June 10, 2016: David prevalence reaches 37.5%
Jeff, Matt, Inku, David L and I pushed the Bathtub out to the outside sites, with the falling tide. Oksanna sat this one out because she was feeling sick and wanted to work on being better as soon as possible. Here is a photo of "Mighty Jeff," definitely the mightiest and probably the most patient and least irritable person on the crew.
I'd been resigning myself to having to drag the buoys from wherever we anchored the 'Tub once we got it out to the outside sites to the fishing anchors. They would all be under water until the tide went all the way out. Underwater would mean we couldn't see the anchors and the tide being out would mean we couldn't float the boat. Sigh.
My site (#1) is about 1200' + away from Sarah's (#4). Happily, they aren't 1200' of knee-deep mud, but more than we've had in previous years. We headed out to #1 first... and even though the water was still about thigh-deep, the corks I had attached to the anchors in my early anchor search stood up proudly. Yippee! One we don't have to drag. We just attached the inside buoy to that cork, knowing we'd need to come back to attach it to the anchor itself. No problem! Then we headed out to where we should find the outside anchor... and actually found the anchor line with a cork attached at the end of that one too. Yay again! We were able to do the final connection on that one. We haven't seen that anchor for years because it's been buried in mud. For the past five years or so, we've just taken our chances and left the precious cable anchor lines attached to it over the winter with a cork attached to the end of the cable. That's what we found. So we just replaced the cork with the buoy and we were set. That made the last four buoys very easy to manage.
Those sites are neighbors, so the dragging would be minimal. The water was down enough that the inside anchor on #3 was poking up out of the water. Jeff grabbed a buoy and rushed over to connect that one. I had made a note earlier that we needed to move the outside anchor out about 50' because the buoys were too close together. We had the new anchor and the turning bar, so since it was an anchor, I thought we could affix the buoy to it and drop it where we expected to put the new anchor, with the plan of returning to set the new anchor, attaching the buoy and anchor line, and take up the old anchor. After dropping that anchor and buoy, we just pushed the boat to #4. Again, we found corks marking one anchor, dropped off its buoy and pushed the 'Tub to where we expected to find the remaining anchor and then anchored the boat. That was a very successful process. As it turned out, it was probably for the best that we couldn't get them out the evening before. It would have been a bit darker and we would have been a bit more tired and anyway, what was the rush?
It took a little longer to firmly finish the set-up.
It's really crucial to make sure nothing can work its way loose. We use shackles to attach the anchor lines to the anchors and to the buoys. This photo shows a shackle. We tighten the pin down very firmly, but with the back-and-forth of the tide, those can work loose. Many years ago, the Ambi lost its anchor due to the shackle's pin working itself loose. So in addition to tightening down firmly, we wire the pin in position, by running a thin wire through the eye of the pin and the horseshoe of the shackle. The wire itself isn't very strong, but it won't corrode during the season and all it needs to do is keep the pin from spinning. The downside of this solution is that it provides one more thing for the nets to get caught on. Despite all these precautions, it is very important to check everything we can see, every chance we get. This is one of the reasons I think it's important when we're setting the nets to get out to the buoys before the water covers the anchors: so we can do a visual inspection, make sure the anchor lines aren't tangled or fraying, make sure the line holding the white buoy on isn't untying or fraying, make sure all the shackles are still firm and the wires are as tucked in as we can make them. It was an excellent feeling to get this done!
David Duke was due in at 5 this evening, even though he began his epic journey from Hawaii more than 24 hours earlier. The ranger was already loaded up on the crane truck. Many of us headed into town so that some could keep getting the boats ready while I borrowed Phil's car to go get David. I'm so glad Jeff remembered noticing that the ranger wasn't really running well the night before. He pushed (in his very gentle way) to take it up to Mark's to check it over and make sure it was OK engine-wise.
The New Kid was ready to go, so Jeff and crew focused on the Ambi. Whoever had put the fairleads and brailer stands into the skiffs did not read my mind, so I put quite a bit of effort into going from skiff to skiff to find the hardware that was customized for the Ambi but had been mistakenly allocated to a different skiff. This year when we close up, we're labeling them! I left the crew working hard on getting the Ambi ready while I headed to King Salmon for David D. His arrival brought the prevalence of Davids up to 3 of 8 crew members.
Here he is, with Matt, fulfilling some of their crew responsibilities: making music!
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