Harvest Time

All summer long Elias was reflecting on the orgy of potatoes that would await us on our return to Kodiak, his first attempts at growing his own doubtless (doubtless!) on their way to wild success. In spite of the fact that no one was at home to tend the garden.

Great thing about kids. The harvest was many orders of magnitude below the bounty of imagination, but Elias and Eric were overjoyed with what they got - one good meal's worth.

Luckily, it has been a completely bumper year for blueberries.

We pick and we pick, and still there are more.

And the silver salmon - Oncorhynchus kisutch. Their bounty has been all we could want, and we have  44 of the beasts safely in freezer and jars to see us through the dark months.

Carrie, Alisa's indefatigable partner in gillnetting, after another big day.

Any Alaskan resident is allowed to gillnet salmon for their personal use off the Buskin River, which is between downtown Kodiak and the airport.

So what did I do with the boys on the first weekend in a while that we didn't go gillnetting, since we finally had enough fish? Somehow I found myself talked into going to the Buskin River itself, to pursue that ridiculous enterprise of trying to catch a silver out of the river on hook and line.

We struck out. Gillnetting is so much more fun. But we did see another local who was out harvesting.

And, finally! We have our first deer in the freezer. And I got to reprise my favorite butchering photo.

This wild food is such a part of our identity as Alaskans. Why the heck else are we living here? Alisa and I ask each other time and again as we head out on some gathering mission or another. It all adds up to real work, these various efforts. But we're happy with the consolations of hard work, concrete rewards, and the promise of a long slow winter to come.

This Alaskan Life

Well, I really will get to a recap of the science side of our summer soon. We are living in very interesting times, in both the Gulf of Alaska and the Bering Sea, those twin stars that dominate the firmament of Alaskan fisheries.

But we continue this miraculous run of good weather that has made late August and early September so outstanding on the Gulf of Alaska coast. We continue to apply ourselves to using that good weather to our harvesting advantage. And our efforts are beginning to bear fruit.

Yesterday I shot a small buck just before sunrise, way up on that mountain that is so consistently productive for deer hunting. (You know, that one.) Good news is that I can still pack a deer out a mile and down 2,000 feet to the road all by myself, as long as it is a small one.

I was home by 13:30, and by 15:00 had rebuilt my energy levels to the point where I was biking out to that spot where the blueberries are so thick this year. (You know the spot.)

After I'd just started picking I got a call from Alisa. And let's stop to consider how the world changes. When we lived in Alaska 11 years ago, berry picking and getting a phone call were mutually exclusive activities.

Alisa was out gillnetting silvers with family friends. And they had 16 of those big beautiful beasts and were heading back to the harbor.

So berry picking was put on hold to assist with fish cleaning. And we're going back again today. (The fish are in - don't tell anyone!)

Family friend Noah, Eric, and Elias on Undercover.

Carrie and Alisa at the fish cleaning station. For years a popular bumpersticker in Alaska has been the one proclaiming "Alaska girls kick ass."

Fleet Management

Unexpected invitations to own a skiff are dancing lessons from the Alaskan coastal gods.

Our neighbors down the street are moving to Anchorage. Alisa and the boys stopped by one day after school to ask if they might be selling their gillnet.

Turns out they were selling a net. And a boat. And two Dungeness crab pots.

In short order the boat was parked in front of our house, and the net and pots were in our garage.

Summer fun awaits.

The Romance Of the Sea When You're Ten, Or Six

Ok, you know what makes me tick on long passages.

What about the kids?

Well. Our little Alaskans-in-training on Galactic are very much into killing what they eat. Or at least eating what I kill for them. Check out Eric's smile in the pic above. He's about to levitate with joy.

So, while there's a lot of things that the boys seem to like, or at least accept, about being at sea, nothing fires their enthusiasm like catching a fish.

And this passage from South Africa was very good for the fishing. If nothing else, we put in enough hours of trolling to expect a few seafood feeds out of the deal.

So here are the boyish smiles that did not get away.

Elias' first mahi mahi

Elias' first marlin. (We let it go.)

Ascension Island. The best-fishing anchorage in our 9 years of sailing.
Not humanly possible to be any happier than these two boys.

Eric's first-ever pelagic fish. Check out the fighting belt!

Wahoo for dinner! And breakfast and lunch and dinner
and breakfast and lunch and dinner

The mahi mahi that Elias caught for our 15th anniversary dinner

I keep telling the boys that Alisa can fillet a salmon much better than I can.

Your Bloodthirsty Children

As I write this we're on our final countdown to leave Beaver Island, in the very westernmost Falklands.  I don't have our log just by me so I'm not quite sure exactly how long we've been here - at least a week, anyway.  This place has had that special magic of being timeless for us.

Riding in the back of the Land Rover - only the beginning. 

For the boys in particular Beaver Island has been a complete joy.  A highlight for them has been how hands-on the place has been.  We've been to any number of places where you can't touch this or disturb that.  But Beaver is part of that world where it is ok to kill what you eat, rather than paying someone else to pay someone else to do it for you.  The boys, who have long lived on fantasies of farming and hunting, found the reality quite to their liking.

Running alongside the Land Rover - even better if there is a...

The tone for our visit was set when we arrived, and our host Leiv offered to go out and shoot a reindeer on our first full day on the island.  No mucking around and waiting for the "perfect" time on Beaver.

...dead reindeer ahead.

Beaver is home to a herd of reindeer that Leiv's dad and brother plucked off South Georgia in Leiv's Dad's boat, the Golden Fleece.

(Jérȏme Poncet is known as "Leiv's Dad" on board Galactic, but he is something of a deal in the small world of adventurous sailors.  The brother even has a Wikipedia page - I checked.  He and "Leiv's Mom", Sally, got up to a lot of very impressive adventures in the Southern Ocean, long before  these contemporary days when everyone and their cousin is sailing around down south.  Genuine Bill Tilman-type adventuring.)

The tone for the whole visit was set on that reindeer hunt.  Leiv tried to get close to a herd of reindeer but they ran off.  He then tried to salvage the day by interesting our boys in a visit to the nearby gentoo penguin colonies.  You've never seen an offer of professed "fun" fall so flat with a pre-adolescent audience.

I could just see the thought balloons over Elias' and Eric's heads as they looked down at their toes, too polite to tell Leiv what they thought of his offer to go eco-touring.  "Effing penguins?", they were thinking.  "Whatever, farm boy.  I thought you were gonna whack us a caribou."

Leiv referred to them later as "your bloodthirsty children".  Shamed into doing the right thing, he snuck up on the reindeer again and shot one this time.

Mutton chops on the grill.

The boys, bless them, have been game for whatever harvesting opportunity has been on offer at Beaver, from reindeer liver to hearts of tussac grass to mushrooms to minnows trapped in the creek to upland geese for Christmas dinner.

Alisa, not to be left out, has been keeping the pressure cooker humming, filling our empty mason jars with mutton and reindeer for the long miles ahead.

And minnows to grill and eat whole while we're waiting.

Elias watching Leiv butcher a sheep

Elias, following Leiv.  Leiv has been the perfect host for our boys (and for us).
Don't you love the way their two postures tell the tale of the journey from boy to man?

Elias hunting (unsuccessfully) for our Christmas goose - they're on the hill in the background.

Bloodthirsty - boy and sea lion.

Alisa and Leiv cutting meat.  The Falklands are quite the place for Alaskans who have been away from home too long. 

Elias plucking one of the Christmas geese that Leiv shot.

Christmas geese. 

Our reindeer antler Christmas tree.

I'll write more about Beaver Island later, I'm sure.  But now, in the moment before we leave and begin the journey back to Stanley, I wanted to just share these pictures and this brief account of how much fun the boys have had here.

We've been to a lot of places in the last eight and a half years.  But I suspect that Beaver is going to be on the short list of those places that we can invoke with just a name.

Five years from now one of us will be able to say "Beaver Island", and the other three will light up at the memory.

The end.

Tourists and Travelers

Being a tourist: paying a hefty entrance fee to visit a king penguin colony.
Being a traveler: having a local friend give you two gentoo penguin eggs (hard-boiled) for breakfast a couple days later.

Our friend warned us that the whites would stay translucent after the eggs had been boiled.

They tasted great - thanks to our "local friend"!

From what I gather, collecting penguin eggs is a long-standing part of life in the Falklands, just like collecting seabird eggs is a long-standing part of life in out-of-the-way northern locales.  We felt lucky to be able to experience that bit of traditional Falklands life.

Wonder Of (At) the World

 

Above - jigging off the jupe under the arch lights.  Being six knows no greater delight.

Well, we're in Tonga now; very glad to be here, and in that initial part of our stay in a new country where I frantically try to catch up with science commitments using inconvenient internet access.  So not a lot of detail here, but some images from our stop at Minerva Reef, a completely submerged atoll between New Zealand and Tonga.

We almost didn't visit because we're so shy about sailing to windward with the boys, but we heard enough glowing reports about the place just before we left New Zealand, and got a good enough forecast for fair winds onward to Vava'u, that we decided to head straight there.

We spent three days at the reef, catching up on sleep and having a look around.  And what a treat - the place is surely one of the wonders of the world.

Not bad pics for a cloudy day.

A visit to the reef at low tide to stretch our legs - what an unreal landscape.  There's water continually flowing over the reef from the breakers crashing on the windward side.

Sea cucumber.  And boy.

A very tired sailor, back on the Mothership.