Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

I know that it's been a while since I posted anything, but as I mentioned in the last entry, it's the busy time of year here with maintanence on the boat and fishing and all the other spring/summer things that have to be done while the weather cooperates. Spring has been beautiful this year thus far, with lots of sun and a little too much heat. I hope we don't have another hot, dry summer again. We really need the rain to keep everything in balance. I was trolling for King Salmon the other day with relatively little success. I'm like the vitamins so far- one a day, which isn't a very good average. At this moment I'm going in the hole fishing, but hopefully that will turn around soon. I ran across Icy Straits to fish Homeshore last week. Historically the kings run up that side of the Straits on their way to the Taku or Chilkoot or Chilkat Rivers. I'm not sure how well the wild runs are doing. I know a lot of the fish we catch now are hatchery fish. The commer...

For all you mothers who may be reading this - Happy Mothers Day! For those of you who aren't mothers, I hope you have a good day too. I had a rather interesting situation happen today. Fortunately it's not very common place, but I start to wonder if I'm not suffering from Brother Gary Syndrome. He's the fellow on the farm who had the most unfortunate luck when it came to boats. As I mentioned in the book, one time I came out to the point and his skiff was perched squarely on top of a reef. Another time he ran his boat up onto a log raft. His misadventures at the farm were legendary. We awoke every day wondering what new mishap he would be involved in. In all fairness to myself, I have to say that what happened today was totally out of my hands. Those of you who know me know that I was in a plane accident in 2000 involving crashing into the water. I had nothing to do with that either. As I mentioned in the last blog, I had the boat hauled out of the water to do routine m...

The busy season is upon us here in Alaska so it's going to be increasingly difficult to be able to keep up on the blog entries for awhile. The only reason I'm able to do it now is because it's raining outside. I've got the boat out of the water to do my annual maintanence and I've been painting it while the weather was good. It wasn't supposed to rain today- only a 20% chance of rain according to the forecast, but we do live in a rain forest and of course I'm using latex paint which is water soluble- go figure. If I wasn't trying to paint it would probably be sunny and dry as a desert. I can't really complain too much though. It has been pretty good weather-wise up until today, and so far no bugs. Hallelujah! Usually when I'm trying to paint it's either cloudy without a breath of wind and the gnats are swarming me like flies on crap or it's sunny and the horseflies are buzzing me looking for an opening so they can swoop in and take a ch...