Home Port

The map of what we did. Numbers indicate the number of seine sets made in each bay.

Under sail at the entrance to Kaguyak Bay.

Galactic at anchor in Rodman's Reach, with the wonderfully hospitable Lazy Bay cannery in the background.

The ship's people on the plane in Akhiok. Next stop, Kodiak, their grandmother, and a new school year.
God, how I love raising Alaskan kids.

Fox Bay

Bluff Point

The Rose 

Reefed down and sailing fast. Oh yes, and my 50th birthday.

Port Wrangell at the end of a windy windy day

Port Wrangell

High energy beach

The 40-knot blow

Picking berries, Kujulik Bay

The fruit of the land

Salty

More berry picking. Agripina Bay.

Butchering Dungeness

We got home a week ago.

Inevitably, we immediately got caught up in the swirl of town life. It's peak harvesting season here in the Gulf of Alaska. Berries need to be picked, fish caught, deer stalked. And if there's any time left before the rains return, house and boat could both use maintenance. Oh yes, and there's third and seventh grade to attend to, and the demands of careers that seem to forever need one thing or another from us.

This is a rich life, and one chapter always seems to be stepping on the toes of the one that came before. So no recap of the summer work just now. I'll get to that *soon*, along with some more about the actual biology we were doing. For now I'll just say that fitting two months of boat life into a town year seems to be a hell of a lot more work than full time boat living was, but we're all four of us ever so glad we did it.

Deer hunting up high. Elias wasn't so impressed by the number of does and fawns we saw (15) vs. the numbers of bucks (1).

Sand Point

Sand Point

We are about to leave the town of Sand Point, that historical cod port in the Shumagin Islands. One more new bay for us to sample on the Alaska Peninsula, and then we will start retracing our track back to Kodiak.

We love Sand Point! What a friendly place, what a fantastic location, what a great harbor. The salmon season was a big disappointment here, but the salmon berries have been out of this world, and the boys have done their best to make a dent in them.

 

We've been in the Shumagins for a week now, sampling three bays and taking advantage of the internet to submit both a National Science Foundation proposal and a journal paper. Oh, and hiding out from some generally ick weather. We are loathe to even mention the idea of poor weather, lest someone think we are complaining. But, when the fishermen start bringing up the bad weather in conversation, as they have, I suppose it's ok to note that it has generally been...atrocious.

But, we've been getting the work done. And now, the wind is in the west, and it's time for us to make tracks.

The team, set to beach seine Sand Point

Cannery and slough

Chasing the salmon berries

Here and below - the taste of summer

National Public Radio reports...

...that I am wiry and have a thick beard.

Seriously, though, it's gratifying to see interest in our work.

The reporter tells me the story will likely air on NPR this weekend.

That's Alisa in the photo with me.

The Cod Are In

Age-0 Pacific cod

My first thought: we should notify the Kodiak Daily Mirror.

Alisa and Elias and I were out at our study site out at Long Island, five miles from Kodiak City, just yesterday.

It was our shakedown trip for our summer sampling, our chance to get the mothership away from the dock and to put all of our new sampling gear through its paces.

We did a test set with the beach seine...and came up with hundreds of juvenile cod, just settled out from the ichthyoplankton.

Alisa, measuring fish on the beach

It felt like life, it felt like renewal, it felt like summer. It even felt like a breath of hope for this fishing town that has been a little short of good news lately.

And now that the cod are in, we're greenlighted to launch on our summer work.

Beach seine and barky

Not incidentally, we all loved being afloat again. The boys were touchingly happy to be sleeping in their bunks.

And I re-discovered that while the true peace of god begins at a thousand miles from sea, a truly good night's sleep begins on your own little ship in a snug anchorage.