m worried we’ll have too much water on a fast rising tide, especially with the wind behind it. We’ll solve that problem in the morning if we have it.
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