July 10: Happy Birthday Debby and Bruce... we're fishing again

Today would have been the 60th birthday of my sister Debby, and I'm not sure which 39th birthday it is of my brother-in-law, Bruce. Happy Birthday to you both. Debby, I miss you.

At 9 this morning (before we even started this fishing period) we received an announcement from Fish and Game that 7500 more fish had made it past the counting Tower for the Naknek system, for a total of 885,000, beyond their minimum escapement goal. We also heard that 31,000 more salmon made it past the Kvichak counting tower into Lake Iliamna, for a total of 1.74 million, plus another 200,000 milling around in the river waiting to go up. Then at noon, still before we even started the fishing period, we received another announcement telling us that setnetters would remain open until further notice. So, we're back in business fishing around the clock.

After a late breakfast, we rushed around to finish projects before we began fishing again. Here are Sarah's photos of the outhouse raising. This is the view a person would see approaching the outhouse from the crew cabin. They made the outhouse out of pallets (skinned with plywood), and the walkway to it. Instead of costing more than $400, the structure itself was free. Yay.

With this crew, aesthetics are very important. Well, and good luck. They salvaged this piece of plywood with a big window-shaped hole cut in it and they put it in front of the seat to give the occupant a nice view. And somehow, Sarah found a window that fit right into the hole. I'm not sure how it could be so perfect.

This is the view that the occupant gets to see. It may encourage excessive or lingering outhouse use. Not a common problem. But one of the many good features of these composting toilets is that they don't stink. I don't really know why, but mine never has. So lingering won't be a bad experience.

Yesterday, I started to soak out the salmon I had salted early in the season, before the freezers were ready to receive salmon. My plan was to see if I could get the Bradley propane smoker to work, using that salmon. Last night, we put the smoker together and I trimmed the "freshened" salmon, cut it into strips, and laid it out to dry.

I had many more strips than the smoker would hold, so I laid out additional batches on cookie racks to await the smoker and the rest, I cut up into cubes to pickle. It should be ready by Friday afternoon.

We had to wait a little bit before we could set our nets because it was a very slow moving tide. When we looked back toward shore, we saw steam rising up off the mudflats - or maybe it was gathering fog. This is our neighbor, Steve, also waiting for enough water to set. We liked the fog as it was rising around them. Right now, it's early in the morning of the 11th and we just came in from the flood pick. Today, the fog was so thick that we couldn't see shore from the end of even the inside net. It's a little scary then, but we're all safely in.

Here is the Bathtub crew, going through an ebb pick. We ended up with about 3500 lbs for this opening. We were all really glad to be back out in the boats, on the water.

Why is that? I think about my safe little sanitized life (not counting my refrigerator) in Seattle and sometimes I wonder what form of insanity possesses us to do this - where fingernails can get torn off or we can get lost in the fog or at least become coated in it (we all had frosty halos this morning) or we are freezing or too hot or bounced around and bruised inside the skiff. Why do we prefer that to umbrellas, temperature controlled offices, and enforced warnings on coffee cups that the coffee inside may be hot? I think it's something about being closer to life and closer to what we're really made of instead of being separated from it by the many layers of gauze we use to protect ourselves from what is sometimes its brutality. I think we've decided that we'll take the fully saturated colors even if that sometimes means a fully saturated black or blood red.

When we came in last night at about 9 pm, we consulted the tidebook (our devotional reading) and determined that we wouldn't need to go back out again until 5 am. Wow. That's just about a full night's sleep. Except, of course, for those of us who choose to wait up because we know a spectacular sunset is coming. And then can't stop taking pictures for the entire 35 minutes it takes to complete. These two photos are about 4 minutes apart.