Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

Humpback whale and seagulls waiting for the herring Whales on the prowl Seagulls taking a break Lining up at the airplane float  Herring spawn discoloring the water Halibut bait jigging for herring at the harbor  All winter long there have been four or five whales hanging out in front of town. Usually they go elsewhere for the winter, but I think that this winter, there was enough feed to keep them here. I 'm not certain what they were eating  but I suspect it was small herring. A few weeks ago, much larger herring started showing up at the small boat harbor. As is the custom here, people started bringing out their gill nets and stringing them across the empty boat stalls, and herring jigs started flying off the shelves at Tideland Tackle. Herring jigs typically have six or eight tiny hooks with beads or bits of plastic which resemble plankton.They are jigged up and down and catching multiple herring at once is quite common. It's a qui...

  I thought I would do a follow up on my last blog post. I came home  a few days ago to see that there was a dump truck load of gravel in my neighbor's driveway and a huge orange excavator next door. I also saw that someone had taken some of the windows out of the downstairs. I was glad to see that there was something being salvaged. The next morning a truck pulled up and a fellow I knew went inside and took out the kitchen sink and some interior doors. It wasn't long afterward that  Grant Coutlee and his crew drove up in a couple dump trucks and started in with the demolition. There was some concern on the part of Grant because of an active power line that feeds my house hanging right overhead, but he got positioned so that with some maneuvering skills he was able to keep from snagging it and getting electrocuted. The house came down surprisingly fast- I'd say in about an hour it was all on the ground. When I mentioned it to Grant he was lamenti...

     I suppose every city has it's share of urban blight.Places like Detroit come to mind. Hoonah isn't exactly a metropolis. We only have about 850 residents who call it home year round, although with the coming of the tourist season there is an influx of tourist related business owners who are flocking to town. Some of them live on their boats which they use to charter out for whale watching or fishing. Some live in campers or travel trailers which they take with them when they go, and still others manage somehow to find a place to rent. There seems to be a surprising number of rentals in town, although none of them are cheap, regardless of the state of the rental. It runs in my mind that $1000.00 a month is the average, although I could be wrong. In any event, if the houses shown above had been maintained down through the years there would have at least been the option of providing the owners with a little rental income. As it is, they have all been...