Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

  Those who know me know that I can take the smallest of life's trials and blow them up into earth shaking, catastrophic events in my mind.  Fortunately I've been blessed with the ability to find humor in most of life's daily struggles. After my initial frustration or anger over an event has passed, I can turn it into a fairly humorous story. Losing six fish in a row to an aggressive sealion is terribly frustrating. The humor comes the next day when it surfaces with one of my flashers stuck to his head. Hopefully it will serve as a warning to any fish in the area. It would be better yet if it attracted other sealions thinking he had a fish and they all attacked him. Poetic justice I would say. In any event, whether it's losing money to predators or medical emergencies or children making choices that you know will not turn out good, we all have something unpleasant to deal with in this life. Jesus said it pretty plainly-" In this life you will have trouble, but ...

     Jan and I took the dog out for a walk yesterday. The weather was beautiful, much nicer than some Easter's we've experienced. While we were strolling along the sidewalk we noticed a gathering of bald eagles on the beach. It would have made a perfect picture, but of course I didn't have my camera with me. It never seems to fail. Either I forget to bring it or I bring it and right before I spot an award winning shot, the battery fails. Go figure. We finished our walk and I went home to grab the camera. The battery still had a little juice in it so I figured I'd be in luck. I don't know why I ever feel optimistic. There were six eagles gathered around a fish carcass on the beach when I showed up. It would have been a great picture, however, as soon as my fuzzy head appeared over the horizon, they all scattered like someone had passed gas at a debutante ball. I stood there for a few minutes looking out over the remains of the carcass hoping th...

Living in Alaska provides me with opportunities to view wildlife that most people will never get a chance to see. I frequently spot Sitka Blacktail Deer or Brown Bears when I'm out on the boat. Over on the mainland when I'm fishing at Homeshore or Excursion Inlet I've seen several Black Bears and once I saw a moose on the beach. I've come across rafts of Sea Otters with forty or more bunched together at Idaho Inlet and it's not at all uncommon to spot multitudes of Humpback Whales in the tide rips of Point Adolphus. All of these animals congregate in these areas because a ready food source. This past summer a number of the local fishermen were complaining about the number of fish they had lost to sealions. One fellow said he had lost twenty cohos to them in one day. It's a devistating loss. The sealions have a habit of getting behind a boat and following it and as soon as a fish bites they dive and pull it off the line, frequently taking expensive gear with the...