Short summary of the past few weeks:
July 25 - finished fishing up in Bristol Bay. Packed the boat up and took off down to Petersburg.
Had a job lined up for another skipper, but as he was still up in the Bay when I got to Petersburg, I crashed on his couch for a couple of days.
Then we were supposed to meet in Juneau to pick up a boat, so I hopped on the Alaska Ferry up there and waited for two days for him to get there - got an nteresting time to check out Juneau, and as a highlight I found their McDonalds - ummm yummmmyy yumm yumm so of course I had to order *FIVE* double cheeseburgers.... it was AWESOMMMME.
Then we picked up the oldest still fishing wooden boat in the state - the F/V Eleanora. It used to be my skipper's boat, but he sold it four years ago. It was disgustingly greasy and dirty and plenty of stuff was broken; so we turned on all the bilge pumps to keep it floating and ran to PSG as quickly as possible before sinking.
Spend a week there fixing everything, painting, cleaning, etc. Everything to get it in fishing shape. Once it was semi-ready, we drove down here to Port Armstrong Hatchery.
Unfortunately, the pink salmon must have been frightened by the mere sight of the Eleanora so they never showed up (AT ALL) and we sat around all August.
We did fish two days and caught 30,000 lbs. That sounds okay, until you hear that we were expecting 3 MILLION pounds. And at .07 cents a pound, we lost a bunch of money - after paying and repairs, food, fuel, etc etc, we were down quite a bit of cash. HaHa looks like the crew will be writing the skipper a check heheheh.
We drove back to Petersburg once for a week because we were bored, but got called back to harvest some pinks and coho salmon; ended up with 25K coho and 7K salmon, which barely even paid for our fuel on that trip.
So August kind of sucked really badly.
And the boat was super tiny and fairly uncomfortable, not to mention that I hate with a burning passion the other crew guys, so it was a sticky situation for a while. They are both idiots and have little or no sense of how to act in a decent fashion when cooped up on a tiny boat with three deckhands and a skipper and his daughter. Somehow I managed to avoid bashing any of their faces in, but it was a close call. Self-medication haha I guess.(Gin and tonics make me happy!)
At the end of August we took the Eleanora back to PSG and did some repairs to it:
- Put it up on a wooden grid out of the water to fix some of the holes in the wood seams.
Then the owner came down from Juneau and drove it back up there for us, which worked out well, because the Island Girl just got to town (that's our other boat) and we had to switch out and get back to Armstrong because the coho are starting to run.
Got down here, and fished the next day. Had 51,000 lbs of coho and 11K of pinks - a very good ratio. Fish are 25% female which is a good indicator that the run is just starting. The longer the run goes on, the more females show up. If the female ratio is high, that means the run is slowing down or almost over.
Have been sitting for three days or so. Our skipper left to go fishing on another boat and another skipper came in to cover for him, but haven't fished yet.
Posbbily this afternoon we will be doing some fishing and taking the fish to Sitka AK, which would be nice because we get significantly more money when we load them on board and take them somewhere, as opposed to filling up a tender that shows up here.
That is about all that's fit to print. Have posted some pictures below this post of some things we've been doing.
Hope all out there in TV-land are well and enjoying the summer. I did some jumping into the 54-degree water the other day; climbed up the rigging about 40 or 50 feet and plunged in; it was quite refreshing and broke up the endless ennui of being tied to the dock...
So Long, Scott
