Holy Cabooses!

It's been a long time. My blog is somehow symbolic of my life....moments of intensity followed by periods of transience. Anyway. What have I been doing since Alaska? Trying to get settled....not just in a place but in my life. Going up there for three months to work with Steve was an awesome experience that I will carry with me for the rest of my life, but now I must turn attention to what I want to accomplish in the southeast US, where my family lives.

In the past 2 1/2 months, I have run a half marathon, worked on a green roofing job in NYC for three weeks, and gotten a clearer picture of my life for the next year.

My green roofing boss, Emilio, and his wife, Kate, have offered me a salaried job in Asheville, and I have decided to make the commitment to the company and join them in the mountains. The decision was a hard one to make after all the work I have put into Fiddler's over the past 2 1/2 years, but the bottom line is: I love Kate and Emilio, I love Asheville, I love the job, I love the pay, and I will love being closer to my parents as they head into the next phase of retirement/aging. I will certainly miss Charleston but will never be far away because of Chris and Jackie and the fact that we have three roofs in the low country.

The pictures are from the job in NYC at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Hard to believe that I am standing on a building! This roof was about 10,000 square feet and was planted with about 50,000 plants! It was great experience for Emilio and I to work with another green roofing company on such an interesting project. It was also a perk to wear out my welcome with Paul and Laura (my brother and his wife) and close friends Erica and Timmy for three weeks.

We have two more jobs this fall: one in Lake Toxaway and one in Chattanooga. I will get pictures of them once they are complete.

Farewell Juneau

Just wanted to throw up some quick pics from the halibut trip in Glacier Bay. This fish is definitely the most beautiful, amazing marine creature I have ever been around. I was in awe when it came up the long line, and I deeply appreciate it's life. This 350 pound fish will feed many many mouths. Took Steve and I all we had to wrestle it aboard. The best part of the trip (besides visiting a friend's remote log cabin complete with kick-ass garden, mud oven, and wood fired hot tub) was waking up to piss in the middle of the night. I could hear whales breathing clear across the bay in complete darkness...it's quite a sound to behold.

It has been a wonderful summer...full of adventure, great times with loved ones, and many many laughs. Now back to Charleston to plant the fall garden :)

crab Diving

Wrapping things up.

We finished our crab season on Tuesday with our final shipment to Portland and celebrated with a big crab dinner. Moving 300 pots back onto dry land was a little easier on my back this time through because of the two months training! The picture shows the boat stacked with 72 pots...barely any room to stand on deck. Those had to be loaded onto the skiff (20 at a time), and then hauled up the beach and into the woods.

The "booby" picture was a creature growing on a rope that we hauled up. With 30 years experience working on boats, Steve has never seen anything like them...they even included eerily similar "nipples?" Haha.

Other pics are us goofing off on a bike/run to Herbert Glacier (the same Glacier Tyler and I hiked to 3 years ago and went into an ice cave), and Steve and I enjoying a rare sunset from a real fishing boat.

The boat is now outfitted for long lining, and we are leaving tomorrow for Glacier Bay to catch 4,200 pounds of halibut. The weather forecast is grim with 4-5 foot seas and heavy rain...should be a good trip. NOT

Even More

More

Pics Galore

The best aspect of this "Alaskan experience" is not the wildlife, not the sunsets, not the fishing, nor the money, or even the mountains. By far, the most cherished part of my two months fishing in Juneau will be my time spent with my wonderful cousins. They have been so generous; opening their home and their lives to me, and I will look back on this time with a fondness of meaningful interaction with people I love.

The ENTIRE Box family rallied for last week's all-night off-load. Even the kids stayed up until 4:00 AM packing our crab into insulated totes to be shipped to Portland. Molly was our camera woman, and I would say she captured the events damn well.

The other pictures are of today's perfect trip in the skiff. Usually, the last thing Steve and I want to do on our day off is head back out onto the water, but with a rare break in the clouds and the sun shining overhead, Molly insisted that we take the skiff out, try to catch a Halibut, and check out some remote beaches. It was SO much fun to experience the water in a new light...leisure, instead of work. We set anchor, and Corey hooked into a HUGE fish. He fought it hard for about an hour, and Molly (as you can see) was ready with the harpoon. It turned out to weigh 150 pounds!!!!! Corey only weighs 100 pounds, so he really worked hard to pull this fish up from a depth of 150 feet.

Might have to do a few posts to get them all on here. We leave tomorrow for our last week of gill-netting, then the last week of crab pots before we have to get all the gear back out of the water and on land. Hard to believe I only have 3 weeks of fishing left.

Pics

More picture of the bubble feeding humpbacks. It was an amazing experience to be so close to this incredible symphony of movement. The whales circle around a bait ball of herring and release bubbles that rise in a cylinder to confine the fish in a cage of bubbles. Then other whales rise up through the center of the column with mouths agape to scoop up as many fish as possible. All the whales surface at the same time, and if you look closely, you can make out the inner baleen of their mouths. SO cool.

The other pics are of me making bait out of cut salmon (pretty slimy/gooey on a hot sunny day) and posing next to a nice pot of 23 keeper dungees. Our record pot for the season is 29.

Bubble Feeding

3-4 foot seas

Picking fish

Holy Whale!!!

Hard to believe Steve took this picture three days ago, but we got quite a show from the boat. A pod of about 8 humpback whales cruised by the boat, and I guess they were in a playful mood because we saw about 15-20 breaches in a 30 minute window. They are SOOOO huge...it looks like slow-motion when they shoot out of the water. Maybe Steve should have a career change to wildlife photographer?

This week was a week of records for the fishing vessel Worthy (that's our boat). We started the gill net opening with the three largest consecutive hauls Steve has ever seen. Each one had 550 fish in the net and took about 2 hours to pick each one. (we had to pick the fish out quickly because the net can start to sink under all the weight.) We threw the net out, waited just 30 minutes, picked the fish, threw the net back out, got unloaded (each haul was about 4,000 pounds), picked the second haul, threw the net back out a third time, got unloaded a second time, and then picked the net for the last time. It was a non-stop finger work out, and when we got done Steve asked me how long I thought that took. I guessed maybe 3-4 hours. We were moving the entire time, and those three sets took almost 10 hours and totaled 12,000 pounds!!!! Of course the action slowed for the next two days, but we ended up with 23,000 pounds of salmon this week. Crazy crazy.

Just a few words about the fish we are catching: 99 % are "enhanced" chum salmon. This means that two hatcheries in the Juneau area release millions of fry into holding pins in two locations. The fry are fed for about two months and then released to complete their 3-5 year life cycle in the ocean. When they come back, they return to their original feeding spots and not to a river mouth. Although the fish live for 5 years in their natural environment, eating their natural diet, the touch of human hands is not far away. If we did not catch them, millions of fish would return to the hatcheries and try to spawn in salt water (which doesn't work), and the beaches around Juneau would become bald eagle hang outs and smelly, carcass-filled places. Definitely a crazy thing to be a part of. I cannot think of any other food source (besides maybe mushrooms) where humans release organisms into the wild for later, large-scale harvesting. I could see this happening with insects, as more research is being done into the nutritional value of arthropods (not kidding check this: www.ted.com/talks/marcel_dicke_why_not_eat_insects). Anyway, slightly off topic. So we are in effect, doing a good thing for these fish who would not be able to reproduce anyway. We are giving their lives purpose, so to speak...Haha.

The week ended with a record haul in the crab pots too. One bay with 12 pots averaged 16 keeper crabs per pot (that's the highest average Steve has ever seen in one area)! It brought our total average up to 5.2 for all of our gear, and Steve thinks this week is definitey our peak week for the season. Going back out again on Sunday, so I will update with more totals!

Hike

This was from a hike up to the ridge that rises over the house to the north. Once I reached the top, I could count 6 glaciers and see all of Juneau down below! The glacier snaking out of the mountains in the picture is the Mendenhall Glacier.

Instead of selling our crab directly to the processor at the dock, we have started shipping the catch to a buyer in Portland who offers a better price. The only downside is that the crab has to be packed in insulated totes and delivered to the airport by 4:00 AM. The alarm went off at 1:30 AM (after only falling asleep at 11:00 PM, and we spent about 3 hours packing them in ice and transferring our 2,400 pounds to a flatbed trailer for delivery. The cool part was this happened on the longest day of the year and it never got dark. We were slinging crabs around under the silhouetted mountains in a twilight of dusk. They were caught and delivered all the way to Portland in under 24 hours time. Pretty amazing what airplanes and automobiles can do!

The pics are from the last trip. Nikki tagged along with us, and Steve says he can't decide if I look like a farmer or fisherman with my hat on...haha.

Oh...I was eating waffles in the kitchen when I saw this bear stroll through the driveway. Steve and I chased it out of the cul-de-sac with Lucy (the dog) doing most of the intimidating.

Humpbacks!

We came across this pod of about 15 whales while running in the channel. Was hoping they were bubble feeding but looks like they were just cruising.

pics

week 1 done

Getting all the pots from land into the water proved to be very demanding work, especially the 120 pots that were stashed in the woods. We had to move them from the woods to the beach, the beach to the skiff, the skiff to the boat, from the stacks on the boat to the hopper for baiting, and then finally the last pick up to throw in the water. Talk about a sore back. The pots are bulky and the boat is always swaying back and forth, so my balance is improving quickly. I was standing in line getting some tea yesterday and caught myself swaying in the line like a drunk sailor. Even in the bathroom this morning, my mind was tricking my body into thinking the walls were moving with the water. The first two days launching the pots we worked 28 hours and slept 3! I was also fighting a cold that seemed to drain my energy, so sleep, eat work was my mantra for the week. Now that the 300 pots are soaking in the water, the two of us can run through them and re-launch in two days time. We will leave the house around 5 tomorrow morning and return late on Wednesday night. Probably back to back 15-18 hour days. This work is just as intense as green roofing or farming, but it lasts for many many more sustained hours. If you want to test your work ethic and durability, come work on an Alaskan fishing boat for a couple months. I felt tested everyday and kept the momentum moving forward with humor, food, and beautiful scenery. Our first haul averaged 3.3 crabs per pot for a total of 2,100 pounds of crab, after only two days soaking. Steve said this should double as we progress and let them soak for 7 days. This Sunday we start gill netting for salmon, which will add 3-4 days to our week. We will fish salmon for 3-4 days, then run through the crab gear before heading back to town. More pics to follow.

More prep

Today we put the boat onto the "grid" during high tide so that we could replace the propeller once the tide lowered. We also finished getting the crab pots ready for staging tomorrow and painted a new high water mark around the boat to discourage barnacle growth. Learning lots all the time. You can see what just one year does to a solid brass propeller...the new one looks nice eh? Excuse the quality of the photos, I took them with my phone. Season officially opens on Wednesday, so on Tuesday we have to ride about 3-4 hours to where 120 pots are stashed in the woods. More updates soon!

Alaska

It has been over a month since my last entry (I am especially sorry to those of you who have been eagerly checking everyday....haha), but I am finally in Alaska.

Steve didn't waste any time putting me to work. After spending the night in the Seattle airport, my flight got into Juneau at 7:00 AM on Thursday. We went back to the house for breakfast, and then headed straight over to the gear to start sorting things out. The picture (excuse the quality) shows what I have been doing the past three days: getting the 50 pound crab pots ready to launch on Monday. This involves checking for holes, repairing/replacing any worn out parts, and recording all the tag numbers. We have 300 pots total(the trailer in the foreground is only 60, just to give you an idea of how many I have to move around). We also replaced the boats batteries, got all of our permits, passed the coast guard inspection, and of course stocked up on supplies for our first trip on Monday.

We were all hanging out in the driveway yesterday afternoon, and all of a sudden Lucy (the family pup) raced down the drive way into the cul-de-sac. She was chasing a black bear out of the neighborhood and holding stake to her territory! I wasn't even here for two days, and I already had my first of many bear encounters. Last night Molly, Steve, and I went mountain biking with a bunch of their friends for Steve's 44th birthday party. I am surrounded by 3-4,000 foot snow capped mountains...this topography (and climate) is starting to get under my skin, and I look forward to a day of exploring.

Steve took the second picture over Memorial Day. Just wanted to show you the landscape and where we will be fishing. Looks nice, eh?

More soon.
:)

back in business

I was out of town last week in Durham, NC installing a pre-vegetated green roof grow field. I realize that doesn't mean much to you, but basically it is an acre of roll-up mats that have to be cultivated on a farm before they are delivered to a project. I will try to get some pictures of the installation up soon.

Only two days off "work" to tie up loose ends on the farm before our next installation on Kiawah Island next week. These pictures are of today's harvest: purple-top turnip, 2 head lettuces, 2 kales, daikon radish, basil, mint, bok choy, and white globe turnip. I am looking forward to dinner tonight :)

Oh and check out this cute radish that is shaped like a snow man!

The weeds are getting out of hand, so tomorrow I will spend a substantial amount of time with my hoe.

Pictures

The comfrey is getting huge (notice my toe to the right for sense of scale). I am continually cutting the buds off the plants so they can put more energy into leaf production and less into flowering.


My modest blueberry crop is ripening well. I am impressed as this is only the patch's first year. Next year should more than double the harvest.


Check out this BEAUTIFUL black swallowtail caterpillar. I think it's so interesting how certain pests attack certain plants. Without fail, every time I have grown dill, whether in Knoxville, Charleston, Wadmamalaw, or even New Zealand, these guys show up for a feast. They grow so fast and eat so much but are so wonderfully nice to look at that I can't bear to kill them. The dill is sacrificed for beauty.


I planted one lime tree in the garden and it's currently putting on some strong growth and bloom production. These flowers rival star jasmine for best smell.