Saltwater and sea air

On Friday some folks from the Kachemak Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve came over to Seldovia to do a little science and show the reserve’s visiting NOAA liaison, Nina Garfield, a bit more of the area the reserve contains.

[Read more →]

Ray announced that it was time to go out fishing for silvers. We didn’t argue. Instead, we loaded the boat up with gear and lunch and people and went out looking for silver salmon.

[Read more →]

I’m a member of the newly-formed Information and Education Committee of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizen’s Advisory Council, and we held our second meeting up in Girdwood. Sadly, not enough members could attend to make it actually be a meeting, but this apparently wasn’t obvious in time to save our budget the cost of what turned out to simply be a workshop.

Nonetheless, Girdwood is a lovely area, not at all dominated by its recent prominence in the news about Alaska’s ~beloved~ uncle.

[Read more →]

This year, for the first time in quite a few, there were sport and subsistence fisheries opened for Tanner crab. We chose to fish the closer-in one, the sport fishery, which is in state water, and duly bought our permits, as did several of our friends. Steve and Ray went out with a group one day and set the pots; on this particular day, a crowd of us* went out and they hauled them.

*Catch limits are per person and each household can only have a limited number of pots, so it makes sense for several households to fish together.

Steve went down first to get the boat ready. This is what she looks like with her new mast and hauler.

[Read more →]

So now it’s official: termination dust has fallen in Anchorage and the paper is referring to our “so-called summer.” Exactly. I’d like to share a photo of how much snow we still have from last year, still, but the clouds have been too low and heavy to get a good shot. *sigh*

Although I’ve given up on my vegies—this yard is simply too cold in a year when it stays 40 degrees at night all through July—at least many of the native plants are putting on a brave show, hustling to get the whole reproductive thing completed before frost, which from the way this so-called summer is going, could be any moment.

[Read more →]

No, we didn’t fall off the map. We drove off of it. Or at least some 1200+ miles of it.

We loaded Cathy and Allen into a plane one bright morning and we all flew over to Homer to pick up the car, which we’d loaded and sent on ahead in keeping with the ferry schedule.

[Read more →]

So we took Cathy and Allen, and also our local friends Mavis and Jim, out in the Inlet for a halibut fishing trip. It was a nice enough morning, bright but hazy, when we all formed up at the docks to load gear and lunch aboard.

[Read more →]

Steve’s cousin Cathy and her husband, Allen, came to visit us from Colorado. Although Allen spent some time around Fairbanks when he was younger, this was their first real visit to the state. We took the boat over to pick them up in Homer on a dank grey morning.

[Read more →]