Sitka field work

I'm in Sitka with three others, fishing for sablefish again.  Unlike last May when we were here, the weather so far has been fantastic.  And so has the fishing!  We've seen sea otters, sea lions, and seals out in the bay while we're sampling.  We're here fishing for two more days, then take the ferry home on Wednesday.

Bears

One night while Beth was here and wanting to head to the bath house for a shower before bed, we reassured her "Oh no, we never see bears in the RV park.  You're totally safe walking to the showers in the dark without a flashlight."  Less than two hours later, she was awakened by strange lights at the neighbors - who were outside picking up the trash that had just been strewn about by a mom and her three cubs.  Later we heard more details; the bears had shook one neighbor's trailer so hard it woke him up.  Another person found bite marks in the corner of their RV.  We looked and found claw marks (probably from the cubs) in our insulation skirting the RV.  Whoops.  I guess we do get bears in the RV park! 

They've been back since then a couple of times.  One morning we let Seca out and she went nuts sniffing all over the porch and the yard.  Bears had tipped over the pots on our porch, tipped over the recycling bin (but didn't get into it), and as we turned around to go back inside...left paw prints on our door and nose prints on our windows!  Seca is apparently not a good guard dog.

Sometime last night a bear broke into the back of the truck.  I had (stupidly) forgotten that I left a garbage bag back there when the cans were too full to put it in the community garbage cans (which are secured).  We have two handles on the back of the truck topper - left and right - and they weren't locked. They managed to turn the left one and tear off the right, then got the flip-up gate open and absconded with the whole garbage bag.  I don't know where they went to rip into it, because there wasn't garbage anywhere to be seen.  Grrr...I guess we learned the hard way to be extra vigilant!

Back to school (again)

This week marks the start of classes again.  Hopefully this will be my last semester where I need to take anything.  I have one 'official' class - Modern Applied Statistics for Fisheries.  It should be really useful and the professor is very good.  I'm sitting in on a class called Sampling Theory, and will be doing the homeworks/labs but am not taking it for credit.  It should also be a good, useful class.  I'm also starting to make some good progress on my own research, which is a relief.  This summer flew past so quickly, and I'm not as far along as I had hoped...but that's life.

Next week Friday I head back to Sitka for another week of hook and line fishing for juvenile sablefish, just like we did last May.  It will be tougher this time around because we're all in classes now, so we're taking the ferry over all day Friday, will fish Saturday-Tuesday, then ferry home on Wednesday.  I only miss four classes total.  Not ideal, but not awful.  The exciting this about this upcoming trip - I just ordered a new zoom lens for my camera and it should arrive before we leave!  I'm hoping with all the salmon in the streams that we'll see some brown bears and I can get some good pictures of them. 

And finally, now that classes are back in session, summer is officially over.  The weather has made a bit of a turn into more typical fall weather - cold, rainy, and blustery.  We're going to have to pull in the awning on Irv soon; yesterday it was rattling around in the wind quite a bit.  I've had to sleep with earplugs in the past couple of nights because it's been raining pretty hard and it gets so loud in the RV.  Happy fall everyone!

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)