a little field work

I'm way behind in sharing fun pictures from recent travel.

Back in June I spent 22 fun, occasionally loooong, days on the fishery survey boat for work. We left from Dutch Harbor, AK and fished our way towards Kodiak Island, then right before reaching the island we turned right and headed across the Gulf of Alaska (without fishing) for three days, ending in Ketchikan. The Gulf crossing was a bit long, since by that time you're really sick of boat food and you just Want To Get Off The Boat. So bad.  Instead, you watch movies, do work (catch up on work projects), play cards, eat bad food, do little workouts since there's only little spaces, and sleep.  I didn't take too many pictures this time around. We were pretty busy fishing (which is a good thing).  But here's a few highlights...

Some fishing gear in Dutch Harbor:

Sunrise in Dutch Harbor. So pretty!

Fishing. This is a shortspine thornyhead coming up. They are quite thorny in the head region - watch your fingers!

One of the days on the boat we had absolutely calm, still water for a couple of hours. I spent time between sets up on deck taking pictures of birds (they are always around the boat, and the seagulls poop on deck a lot, so they're not very popular with the crew who has to clean up after them). This might be my best picture ever:

This guy was sitting on the railing and didn't fly away until I was about 3 feet from him/her. 

Coming in for a landing!  Or playing peekaboo??

He was probably about to poop on the deck...

On the last day before getting to Ketchikan we met a tramper (a big barge-like boat that moves things between ports, and has a freezer hold for moving processed fish around too) in a small bay and offloaded the catch so far. Everything gets brought up on deck, restacked by hand onto pallets, then a crane lifts the pallet over to the tramper. It took 8 HOURS to offload. I helped for about 3 hours until my arms were bruised and too tired to lift anymore.  The boat processes almost all the fish caught (not much is discarded) and pretty much everything is frozen within hours of getting caught. It's a very efficient process.