A visitor!

Beth and Steve navigating a flooded part of the trail to Point Bridget.

Our friend Beth came to visit!  She got into to town Wednesday night and headed back to Charleston today.  I think she'll need a vacation from her vacation to recover...we barely took time to sleep, running all over to see the fun sights in an around Juneau!  

A very patient Western Toad on the Point Bridget Trail.

Within two hours of getting here, we took her up to the Mendenhall glacier and saw some bears feeding on the salmon run.  Thursday we hiked out to Point Bridget and ate a picnic lunch on the beach.  We didn't see whales, but did see several toads (a first for us!) and some otter prints in the sand.

Yep, still lots of icebergs in Tracy Arm.

Friday we took the all-day trip to the Tracy Arm Fjord.  It's absolutely a must-do in Juneau.  It was a gorgeous day and we saw dozens of seals on the ice and some pretty big pieces of the Sawyer glacier calving into the water.

A curious seal in front of South Sawyer glacier.

Saturday we got up really early and caught the ferry to Skagway for the weekend.  It leaves at 7 am and gets into Skagway at 1:30 pm.  Unfortunately, it rained pretty much all the way there and most of the rest of the day. 

Downtown Skagway on a deserted Sunday morning before the solo cruise ship of the day offloaded.

We spent Saturday afternoon exploring the town, with is pretty much all encompassed within Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park.  Some of the shops and museums were good, but some of the shops carried the same junk you see in every tourist town in SE Alaska.

That's one big, wet dog.  Skagway, AK.

Sunday it was much nicer out and we walked out to the Gold Rush Cemetery, which holds some 130 graves, mostly from prospectors and gold rushers who died in the two years of the Klondike Gold Rush, 1898-1899.

Ferry heading down Lynn Canal towards Juneau.

And finally, for the ferry ride home was actually enough outside to see the mountains and scenery!  It's not as stunningly beautiful as Tracy Arm, but it is very scenic.

Eldred Rock lighthouse in Lynn Canal.

Approaching sunset, Lynn Canal.

All in all, we had a great time with Beth in town!  And now classes start next week, Steve's new job starts tomorrow, and it's back to reality.  I'm not ready for summer to be over!

Salmon fishing

Because I apparently didn't get enough time on the water for the past two weeks, we went out fishing with friends on Sunday.  Steve and I didn't fish, but did enjoy the scenery - two humpbacks surfaced way too close to the boat for comfort and we did a drive by a sea lion haul-out on the way back to the dock.  Kristan and Tara caught 5 salmon - a nice half-days work!  Then we had dinner at their place- fresh salmon, of course.

 

trip report

Cordova, AK

I've gone back and posted several updates about the longline survey over the past few days.  If you want to read them, go back to the first one starting on August 11th and it might make more sense.

Chris 'Cheeseburger' - one of the processors on the boat.

Gorgeous night in the central Gulf of Alaska.

Gulf of Alaska wildlife

Orcas in the distance on a very calm night

There was a lot of cool wildlife viewing while on the boat.  Since work usually wrapped up by 5 pm or earlier, we'd sometimes have time for sportfishing in the evening, which was a good time to spot whales.  Here's some of the cool things we saw:

Killer whales and sperm whales.  These are bad because they tend to take fish off the longline as we bring it up.  They follow the boat, sometimes for days and eat our data.  Not fun.  But, kinda cool to see them so close.  Sometimes there were less than 50 feet from the boat.

Sperm whale

Sperm whale, diving

Minke whales

Dall's porpoise

Dall's porpoise, riding the bow wake as we left Cordova

Laysan and black-footed albatross (only the black-footed shown)

albatross coming in for a landing

and another only getting up speed to fly away

albatross and fulmar waiting for fish parts to wash overboard

Storm petrel

A big lingcod

Just attached a satellite tag to a lingcod

A skillfish - the closest relative to sablefish

Sea otters (these were in Cordova)

Longline

Retrieving the end of the longline

A longline is pretty much what is sounds like.  A really, really long line, with lots of hooks on it.  Since we're fishing for sablefish, which are a groundfish (live on our near the bottom of the ocean), the line is held near the bottom with weights.  Fish bite the baited hooks, and get reeled in using a giant winch. 

Mark, baiting hoots and coiling line.

First, a set of buoys are set out on one end of the line.  They help you find your gear so you can retrieve it.  Then there's some weights (5 links of a giant chain and a big anchor, in this case) that are far enough from the buoys that the weights sit on the ocean floor and the buoys still float on the surface.  Then continuing on one long line (spliced together) are 3600 hooks, evenly spaced, hand baited with squid.  Every 45 hooks there's a 7 lbs weight to hold everything down.  On the end of the longline (3-4 miles later) there's another set of chains and anchor and another buoy. Two of these are set each day for a total of 7200 hooks.  If for some reason the line breaks you can go to the other end and start pulling it in from the other side.  Each day the deckhands bait all the hooks by hand, coiling the line as they go.  It takes hours and hours.  When this vessels fishes normally (for Pacific cod) they fish far more hooks (maybe 40,000? I can't remember exactly) and use an automatic baiter. 

Serge and Elliot, getting ready to bring in fish at the rail.

The longline is 'set' - or released from the boat - via a small hole at the back of the boat. 

This is where the line is released when being set - this is the back of the boat (factory deck) - it's also where I stood and puked when I got seasick on day 2...

When it's pulled back in (hopefully with lots of fish on it) it comes in through an opening in the side of the boat (aka the 'rail').  In really bad weather, water comes into the boat over the rail, which is about 8-10 feet over the water surface. 

Fish moving up a ladder towards the processors.

Once the fish come on board, they move up a series of ladders to the processors, who will remove the heads (by far that's the messiest job on the boat), remove the guts, and wash and prepare for freezing.  Every day the factory is scrubbed down, but it's messy work, especially on a moving boat.  This boat was very sloshy - sometimes a foot or more water on the floor, rolling with the boat in the waves.  A couple of days we had pretty heavy seas and water would roll up the walls and rain down from the ceiling, but of course it's not just seawater, but seawater filled with all the nasty bits of fish innards and severed fish heads that didn't make it into the grinder yet. 

I admit I got seasick briefly on day 2.  It was the worst weather day - 10-12 foot seas, which wasn't bad in itself, but towards the end of the day we were taking some samples from a really gross (slimy, mushy) fish species, and the boat ended up sideways to the big waves for a couple of minutes, which meant there was a lot of gross water flying about while I was wrist deep in mushy fish.  I calmly walked (or stumbled, really) to the back of the boat, puked up all my lunch, then felt much better for the rest of the trip.  And the best part about puking while wearing foul weather gear (ie head to tow rubber) is that you can just hose yourself off if you get any on you!

Two weeks on a boat

The Ocean Prowler

The Ocean Prowler is a 150 foot long longliner vessel.  She usually fishes for Pacific cod in the Bering Sea, but we were on her fishing for sablefish (aka black cod) in the Gulf of Alaska.  There are four levels ('decks') - the top is the wheelhouse, next down are the staterooms and bathrooms and some dry storage, then the next level down is the factory and food freezer, then the bottom level has the fish hold and engine room.

Our room on the boat.

So each year a survey is done to help estimate how many sablefish there are in the North Pacific.  The survey doesn't give an absolute number, but rather a relative number of fish (that you can track over time).  Specific ocean locations are sampled each year, using a commercial fishing vessel that has essentially been rented out for the summer.  The vessel provides the crew, the scientists provide the fishing gear that is standardized so that the same gear and bait type is used every year. 

Serge, Mark, and Mike, three of the deckhands

There were 18 total people on the boat this year - a Captain, First Mate, cook, engineer, four deckhands, four processors, a 'factory supervisor', a fish specialist, two scientists, and two fishery observers (biologists).  This is a 'fisher-processor' vessel, which means fish come on board alive and leave frozen in boxes...so the deckhands are the ones setting out the fishing gear (a longline, which I'll explain later) and the processors are removing the heads and guts of the fish.  The 'factory' is the physical place where all this happens - it's a messy, loud place on second deck of the boat (if you start counting at the bottom).  The factory foreman is in charge down there, helps with sorting the catch by size (or 'grade') and the fish specialist also helps with this and then also acts as the liason when trying to sell the fish (usually to fish markets in Japan).  Our fish specialist was an older Japanese man who spoke little English but was very nice and has been doing this for probably 20-30 years.

Observer Johanna, measuring fish.

The scientists (me and Katy for this two-week leg of the survey) pull samples of fish as they come on board - recording the length and sex for some of the fish and pulling out the otolith which will be used to tell how old the fish are.  We were also putting small tags on some of the fish and then releasing them.  Finally, the two observers are also taking length measurements of EVERY sablefish we caught, was well as some of the other species. 

So that's what we were doing for two weeks!  And it was SO MUCH FUN!!! 
Next I'll write about what a longline is...

Cordova, AK

Salmon stream on Whiteshed Rd, Cordova

I flew to Cordova, AK to meet the boat for the longline survey.  It's a small city, about 2000 people, and it's situated near the mouth of the Copper River, which is known for it's salmon.  It definitely felt like a fishing town.  We (Katy - another scientist - and I) were meeting the boat at 4 pm on Aug 11th, but had to fly in the day before so that we wouldn't risk missing flights due to bad weather (very common, any time of year).  So that meant we had most of the day on Saturday and Sunday to explore Cordova.  Much like Juneau, Cordova is not on the road system.  You can get there by plane or boat (our plane left Juneau, stopped in Yakutat brieftly, then continued on to Cordova).   Coming in our airplane was a "combi" type - with the front half of the 737-400 separated off for cargo and only the back half for passengers.  It was really windy as we were getting ready to land, and the pilot had to abort the landing and circle around to approach from the opposite end of the runway.  It was weird because we were really close to the ground then suddenly we were pulling up again. 

Cordova, AK

Cordova is beautiful!  We had pretty rainy and foggy weather, but you could still see that it's surrounded by mountains.  There's a huge delta where the Copper River flows out of the mountains, and there's a gravel road that runs across the delta for 30-40 miles towards a glacier.  Severe flooding a couple of years ago knocked out a bridge so you can't go as far as you used to, but it was still a pretty drive. 

Copper River delta area

We also took a drive along Eyak Lake to see the salmon spawning.  The water was so clear it looks like the salmon are floating above a dry gravel bed!

But just across the street from the salmon, the river flowing from the glacier was overflowing it's banks, and you could see the contrast between the glacier fed water and where the clear stream came in!

Things in trees

Last night we ran up to the glacier to see if we could see any bears.  It was our lucky day! We saw three - a mom and two cubs, and they were all very active.  The mom was making a half-hearted attempt to fish, but would mostly splash around then go feed on salmon she'd already pulled out of the water.  But the best part was the two cubs, who were climbing up a tree and got almost all the way to the top!  One was so high you could see the top of the tree starting to dip back over.  And there was another tree right next to the bear tree with a porcupine in it.  Fun!  I didn't bring my camera, so no photos to share, but it was actually nice to just watch for once!

I leave today for Cordova and I'm hoping we have time to do some exploring because I've been told there's good brown-bear viewing there.  I'll bring my camera this time though, so stand by!

meanwhile in Alaska

Today I overheard a couple of women in the locker room complaining about the long stretch of nice weather we've had in Juneau.  While they were enjoying the sunny, 70-80 degree days we've had for large parts of this summer, they were lamenting the fact that they don't own much in the way of 'summer' clothes.  One didn't own any shorts and her kids only had 2 pairs of shorts each.  They didn't want to go buy more because it's Juneau, it'll never be this nice again (and the kids will just grow out of them).  But they were really sick of doing laundry multiple times a week.  Let's just call this an "Alaska problem".

In related summer news, the local NPR station this morning had a story about how to discourage the (really abundant) porcupines from eating the leaves of everything in your garden.  Helpfully, they also gave tips on how to humanely and less-humanely get rid of them.  If you do choose to 'off' one (quick shovel blow to the head was recommended), they suggested burying it in your yard as fertilizer, taking the carcass to the beach for the eagles to eat, or eating it as potential disposal methods.  And in case you choose the latter, the gave tips on how to skin it (carefully and slowly, using gloves) and how to prepare it (marinate first with lots of garlic and herbs to cover the actual taste of the meat).  Seriously, I couldn't make this up people!

Finally, my brother found this site and shared it with me this week...It's a humourous photo site, with a selection of funny photos from Alaska.  (you can access it by clicking on the 'this' above, or copying this address into a brower: http://thechive.com/2013/07/29/meanwhile-in-alaska-30-photos/)  Enjoy!