Category Archives: Alaska

Fish Heads can be Remarkably Good

Randy Pyle with a yelloweye rockfish.

Randy Pyle with a yelloweye rockfish.

I took a quick trip down to Valdez to go out with a charter boat for halibut. Randy Pyle of Lady Luck Charters took a group of us out for an all-day fishing charter on the Aleashia. We had a great day on the water. We saw whales, sea otters, great birds—and we caught fish. Then I zoomed home with the fish gutted and on ice: two halibut and two yelloweye rockfish. They fileted up quickly and easily enough, and I vacuum-packed most of the filets and put them in the freezer. I held out two nice pieces for a side-by-side taste test of the fish—baked: a little olive oil in the pan and seasoned only with salt and pepper to keep it simple for a flavor comparison. (I liked the yelloweye better, but both were very good).

 

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Moose!

Having not gotten a moose on our float trip, I carved out a couple of days to go out to Standard Creek, where I’d last gotten one several years ago. I hadn’t had any luck crossing paths with a bull during the season out there since, but the biggest part of moose hunting is just putting time in where they are likely to be. I hunted two evenings and mornings in my usual area, but judging by sign the densities were the lowest I’ve seen in many years of hunting there. The visit was great, especially because I’d avoided the weekend by working then and taking a couple days mid-week, which really reduces the hunter activity. Coyotes were howling at dawn on the second day, and the weather was excellent, but I left feeling strongly that it was not worth returning. Moose densities have been too high across this entire hunting zone, apparently, and they’ve been issuing a lot of cow tags to push those densities down. I guessed that a lot of those tags have probably been being filled out here.

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A Fall Float Trip

After returning from a wonderful trip to Europe, life was back to its hectic norm for a couple of weeks, but Rose and I planned to take a float trip down the Chatanika River—just like the one Dad and I had gone on moose hunting back in September 2000. During that former trip, I remembered thinking how much Rose would enjoy such a float, and rumor had it that the 15-mile road off of Murphy Dome Road (which had been very bad before) had been improved for fire fighting earlier this year. So we planned to go. When Dad and I had gone, we’d taken a standard 18-foot aluminum canoe, but we’d worried about the extra load a moose would add and so had brought along an inflatable raft to tow if necessary. That scheme unfortunately was never put to the test, but in talking with some guys at work I heard a resounding recommendation for an inflatable Pro Pioneer made by Soar. I was able to rent one from the folks at Test the Waters, and we were set.

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Rose gets an “A+” in Couch Science

For a long time, Rose said she didn’t like our old fold-down, futon-on-a-frame couch. She didn’t think it was comfortable. Well, it wasn’t a dream couch, but it didn’t bother me enough to want to hunt down a better one. We’d gotten it new when we got up here to Alaska, and it had been an improvement over the ancient, government-issue one we’d had when we lived in Virginia. But it did have more than a decade of good use on it (although it still looked like new), and if we could find a decent replacement without paying an arm and a leg, I was okay with replacing it. So Rose began the hunt and had me sit on prospects when we were in various stores together.

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The Hairy Stick-Eaters

PRIVATE LOG
Star Date 2008.23.12
Local Date 23 DECEMBER 2008, 1930 h.
Earth, interior Alaska.

The hairy stick-eaters were here again today. Fortunately, we had escaped before dawn, traveling the 10 km to the employment facility, and so missed their onslaught. Upon our nocturnal return, the seasonal retention of precipitation as frozen particles (“snow”), which covers the earth here in a white blanket for half of this planet’s annual cycle, gave clear indication of their earlier presence. We were lucky to have missed them, but they had been unable to erase their tracks across this seasonal slate. And, perhaps to taunt us, they had once again turned out the lights. We keep a seasonal array of many small lights wrapped around a nearby perennial plant (a “tree”) to give some dimensionality to the ports in our dwelling. During the excessively long nocturnal periods here at this time in the annual cycle, these transparent panels are usually cheerless, reflective black surfaces, only less oppressive when the shades are drawn, enabling us to focus inward, rejecting their presence. This is the season when the hairy stick-eaters come in greater numbers to threaten our security. Drawing the shades also prevents them from spying on us, and we hope that it thwarts their planning.

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