June 8, 2016: David Levitt arrived... and thought he had been hustled

"Naknek doesn't even sound like a real place."

David L left NYC at 7 AM east coast time and was scheduled into King Salmon at 6:20 PM, Alaska time, after stopping and changing planes in Seattle and Portland. Conveniently, David L and I were to be on the same flight in from Anchorage. Jeff left Portland at 9 AM and was due into King Salmon at 5:10. I had taken myself to the airport yesterday and just left the truck parked there, with the idea that the three of us would ride back to the cabins together today. I'd let Jeff know that he would have a little bit of a wait for our flight and I'd let David L know that I'd be flying into King Salmon with him and that Jeff would be waiting for us. All of that got turned upside down by the combined efforts of PenAir and me. I think this worried look is about right for David L's first introduction to setnetting with us.

I had planned to take advantage of the rare opportunity to do some additional shopping in the middle of the season. I even had a list:
*Boxed milk (this is shelf stable milk. Very expensive everywhere, but more so here. I could only find about a dozen boxes in time for the barge)
*Soy flour
*Wheat germ (these are ingredient in the Cornell Bread recipe, which my crew refers to as the nuclear holocaust bread)
*Sweet potatoes (we lost about 3 dozen in the luggage I'd sent with David in one of his mid-winter trips. Turns out, sweet potatoes gone bad are hard on the inside of a duffel bag.
*Carrots, cabbage, broccoli, squash, cauliflower (why not? They'll last a while)
*15 doz eggs (they are about $6 per dozen in Naknek and we go through them at quite a clip. We used to travel with 15 dozen in a wire crate. When the baggage handlers could see what they were, we have very few broken by the time we reached King Salmon. Then the agents started to insist that we contain them in plastic which meant more breakage. We finally gave up, concluding that it wasn't worth the waste or the hassle. But this was Anchorage, where people understand things like travelling with eggs as luggage, so I thought we might have better luck. Besides, if we could get a good price on the eggs, it would be worth a little breakage - and we could have a big scramble-fest as the first meal home.)
*Coffee filters (Oksanna brought some fancy Hawaii coffee and this seemed like the simplest strategy for brewing it.)
*Dog treats and poop bags
*Winch or something to help the ranger make it through the mud
*Inverters for the cabins
*Camp toaster (I'd sacrificed mine to the crew cabin. If I ever wanted toast again in my cabin, I'd better get another.)
*Herb garden (why not? We have long days here with lots of sun. Wouldn't a little parsley be nice in our dinners?)
*Scissor jack for the Carry (yeah, learned that one a few days ago).

*Also, David N had asked me to go to GCI to get him his own Mifi so he could continue to work on his Seattle business. My active, independent, but 92 year-old mother and I started early with breakfast at 8. Then we went to Fred Meyer to get a few of the items on the list and started working with the egg man for ideas on how to get the eggs on the plane to King Salmon. But our meeting was at 10:30 and it was getting late. So we checked out with the herbs, coffee filters, and camp toaster. After the meeting I dragged Mom all over Palmer and Wasilla trying to fulfill my list, check in with her about some of the decisions before her, and get back to her apartment in time for my wonderful niece Makenzie to pick me up for the trip to the Anchorage airport, 45-60 minutes away.

(I couldn't resist - this is Makenzie, after she got to Naknek) I figured we should leave by 3 to get me on the 5 pm flight. I wasn't completely clear on Pen Air's policy (a case of willful ignorance), but it turns out that they close check-in 40 minutes prior to the flight because they need those last 40 minutes to be sure they have their fairly small plane properly balanced for the flight, considering the weights of the people, their hand carried items, and the luggage.

So, prioritizing, we went from the meeting to Carquest to see if they had some kind of a winch that might work in our application. Maybe we could get the jack and the inverters too. The guy at Carquest was very helpful and sent us to Alaska Industrial Hardware (AIH) in Wasilla, about 20 minutes away, to get an ATV winch. On the way, we saw a Petco so stopped in to check those things off the list. AIH was time consuming and expensive. I finally settled on a good quality but not top of the line sealed winch that would not be destroyed by the mud. And a couple of inverters - but no scissor jack. We spent quite a bit of time at GCI on the way back to Palmer. It turns out that it isn't so easy to just buy a Mifi device for someone else. Not only that, the store in Wasilla didn't have one so they sent us to their brand new office in Palmer, so new that Google didn't know about it yet.

Abandoning the hope of eggs and cauliflower, we returned directly to Mom's apartment at 3:08 expecting to find Makenzie waiting for us, but she wasn't there. Uh oh. A quick call let me know that I had failed to communicate properly and Makenzie didn't know when she was expected. Reasonably, she expected me to contact her about my plan and how I hoped she would fit into it. She arrived as quickly as she could limited only by the laws of physics and traffic. Meanwhile, my poor exhausted mother did what she has always done: she kept going even if she wanted to collapse. I needed something to pack all the loot into so I could get it on a plane, and she had a duffel bag in her storage area. With the determination I have always known her to have, she wheeled her walker off after it for me.

Makenzie drove with nerves of steel, as fast as she could go without having to explain it all to a nice person in a uniform. On the way, I called PenAir and was told their policy. We looked at our watches... and knew that we might make it or not. It would depend on the lights once we got to Anchorage. I was also in touch with David L who was waiting for our flight at PenAir. At first, I told him I was on the way. Then that I might be late. Then that I might miss the flight, but that I would see him before he left Anchorage. And that Jeff would meet him in King Salmon and I would catch the next flight about an hour later. Then that I would see him in King Salmon.

I had been fretting about the missed opportunity with the eggs and the other groceries. Though I realized it wasn't quite the opportunity I thought it would be when Jane (Makenzie's mom and my sister-in-law) reminded me that Alaska Airlines and not PenAir has the policy of allowing three free bags for in-state travel. Oh. That changes things. At 4:18 when Makenzie and I accepted the fact that I wouldn't make the flight, I asked her to take me to a store where I could get some eggs. I asked this even though I knew she was in a hurry to visit her friend who had just lost her geriatric dog because she, being mostly blind and deaf, had come too close to a moose and her calves, and been trampled to death. So I rushed through the store, snatching up a clear plastic tote that would be perfect to hold the eggs. See-through and contained. And I bought 12 dozen eggs - all that would fit in the crate - taking up the excess space with my jacket. Makenzie dropped me off at the airport after David L's flight had left. I was a little worried that I might have delayed so much that I wouldn't get on this next flight either. But not to worry about that.

Waiting at the PenAir gate, a fellow passenger told me that our flight had been delayed by a couple of hours because our plane was stuck in Dutch Harbor. Dang. I got in touch with David N to update him so he could help straighten out what was bound to be confusion among the crew. I was surprised yesterday to find that he had returned to Naknek the same day he left. He called while I was in Palmer to let me know the crew was making progress on getting the boats ready and that he planned to use the crane truck to bring the Bathtub down to the beach sans outboard.

(Here is the Bathtub, with the outboard attached, anchored in our legendary mud.) So I knew he was in Naknek when I called to let him know that I would be late. He said that Jeff had arrived as planned, didn't see me get off the plane, and after not being able to find David either, just drove down to the cabins. I later learned that Jeff had been looking for the third David on our crew, someone he already knew. (This means that 30% of our crew this year is named David.) David N said he would return to the airport to collect David L.

David L had a "burner" phone from Verizon, so he had some texting capability. He texted at 6:45 that Jeff wasn't there. I replied that Jeff couldn't find him and had left but that David N was on the way to pick him up. And if all else failed, I would be there when my delayed flight got in. David N and I talked again and found that it was a difficult time in the boat readying process for him to leave for the airport, so I suggested that he send Oksanna. Good plan! At 7:30, I texted David L again to let him know the change in plans. And I gave him David N's Bristol Bay cell number (not yet realizing that he had lost that phone) and told him where to find phones for local calls. Later, I learned they were all out of order anyway, so it didn't matter what number I gave him. He texted for the last time a little after 8 pm to let me know that Oksanna had picked him up. Whew.

By that time, David L had been at the King Salmon airport for 1.5 hours and the airport staff was getting ready to leave. I'd told him a whole series of things that ended up not happening (I'd be on the plane with him; I'd see him before he left Anchorage; Jeff would wait for me with him in King Salmon; David N would come get him; he could call David N). So, he was beginning to think that he'd just been the victim of one big hustle because "Naknek" didn't even sound like a real place. He must have been especially happy when Oksanna arrived.

Back at PenAir, I'd just heard the announcement that the flight I was waiting for had been canceled. I could get on a flight the next morning at 6:10 AM, arriving on the same flight that I hadn't been there to collect David or Trevor from the day before. Maybe they would leave me the truck...

The delay had given me the chance to do some math on the eggs. Hmmm - $2 per dozen; $25 to get 12 dozen to King Salmon=$4 per dozen. Plus the cost of the container. The answer is simple: get more eggs! And a bigger container. So now, the cancellation gave me a chance for an egg do-over. "Hello, Makenzie? How do you feel about another couple of trips to Anchorage? And, um, can we go to another grocery store?" Yep, and I got the scissor jack too.