June 9, 2016: Return to Naknek

Even though this day had an early start, little is in my log. Makenzie got me to the airport on time. 24 dozen eggs, with about 10 oranges and my PJ's weigh 50.5 lbs. Makenzie and I had taken out our calculators the night before to calculate the anticipated weight of 24 dozen eggs - I think it was 36 lbs. It was a prodigious math effort, the computational culmination of our combined 40+ years of education. And in what seemed like a miracle of spatial reasoning, all the other stuff fit well into the original clear crate (except for the herbs, which were carefully tucked into my backpack).

The luggage traveled with me. The white truck was at the airport, as promised by David N. It still needed to go to Mark W's shop to complete the needed work on the brakes and bearings and on some engine stuff. So I took my new friend that I had met the evening before at PenAir's gate to his boat at Silver Bay and went over to Mark's shop, expecting to find ol' Red to trade into... and it wasn't there. OK, maybe it's at Phil's. Nope. OK, I'll head down the beach and probably find it at the turnaround. Of course, I tried without success to call David's Naknek phone, still unaware that it had been lost. When I got to the turnaround and found that it wasn't there either, I began to work myself up with the fear that ol' Red had been left on the beach which would have meant that it had swamped. So I was relieved, if a little more confused, when I rounded the point in the Carry and could not see the truck in front of the stairs.

When I got to the cabin, the crew filled me in. Jeff, not informed about the whole plan, had left ol' Red at AGS. So it was a simple matter of Trevor going back to town with me to AGS to pick up ol' Red and then following me to Mark's to drop off the white truck and then drop himself off at his new boat.

I had returned to Naknek with a thin strand of hope about what might be going on with the ranger. Harry suggested this idea. Maybe the tracks were on backward so that they weren't as good at throwing off the mud. When I stopped in to see Mark on the way home from the airport, I talked to him about the possibility. He didn't think it would make a difference. He also said that it isn't something that could have been switched around by accident because the wheels and the tracks come off together. The wheels don't come out of the tracks. And the front tires and back tires are different - street tires in the front and snow tires in the back for traction. So even if they were wrong, they were the same as they had been since 1980. But I don't relinquish threads of hope easily and while at the turnaround, I looked at the other rangers and found that indeed, their tracks run the other way. In discussing this idea with the crew, Matt suggested that instead of paying to have the whole operation reversed as an experiment, maybe we could just take the ranger out to the mud (with a towing rope very handy) and see if it ran any better in reverse than in first gear. We did and it didn't. Hope dashed.

The net was in the back of ol' Red. Once we had that back on the beach, we laid out the 25 fathoms just for this one tide. Fishing would close by 9 AM Friday, so that really means picking up the net at the end of the Thursday evening tide. We got six fish! We salted two of them for making pickled salmon later and ate the rest. We recovered the buoys from their tide-safe secure storage partway up the cliff and piled them into the Bathtub, intending to pick the net up into the truck and then follow the tide out, pushing the Bathtub out to get the buoys to their intended locations. That would be so much easier than carrying or dragging them through the mud, our other two choices with the ranger out of commission in the deep mud.

But the tide got away from us, going out faster than we expected. So by the time we got down there, the net was already half dry and we couldn't get the Bathtub into the water. It was right at the edge of the water, but on hard sand and we couldn't budge it. Jeff jumped on the ranger to help us pick up the net over the hard sand, trying to get the rest of it in before the tide ran out and the net was lying on the thick mud. He noticed that the ranger didn't seem to be running right and suggested we take it into Mark anyway, not to have the tracks reversed, but to have him look at the engine. Could that explain it?

I was frustrated that we had missed the tide. Such lack of attention can be a real problem when we're fishing in earnest. But then I realized that this could be an excellent and very low cost learning opportunity. There was really nothing pressing that kept us from being out there earlier, so it was very helpful to be able to point out the price of being even just a little bit late. The work becomes much harder, the process more chaotic, and some just might not be possible... because we were a little bit late. Timeliness and details matter a lot in fishing.