Fresh, Hot Wastes of Time

Sportfishing is a lot like hunting – when the adrenaline is pumping you don’t notice things that are going to hurt later. I brought in a 62 inch long halibut today – 122 lbs. It took me about 15 minutes to reel it in and during the process I bruised the tops of my thighs all to hell with the back of the rod.

We got up at 5 this morning and picked up out $9 sack lunches from the hotel. This $9 buys you a sandwich, apple, chips, and small package of Oreos. (Whoops, wait, hold on, I just had to pause to kill a mosquito approximately the size of a sparrow) One of the stores in Whittier has a 12 pack of Diet Coke priced at a reasonable $8.00, but we waited until we got to Cooper Landing and picked one up at a bargain $6.50.

We got to the tunnel right as they opened at 6:30 and realized that the parking lot attendant wasn’t there that early, so a guy offered to give them our money when they came in. He did. I swear I’ve never met nicer people. The little grocery at the harbor was closed as well, but last night the owner told us to knock and he would open for us to sell us some ice. Also last night we went to the hotel gift shop at 10:15 because the Open sign was there, but they actually closed at 10:00. The lady was apologetic and said to come on in and look around anyway. Tonight we ran into our acquaintances from Troutfitters at Sackett’s Grill (wonderful food, amazing crabcakes) and they congratulated us on our halibut catch.

So back to the story. There were 6 of us on the boat, plus the captain – us, another couple, and the captain’s father and his friend. We headed out and spent about 2.5 hours getting to the edge of Prince William Sound. I had thought we would stay within the Sound while fishing which would have been ideal for Hub and his seasickness problems, since it’s more like a giant lake. However, we ended up going out of the Sound and into the Gulf of Alaska. Bad news – Hub alternated yarking up his toes and miserably huddled over sleeping to escape the urge to yark. He spent a good 6 hours like this. He swears he will never go on the ocean again. He had taken 2.5 Bonine yesterday and 1.5 this morning, as well as had an electronic Relief Band turned up so high his fingers were involuntarily twitching.

After a couple of hours of nothing, I felt my line get hit hard. I gave it a few minutes, then started reeling it in. Halibut are bottom feeders, so we had to put our bait on the ocean floor, some 250 feet below us. This meant that reeling anything in took a good long time. Eventually I got him up and the captain hit him with the bang-stick after an unfortunate incident with the safety being on. Jab, jab, why isn’t this thing working? Ohhhhhhh…

A few hours later I got hub to reel in a fish, thinking it would get his mind off his woes. It was around 20 lbs, I think, and all told we netted around 55 lbs of halibut. The yield is about 40% of the body weight. The men were pretty disgusted that they were shown up by the “girls” – the other woman on the boat got a 54″ halibut, 77 lbs. One of the men, a congenial older guy named Ed who has done just about anything and everything in his life and had the stories to prove it, had been slagging on Texas all morning; how it can fit into Alaska a couple of times. I told him that not only did he get out-fished by a girl, he got out-fished by a TEXAS girl. Later he was giving me grief for napping on the way in… but I told him it was hard work reeling in those big fish. I admit it, I was pretty full of myself. That’s the biggest one that our captain had brought back so far this year – the next biggest was 110 lbs. He cut out the ear bones and gave them to me as a souvenir.

I also got to see porpoises swimming and a whale breaching at last. I got a picture of the whale but it’s way far off and pretty grainy. I end the day (still light at midnight) bruised, sore, and beet-red sunburned on my face and hands (my ears are purple, for cry-eye-eye) but happy in the knowledge that we will be eating halibut for a long, long time.

Tomorrow we sleep in!

Woke up around 9 this morning. I’d stayed up late last night trying to see if it was ever going to get dark. By 12:30 I realized that it would not. I was so hoping to see some aurora, too. Oh well. Just means that I will have to come back another time to see it.

The state is so beautiful that it becomes passe. Look, a tall stately mountain with a waterfall of ice suspended on it, surrounded by lush green birch trees, and a moose walking under it. *yawn* I think that if I lived here I would have to visit what we call “Civilization” quite often in order to realize that what is here is so special.

And the people here are outstanding. I’ve never met a nicer group of people. It’s almost like by being here, you’re a member of a club that you never knew existed, and everyone who sees you is happy to talk to you or help you out in some way. Today we realized around 8:00 PM that we didn’t have our fishing licenses yet, and we couldn’t find anything in the area that was still open who sold them. We saw a van with a Longhorn sticker pull into a “Troutfitters” outfit, and so we followed them in to ask if they knew where we could get a license. Wait there just one minute, they said, we haven’t opened for the summer yet but I think my aunt has that stuff in her place somewhere. Let me run over and grab it for you. And she did, while we talked to the other van drivers. They had bought it from some “crazed hippie” in Austin a few years ago and drove it up to Alaska. It’d been sitting dead for a couple of seasons and they got it running this afternoon, just in time to run across us, admiring the Longhorns sticker on the front of the beast and Hookin’ Horns at them (they looked confused). It was like the fates smiled on us, and sent us that really nice bunch of people who took time from what they were doing to help us out so we could go fishing tomorrow. Like I said, outstanding. With no ulterior motive, no “What’s in it for me?” attitude (actually, an extra $20 was in it for them, I hope they were able to upgrade from the Pabst Blue Ribbon for the night). We promised that if we were going to go back out and freshwater fish that we would call them first. And I recommend them for anyone looking to freshwater fish in the Kenai area: Alaska Troutfitters, PO Box 579, Cooper Landing, AK 99572 (907) 595-1212. Even though we didn’t go fishing with them (yet), they went the extra mile to help us out. Good people.

We went on the 26 Glaciers Cruise out of Whittier this morning and it was great. The food was not much to write home about, so I won’t. But you don’t do that stuff for the food, you do it for the view, and view we got aplenty – otters, bird rookeries, icebergs, major glacier calving (and the damned videocamera putzed out 3 minutes before the big pillar fell, too). The Sound is gorgeous.

One thing I have noticed is a definite warp in my concept of scale. Everything here is so big – mountains, trees, rivers, etc. that it all looks to be on a normal scale – until you start wondering about the treeline on the mountains and realizing that a man standing next to that tiny little tree way up there would be dwarfed, and that small-looking mountain is really 13,000 feet tall. When Surprise Glacier sent a hunk of ice into the fjord, the resulting wave from the small-looking chunk was enough to rock the 135 person capacity catamaran for a good 5 minutes.

Wild stuff. We met our captain for tomorrow’s halibut fishing and he’s very nice. I think tomorrow should be a fun day, full of fish. And it’s hub’s birthday, so I hope for his sake that he won’t be seasick. He’s so nervous about it. So horribly worked up that he… well, he’s passed out on the couch, so he’s better than he says he is. Heh.

I can’t wait to get to a faster connection so I can upload more of these pictures. Here are a couple:

Flying over a glacier

A soon-to-be mama moose who ambled by at dinnertime.

It’s 10:45 in the evening. It’s just starting to get dusk here in Cooper Landing, Alaska. Our trip started this morning in Austin when our plane left at 9:40, connected through Houston, and ended up in Anchorage at 4:30 Alaska time, which is 7:30 Austin time. We drove two hours south into the Kenai peninsula to the Kenai Princess Lodge in Cooper Landing. Along the way we hit Turnagain Arm at the exact right moment as the tide was coming in. While we watched, the great expanse of mud flats filled up with a rush of water until you couldn’t see any of the bottom. They say that if you get stuck in the quicksand-like mud, you can drown within an hour if the time comes in, and I believe it. It was amazing.

Further down the road we saw a “Moose Xing” sign and I exclaimed that I wanted to see a moose. Not 5 minutes later, we rounded a corner and saw that the car in front of us had to slow and nearly swerve to avoid a moose crossing the highway. Later on, as we ate dinner on the balcony of the restaurant at the hotel, a pregnant moose cow walked past underneath us.

When we got near to the lodge we started noticing the locals – one kid dressed in his swimsuit and mullet, walking down the road after a swim. Is he nuts? It’s only sixty degrees outside. Another boy didn’t even glance up as we drove past; he was too busy whipping it out to pee on the road. We were a little nervous as to what the place had in store for us. Then we saw a fence that was marked every 10 feet with signs saying “Shooting area – do not enter”. Turns out we are less than 1/2 mile from a gun range that’s open to the public until 9pm. All we need to do is find a place that sells 9mm and we’re there, baby. I will get to shoot my new XD9.

At dinner I had an excellent local beer called “Moose’s Tooth”. I immediately started craving more but they floated the keg, so I had to try another.

What a beautiful day to fly in on – 60 degrees, sunny, dry, slight breeze. So our car smells a little like smoke and the salmon aren’t running yet. I don’t care. I may just sit on our deck and look at the mountains all day long. Friday morning we have to be in line to get through the Whittier tunnel by 6:30 in the morning. I’m not sure what we’re going to do tomorrow. If it’s nice, maybe we can get a sightseeing cruise in Prince William Sound. We shall see.

My daughter is concerned that we might not have a bed to sleep in where we are, so I promised her we would take lots of pictures and show them to her.
I will post them here later.

This guy didn’t fare as well as the others. First of all I think the cat had been at him previously, since he only had 4 legs left before I started grabbing at him with tweezers to get him out from behind the mantel. And I didn’t realize that spider killer would um, dissolve him like that.

It’s interesting. Normally we get a ton of mail and catalogs every day. After my note to the mailman the other day, we only got one envelope. I’ll bet the rest went into the trash.

Oh and I found another brown recluse in the house yesterday.

The stupid slack-jawed boogerfaced postman brought us someone else’s mail again. The only thing our address had in common with the other one is the street number and zip code. Soon I imagine we will be getting mail for everyone in Austin who has the same street number that we do.

I wrote a big black all-caps message on the envelope: WRONG ADDRESS. PLEASE START CHECKING ADDRESS VS. STREET

Like that will make a difference.

You know what else? In the past month a cockroach has come in with the mail twice. I think his dumbshitness is planting roaches in the mailbox.

I ordered a copy of Ghostwatch off of eBay a few weeks back and never got around to watching it until tonight. It was good. It was really good. It was really scary, and I am a very tough customer in that regard. The ending completely blew me away.

On Halloween 1992, the BBC presented this program (or is it programme?) as a live, real story and prompted a panic like unto the broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938. Three recognized, well-respected journalists took roles in the story. It would be like if Tom Brokaw, Greta Van Susteren, and I dunno – Geraldo Rivera, maybe, appeared as themselves in a program that was apparently real. The simple fact of their involvement lent the program instant validity.

I highly recommend the program. Go get yourself a copy ASAP. eBay and Amazon UK both have it.

A solitary worm? A lonely worm. A worm that kept to itself; a moody worm. My kind of worm. An individualistic worm that had taken up residence in my intestines.