June 24 2016: And the Cockroach makes four

Every morning we wake up, hoping for an announcement. Those always start with, "This is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game with an announcement for fishers in the Naknek/Kvichak district. The time of this announcement is ..." Whenever her voice comes over the radio, the room falls quiet. Anyone who misses the cue is hushed. When instead the voice says, "This is the Alaska Department of Fish and Game with an update for fishers in the Naknek/Kvichak district..." The room fills with disappointed but interested silence. It is hard to wait.

First order of business: launch the Cockroach and bring it down to the sites.

There's Patrick pulling from the bow and two of the Davids pushing from the stern. Really, they didn't get it all the way down here like that. They must be repositioning it.

They took the dogs with them into town. Here we see thrill-seekers Patrick and Ollie riding on the tailgate.

Before too long, Oksanna saw an eagle perched on the cliff and she asked David to stop so she could try to get a good picture. Ollie must have perceived wildlife out there, so barking as only a small dog can, he flew off the back of the truck along with the other dogs who also thought it was their duty to scare away that interloping bird. They chased it off the cliff

and down the beach for a distance. Oksanna said that as the eagle flew along, barely perturbed, he started looking back, perhaps considering other possibilities for the tasty morsel chasing him. Ollie needs a mirror and perhaps a carefully selected episode of Animal Planet.

Once they got to AGS and got the Cockroach up in the transport truck, David noticed that the Cockroach had a leak. It was draining from what should be the air pocket in the transom on the port side of the skiff, right above the seam that connects the deck to the hull. It looked like a hole had been drilled there. We don't remember drilling it, but it was a perfectly round hole and water was squirting out. They were about to go into the water, so it was sort of a now or... well, not "never," but we don't know when - situation. OK, go into the water, go like hell down to the sites, and then beach it. Actually, as long as they keep up a good pace, they shouldn't take much water. It's hard to believe, but if the boat is running along quickly, it's possible to pull the drain plug and water will go out instead of come in. I'm not quite brave enough to try that - maybe it's just when a boat is up on step so the drain hole is actually above the water line.

Besides, even if water did fill the air pocket, that isn't enough to make the skiff sink. It's just that if it also took a lot of water over the side, that erstwhile air pocket would not help it stay afloat.

They beached it as high as they could allowing David to lift it with the crane so that the water would finish draining out, and then they plugged the hole with Splash Zone, a mending goo that will affix to most surfaces, under most conditions (including under water), and harden into something that can be sanded. After they were pretty sure it wouldn't be compromised by dragging it down to the tide line, they dragged it along to get it out of the swamp zone (that is, about out onto the moon crater mud).

OK, so now here is the story on the Cockroach. A dear friend taught me that term - it means to sort of sidle up to something and absorb it into your own thing. He did this with a net locker. He's an ambitious fisherman, with lots of fishing stuff. When the fisherman in the net locker next to his cleared out, he just took out the wall separating their net lockers and suddenly and somewhat mysteriously, his net locker was bigger and the web loft was down one net locker. That's a classic cockroach. I know I've already said how much I love our neighbors. They are just the world's best neighbors. Period. We've fished next to them since 1969 (and ha! I still think of them a little bit as newcomers). A few years ago, Mark mentioned to me that he was looking for another skiff. That made me look over at our Bathtub and realize that while we have back ups of just about everything (fishing gear, trucks, rangers, four-wheelers, even fishing skiffs) we don't have a back up of that crucial piece of equipment, a skiff that will slide across the mud - a skiff like the Bathtub. Oh, yeah, I should probably start looking for a back up skiff, too! I was also looking for a replacement drift boat for the old woody Harry had been fishing, the Janice E.

On my next trip to King Salmon, I saw a flat bottomed skiff on the side of the road with a For Sale sign, and a drift boat behind it with another. OK, I'd better stop. I didn't know how to evaluate the drift boat, so I just passed the information on to Harry, but the Bathtub did look like just what I needed. I offered him $1000 less than he was asking, and we made a deal. Only later did I learn that that was the very skiff Mark was trying to buy, hoping to get it for $2500 less than the seller was asking. Mark had made his offer, but the owner wanted to wait for a better one. It turned out to be mine! Probably, if nothing better had come along, he would have taken Mark's offer - or sold it to him for something less than I paid, anyway. If I'd known, I wouldn't have bought it from under him. I felt terrible!! But there wasn't really any going back. So... it's the Cockroach.

The rest of this day was spent in musical pursuits (here is Austin, playing for the tundra and the seagulls - and himself) and in working on Debby's roof.

Nearly all of the crew started out working with Patrick, dragging over tin that's been lying around in the tundra (possibly originally from Debby's roof. A good sized chunk of it blew off in about 2002 or 2003. My long time dear friend and temporary husband Tom rebuilt that part of it for us.) They also moved our insulated totes and other totes out of Debby's and into the Cockroach (to be our ice barge - that's the blue thing in the middle of the Cockroach in the first photo above) and the back of the crane truck. As high as the tides have been coming, we were reluctant just let these sit at the bottom of the cliff where the tide could carry them away.