July 11 and 12: Fishing is slow

We have been having varied weather - foggy then sunny then really sunny and downright hot. None of it seems to be what attracts the fish, but we are still plugging away, getting a few hundred pounds per tide, working on our homepack. We all want to take plenty home.

With fishing slow, we have the chance to notice things like our hearty and brave daisies that insist on blooming in this difficult environment...

And bake bread - this is best done on a cold and rainy day. The heat from the oven is comforting and the smell of the bread is uplifting. Oh, and the taste of the cinnamon rolls reminds us that some day it will be sunny and warm again... and if it isn't, it doesn't really matter all that much.

The other things we've been doing is gathering shots of the two chairs Trevor and Luka placed early in the season to duplicate the mural that the kids at Alex's school painted in his memory. Earlier, I posted this photo of the mural (taken by Rohan's dad, Alok).

During the summer, I've taken a number of photos of that still life, created solely from the students' understanding of Alex's Alaska world. Their painting looks like it's a little later in the fall, after the tundra gets some red in it and we probably won't be here long enough to get that. This was my first attempt. It's a little dizzying to try to capture a photo of a scene that has been painted from the imagination, but that also seems appropriate. And just to show some of the realness of this scene, here are other conditions that these chairs might find,

like the morning fog,

mid day blue with bird activity,

and sunrise.



The pickled salmon and the smoked salmon have finished their processing. The pickled came out great and we're in the process of trying to restrain ourselves from just inhaling that. The smoked salmon, though, came out too salty. It's odd, because I soaked them out for the same amount of time. I think smoking concentrates the salt and pickling dilutes it. So we're about to try another taste sensation: we'll pickle some of the smoked salmon. And later, we'll smoke salted salmon that has spent more time soaking out. I'll keep you posted on how pickled smoked salmon is.

We decided to take the Ambi and the Grayling in to AGS to be pulled out of the water for the season. It's always a little nerve-wracking - what if we get another push... late? We can handle it. Whatever comes, we can handle it. Jeff and Roger took the Grayling and Luka ran the Ambi with me. I have several photos of that process, but since my camera battery died just then, they are on my Alaska phone and I don't know how to get those photos off the phone and on to my computer.

Rohan drove in to help us finish off our town errands (we had about 20 fish to process for home pack and we wanted to get started on winterizing the boats) and take us back to the beach after he helped the neighbors with their net. It was lovely, driving home into the sunset.