June 16: Satellite dish technician?

First thing this morning, I bit a very big bullet and bought an outboard. I heard my credit card creak under the strain. It's a Honda 90, chosen partly because our current Honda 90 is so valiant, standing up for another season, despite a wounded fuel pump, carburetors with water in them, and whatever else it has suffered at our hands. The other reason is because it's a Honda 90 and we already have one of those, though it's a 2006. So I asked Andy, the salesman at Alaska Mining and Diving how interchangeable the parts are. The answer is: pretty interchangeable - the throttle, steering, and shift cables and the props, for example. Those are parts that we need to have on hand. The big difference is the new Honda 90s are fuel injected - all new outboards are fuel injected. Our old one has carburetors. At first, the fuel injection seems like it would be good for us - no more carburetors to mess with. But they demand a higher quality of fuel because there are no carburetors to collect the water. Andy told me that water in the fuel is the #1 reason they see these outboards in for repair. Uh oh. We'll need little umbrellas and houses for our fuel...

This is "free week" for fishing. Actually, we've had "free weeks" since the first of June. During those three weeks, we're allowed to fish from 9 am Monday to 9 am Friday. We've been fishing all those tides and so far have about 10 or so fish filleted and sealed - maybe a few more. Since at 9 am today the tide was falling and since yesterday, Harry got only 2 fish in his subsistence net, we decided not to knock ourselves out trying to do a deep water set and just set it on the incoming tide in the afternoon. Even so, we were kind of late getting out there so we didn't have the time to check all the tag lines and so on. Every year, I need to remember again that when we're going out to set, we need a little extra time to get ready while we're there. It isn't good to just meet the incoming tide. We always need to top off the gas tanks or untangle the anchor lines or check the knots or something. We need to be out there ahead of set time, ideally while the boat is still dry. Sure, sometimes we have to wait a little bit, but that's better than spending the rest of the tide trying to recover from being 10 minutes - or even two minutes - late.

Before going out to pick the evening tide with Roger, Rohan, and AJ, we tried to use the Internet and found again the warning "System degraded" because the "web acceleration is not operational." All that gives me no idea what the problem is or what to do about it. At first, I thought it might be the weather, but we've had that for a few weeks now, so finally, I called Will, the friendly HughesNet rep out of Fairbanks. He is really great and patient.

This is the front of the satellite dish, with the part that aims. I think it is aiming at a transponder on a satellite (??), way far away. Will thought we were probably having the "system degraded" problems because the aim of the dish has shifted a bit since it was first installed, but he worked patiently, coaching me through getting a better signal.

This is the back of the satellite dish, where is it possible to make adjustments to improve the signal (or make it altogether worse). Will has taught me to get into the program to talk to the modem and we could see that the signal strength was poor, giving Will more confidence in his diagnosis.

At the end of the first season with this dish, I drilled a hole through the sleeve and the post it fits over so that I could insert a nail through both to align the dish the next spring. That was Tom's idea, the guy who came out to point it in the first place. And it did help, but I was surprised when Will suggested that there would still be some play in the dish, and indeed there was... enough to improve the signal. At the initial setup this spring, I was on the inside and someone else was moving the dish and tightening the nuts, and he didn't tighten them firmly enough. So the first strong wind blew the dish out of whack and we needed to go through the process again. Then we had another strong wind and even though the nuts were tightened, when I got up there today to try to fix the signal, I was surprised to find another loose screw, so moved the dish around ever so slightly while Rohan reported on signal strength until we got it good enough and I tightened everything I could find to tighten. Maybe this will save a little frustration in the future - it is definitely saving some frustration now.

Before long, it was time to head out to fish, and fix the remaining lines that needed to be fixed. I was surprised last week that other crew members weren't clamoring to fix the hang of the net that felt obviously wrong to me, so it occurred to me that the other crew members just might not understand how this whole "tying down the leadline" works. The leadline and corkline have to be even, with even pressure. That means that the anchor line and v-line that come up from the anchor to the corkline and leadline (respectively) have to be the same length, including the buoy. I think everyone understands now what we're looking for. We'll see as the season progresses.

The net on the inside site, the bane of our fishing life because of how the net and the running line interact, once again fouled on the running line.

This photo shows Rohan and AJ pulling along the net, untangling it from the running line as we go. I know that an obvious fix for this is to eliminate the running line... but I don't want to. Here's why:
(1) It gives us a way to get off the beach when the weather is too rough. In calm weather, we only need to be thigh deep to be able to safely lower the outboard and get off the beach, but when the weather is rough, the surf lifts the bow of the boat and at the same time, pushes down the stern, driving the outboard into the mud, sand, or rocks - whatever is under it. So in rough weather, we need to get the boat out way deeper than usual, but in rough weather, that is even harder/more dangerous to do because the boat bounces more than usual, waves splash harder, and it's overall harder to control with worse consequences if we lose control. The easiest answer is to leave the outboard up and pull out on the running line until we are out of the surf break - that way, no one has to be outside the boat in those hard-to-control conditions;
(2) It gives us a way to deliver to the beach in rough weather. Instead of heading in to the beach bow first as we usually do (even though we might immediately turn the bow out into the waves if the weather is even slightly rough), when we have a big load and the weather is especially rough, we don't want our stern facing the surf break because water will just pour into the low stern of our heavy boat and swamp us, so we hang on to the running line and pull ourselves in, backwards, keeping our bow to the surf break; and
(3) It pretty much guarantees that if we have a deep water set, at least we'll get that one set even if we are unable to set any of the other sites.
To me, those are three good reasons, and they make it worthwhile to look for other solutions to the problem of the net wrapping over the running line, illustrated in the photo.

No matter how many fish we get, we still have to clean the boat. It seems strange to do it, but we clean the boat by dipping a 5 gallon bucket into the water outside the boat... and dumping it into the boat. (It always feels odd to do that because of the strong feeling that the water is supposed to stay on the other side of the boat.) Then we swirl the water to get the sand and mud into suspension, and bail it out. I think it is crucially important to keep the boat clean, including the lines folded up and not under foot, and everything put in its place. I am not this tidy anywhere else - you should see my desk at home! But on the boat, if we can't find something right when we need it, it could be dangerous, and if our feet are tangled in line that has just been dropped on the deck, that is dangerous. So people on my boat tend to hear, "fold up that line" until they internalize the principle and see for themselves when a line needs to be folded. That is a very rewarding moment for me.

Here is the season's first fish ticket, showing the 36 lbs we've sold so far (46 lbs total, minus 10 lbs of brailer weight). I'd definitely say that the excitement about an alarmingly early season is not panning out. Honestly, that's a bit of a relief. As long as they come, I'd just as soon that they aren't early. After all, we are now waiting on an outboard to be able to get our other first string skiff into the water.