Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

 The sorting table  Ron Juan at the scales  Heading blackcod  Putting the black cod on trays for freezing   Thorny head Rockfish  Small halibut  End of the line   I hope this blog post downloads. I thought of making two separate posts out of it, but I didn't want to break up the process- it might be hard to follow. The top picture shows Bill- I don't know his last name- weighing a load of round Chum salmon, also known as Dog salmon. The person who brought in this load is a hand troller and typically they catch fewer fish than power trollers because they have less gear in the water and they have to manually bring in the lines themselves instead of using hydraulic power. The second picture shows Ron D Williams standing by the two scales used. The hanging scale is used if there are fewer fish. The floor scale is used when there are enough fish to put in a tote and weighed. Ron is a unique character. There used to be...

With the help of my daughter Jen, I was able to finish up enough projects on the boat to take it out for a few hours of fishing the day before yesterday. By the time I got started, it was already after 2:00 PM, but I was just glad to go out. The cloudy, rainy weather that I was cursing when trying to paint finally dissipated and was replaced with brilliant, hot sunshine. The temp went from 55 or so to over 80 degrees overnight. Lovely. I felt like a Russet potato baking away in an oven. I looked at the thermometer on the wall and it was working it's way past 90. Thunderation it was hot! I spent a few hours dragging around the bay with only a couple of shaker kings and a grey cod for my efforts. Yesterday I went out again, but again it was afternoon before I could get away. The sun was just as hot as the day before, but at least there was a breeze to cool things down a little- it was only about 75 in the pilot  house. Of course I'm sitting there with a long sleeved f...

Do you remember when you were a kid, and just after Thanksgiving all the flyers would start coming out with pictures of toys and other delights? The anticipation of the upcoming Christmas holiday would build to such a crescendo that by the time Christmas Eve arrived, you were worked into such a frenzy that the chance that you would actually fall asleep before the wee hours of the morning were about as good as winning the lottery. It's been like that for me with this boat project. I'm not a patient man, so of course what profession do I choose but one that at times requires infinite amounts of patience. Add to that the fact that we had seven children, which Jan and I raised over a course of twenty seven years. Tell me God doesn't have a sense of humor! It took exactly four months from the time I hauled the boat out until today to repair the boat and return it to the water. I've been through every emotion known to man during this process. Prior to hauling it out in F...

Frequently I don't have the slightest idea of what I'm going to write about until I sit down and start to do it. For me, writing the blog post isn't like sitting down in the morning and knowing that I'm going to have a bowl of corn flakes, and that for the next five or six days I'm going to sit down and have a bowl of corn flakes- unless of course the breakfast fairy shows up and magically produces a plate of ham and eggs. I like to take pictures of various things from wherever I'm at to possibly use for a post in the future. For today's post I was able to draw on some photos  I took several weeks ago.  The top picture is of Alaska's state flower the Forget-me-not. I love them. They grow wild all over the place and add a bit of beauty to a hillside or garden in the spring. Chances are, if you gave someone a bouquet of Forget-me-nots, they'd never forget you - even if they wanted to. Wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, t...

It's been an incredibly busy year so far, with summer coming on and the start of the fishing season. As I have mentioned  numerous times on this blog, I've been working for months trying to get the boat wrapped up. It was hauled out for a major renovation and it has taken most of my time. While I was working on that, the second book I had been writing  had to be completed, so there was added stress. Once it's written, there's still all kinds of back and forth with the publisher and graphic artist. It's all quite exciting, but also time consuming and nerve wracking. Since I am self published, it's pretty much up to me to sell it, so that takes added time. I've been fortunate that my first book was so well received, so at least selling this one locally has been pretty easy so far. Several years ago I found myself down at the harbor checking on the boat in early spring. There were one or two other fishermen hanging around so I sauntered on over and joined ...