One room school house

Shortly after I got back from shrimping, the teacher in our school quit. He and his wife were from Florida and wanted to give Alaska a try. So they tried for two months and it just wasn't what they were looking for. So the I was asked to be a substitute teacher until they can find another teacher to move up here half way through the school year. They haven't found anyone yet. If you're interested please see http://www.sisd.org/ .

I am teaching 7th through 12th grade in one room. We have 7 periods a day and I am teaching technology/portfolio, Algebra I and II, English, Earth Science, Phys. Ed, and Alaska History. There weren't any lessons plans or sylibi left for me so I have to figure all this out with the help of the lead teacher who teaches kindergarden through 6th grade in the other room (trailer). It is challenging but I really like it.

We had some exchange students from Mexico and Germany visit the class last week. They are enrolled in another school on the island. We took them snowshoeing on a nearby logging road and had lunch in an old rock pit. There are six girls (ages 12-17) and one boy in my class. Having some fresh blood in town caused the hormones to rage. The girls who didn't want to go in the first place were now fighting over leaving. At lunch I overheard the boy say to the exchange students "Remember in America, it is always the man's fault".

More on shrimping

The post I did on my shrimping trip didn't have any photos. It was sooooo busy the first few days that I couldn't even step away to take some shots but I did get a few.

This one shows the unique design(for AK shrimp boats) of lining up the string of pots on a rail. This saves having to haul them up and over the freeboard and each string of five pots can be kept together until their final resting spot in the water is found. I feel like the lobster boats back home did this rail set up too. Each of the five pots is connected to a longline, which is set to be however deep, maybe 50 to 75 fathoms. The long line has a buoy on the other end so that they can find it again. Above, Dean and Chris are bringing up the last pot in the string. The pots are lined up so that when Dean, the captain, steams over to the right spot he tells Chris over the loud speaker. Chris tells him the number on the buoy so Dean can mark it on his chart to keep track of where all his pot strings are, and also keep track of how well he is doing in each area.

When Dean steams back to the buoys that are in the water, Chris snaggs the buoy out of the water with a gaff, gets it loaded on the block (the metal wheel thing behind Dean's head) and Dean runs down to the deck from the wheelhouse and they pull each one over the side onto the rail. There are some bungees that open up and the shrimp fall into a tote below the rail. Even though the pots are big(75-125 lbs each), one will average about 10 pounds of shrimp per good set because shrimp are creatures of space. They don't like to be close to each other, and if they are they have long spears on top of their heads that they can stab each other with, but mostly they just stab us while we sort them.
This is the sorter that I mostly worked on. I would grab the shrimp out of the tote on the deck and put them into baskets that held about fifty pounds each. The first few days we were doing so well that each set would get a full basket and maybe half of another basket. Then I would take them into the sorting room(just a tarp that divides the deck into two spaces) and run them through the sorter you can see in the above photo. The shrimp are dumped into the tray and I push them one by one onto the rollersthat gradually get wider. This way they are sorted into smalls, mediums, large, extra large, jumbo, and super jumbo.
The boat I was working on sold their shrimp to a cannery that sells them on the Japanese sushi market. We were provided with very, very specific directions for handling the shrimp because our boat was considered a catcher/processor. The goal was to get the shrimp from the water, through the processing and into the freezer as fast as possible so that they are frozen alive. Misty and I were the processors. From the sorter, they were dipped into something that makes them poop so they don't have that unattractive bleck vein in them. I got to make that dip solution every 200 lbs. mmmmmmmm. I called the dip bucket the cess pool.


From there they were given to Misty who is the master finger packer. She worked on an other boat that marketed their own shrimp. She was trained by a Canadian lady who works with the Japanese buyers and knows how they like their shrimp to be presented. Misty has done this for a few years so she is very good at it. For every one case that I could finger pack to the specifications she could do four or five cases. The shrimp aesthetic goes something like this: shrimp are lined up in two layers with all legs and antennae tucked under and eyeballs lined up in a perfect line, their butts are tucked under and their swords have to alternate facing left and right, and each box has to be with in grams of the size specification that they have been sorted by. Then they have to go into the freezer. However the freezer can't be opened that often or else it doesn't stay a the required -30 degrees F. We finally got a system down and we think that the shrimp were out of the water and into the freezer somewhere between 45 minutes and and hour. We hustled. We worked hard and lifted crazy heavy stuff. My face was still healing and my hands were raw and punctured. But this fishery only goes from 8 am to 4 pm. So at night we holed up in a protected cove and ate really well, watched movies, and did anything else you can imagine that goes on on fishing boats like:
Haircuts
I was only on the boat for the early part of the season, Chris left a little bit after me. For the last month or so of the season, it was just Misty and Dean working the pots. She did all the pots on the rail, got the lines ready, and all the processing herself. A lot of hard work, I admire Misty and Dean a whole bunch for the insane work that they do and am glad that I had a chance to work with them. Thanks guys.

The cool weather has settled in, Arlo Guthrie style

You know what that means, firewood. The local heli-logging company, Columbia Helicopters (a.k.a. the Cartel) finished up their work for the season. Their sort yard, a former rock pit, is nearby so we all headed down there to do our part to "clean it up", i.e. this is an easier way to get firewood because it is already on the ground. However, its ownership is questionable because the wood is from the Forest Service, and cut by the Cartel that dumped it in the rock pit. Our town is surrounded by the Tongass National Forest (http://www.fs.fed.us/r10/tongass/ ) so basically any wood you get here is Forest service. Anyway, in the photo above, you can see that the big log Roland is leaning against has a rope tied around it. The other end is tied to Jonathan's truck. He pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled and retied it and pulled some more to get it down to be cut up. He pulled until it was both close enough to the splitter and until his bumper fell off.
Then Dave bucked it into pieces long enough to fit into our woodstoves. This is the same chainsaw he used to cut our solid wood doors for the cabin. I never knew how useful this blade would become, go figure. We did maybe five or six of those logs that day. Once the logs were bucked the guys used axes to cut the circles into pieces that Connie and I could manage to get under the wood splitter that we borrowed for the day. She would operate the lever and help get the wood into place. I stayed squatted and pulled the cut pieces out of the way and reloaded it from the pieces the guys were cutting. In this picture, Connie and I got to take a break and the guys took over on the log splitter.

You can see how big the "smaller" pieces are that the circles were cut into by the guys feet and then the final size in the back of the trucks. We cut about three months of firewood for us, for Dave, for Connie and Roland, and another couple loads for some older folks in town. It was a huge job and we were hurting and cold by the end of the day.

So we rolled out of there and about 100 yards away, the Forest Service had a "road block" set up. This was the first case of law enforcement I have seen here first hand. We don't have any police in camp, sometimes the State Troopers will come through town. I wasn't really sure of the status of the wood in the rock pit, but there is no hiding four trucks full of firewood and us covered in sawdust. We were about an hour from any kind of town in the middle of a national forest. They had barricades and sirens and a K-9 car and rakes and shovels and other implements of destruction. I was trying to remember all the verses to Alice's Restaurant and decided to tell them that I put my license and registration under that pile of firewood. It turns out they only ask for hunting licenses here. I am still trying to get used to how this place works, the rural learning curve is a steep one. In the end, they didn't even look twice at all the firewood they could hear us cutting up all afternoon 100 yards away. http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml

Excuses Excuses

Haloween has come and gone. Jonathan and I were sea creatures at the community Halloween carnival.
Well I am back online again. My internet satellite connection was shut down by the FCC because it was interfering with some kind of communication and was violating some kind of regulation.


My guess: the stump that it is mounted on froze and repositioned the dish. We are right under the floatplane flight path that services town. I can see the trouble this could cause, we do get our mail once or twice a week if the floatplanes can fly. One of priceless experiences of living on the island.


Another priceless moment: Old man Wes swallowed his tooth this morning.

Gone Fishing

I went fishing so I haven't been updating the site lately. Misty, Jonathan's sister asked if I could help out on the boat she works on, the Island Pride, out of Petersburg, Alaska. It is a 58 foot limit seiner(salmon) but is rigged up with a sorter and freezer for shrimp season. I have never worked on a commercial fishing boat so this was a whole new thing for me. I have read about the all the horror stories of working without sleep in excrutiating pain in horrible weather. Fortunately, the spot prawn fishery in southeast Alaska is managed by bankers (not really) because you can only work your gear from 8am to 4pm. Very nice, got lots of sleep. The weather while I was on board was calm and sunny, the best weather we had all summer. It was so sunny it was hard to see the buoys on the water surface for the reflection. Pain, okay I was sore, very very sore, but mostly good sore.
My first days on the boat were really busy because we had to get the boat set up...freezer, shop, sort room, rack, make bait bags, shop, move pots(60-125 pounds each)and then move them again, shop, get the lines together with the buoys, and shop more. There are a million things to remember to get ready befor they leave the dock.
We were loading bait from the cannery down to the boat roof onto the maindeck and into the hold. I had to catch about a thousand frozen sub-zero humpies(red salmon) from Dean, the captain, on the top deck and hand them to Chris in the hold. A few "slipped" out of Dean's grasp right onto my head. The best one hit me right in the mouth and split open my lip. So as I'm staring up in the sky to catch the next humpy, the shredded remains of the inside of my mouth just kept getting stuck in my teeth and there was blood over it all. Misty couldn't stop laughing, and we couldn't stop working. By the end of the day it looked like a really good silicone implant. I should whap a frozen humpy across my face more often.

Bogger Names

I just did a post about the the Nuakati Boggs. One of the best parts of this event is the names people come up with for their rigs. Here are a few that I enjoy.
This first one represents our little town, One Stop Fuel Coffman Cove, its named for Earl(see on the hood). We call him "Old Lead Foot" because one of his legs is shorter than the other so he has one shoe with a six inch rubber sole...















Dad, if your reading, this one's for you..

















A little luck of the Irish...













Everyone's favorite, the Bug Bogger...


















And my favorite...












dirt diggler

Mud Boggers

Due to some technical difficulties, I haven't been posting for a couple weeks, but now we're back on line, hopefully. The roads continue to be built, but this post is more about the off roading extravaganza that we have on the island. It is known as the Naukati Mud Boggs.

Naukati is an unincorporated town on the island, which means that it is not a real town, just a bunch of (strange) people living in a remote spot. We call people from there Naukateers. It's a wild west kind of place.



But for six amazing weekends in the summer, they host the Mud Bogs. People from all over the island work on modifying their scrappy island rigs to race through 200 ft. of thick soupy mud.

It has grown over the years and it is about the only public event we've got (except for a marathon in May). They put some bleachers in this year, and had a live band and bon fire after hours.













Some friends just moved here from Arizona to work for the school. The school provides housing for teachers. In Naukati, the teacher's trailer is in the middle of the pit, so when the trucks come out of the mud they circle around the teacher's trailer to get back in line to go through again. They also do their pit stop all around their yard, so it was pretty "exciting" for the teachers to have the Mud Boggs surrounding their new home on their first weekend in Alaska, ever.

We got pavement

For this tiny town, there is quite a bit of development going on.

Here is the first bit of pavement was laid down in town last week. We have had dirt/gravel roads up 'til now.



We have a new ferry and ferry terminal that goes between two other islands, one has a town of about 3200 the other has a pop. of 2500 people. This photo was at the inauguration/christening last January in Seattle. I will try to get a picture of the terminal up here, that was a huge project in itself.



They are also developing the road that comes into camp and connects to the rest of the island towns. This has been a major project going on for the past three summers. It was a one lane dirt road, very narrow and curvy. It will now be two to three lanes wide and less curvy. Lots of people who live in camp work on this road. There are also alot of people from out of town that come to live here during the constuction, which leaves a bit of a housing shortage in the summer, but it seems that everyone found a place. The work that is required for this job is amazing, even after seeing the Big Dig for so many years. It is raw, wet and remote land on an island much larger than Long Island but with less than 4,000 people. This the only part of southeast Alaska that you can actually drive to other towns, there are 9 towns that you can drive to with populations that range from 30 people to 1500 people.



The road on the right is the old road, the road on the left will be the new road.



The city also got a $1 million grant to expand the harbor. This is very exciting for me because one of my jobs is harbormaster and there is a shortage of space in the summertime at the dock. We are gong to run another finger out the middle and then a dock parallel to the existing one. We probably still won't get electricity out there. There is a new school and a clinic in the works, but that may be a bit down the line. We did get a new post office this year and they are building a new seaplane float this month. They are in the process of putting up street signs. Nobody ever knew what street they lived on. We just made up addresses and the post mistress would sort by name. Our mail comes by float plane three times a week, so Fed EX definitely does not apply here.

My camera still works!!!

I went to town the other day to go food shopping and register for a class. On my way home, my drink fell and I guess some of it fell into the pocket where I had my camera. It soaked in cider for an hour until I found it when I got home. But look it still works. Here's some of the stuff from the greenhouse.









Good thing because groceries can be expensive. For example, 1 gallon of milk = $4.83. A loaf of Orowheat bread = $3.75. Head of cauliflower = $3.76. My total bill for groceries was $290.22 for 104 items. I can't remember if that is expensive or not. But that will last us for about 4 weeks, 2-3 meals a day with no restaurants to get out of cooking a meal. Shopping here, you don't have the selection like in the lower 48. And what ever is in stock is what you get. I think it all comes by barge, so produce is hit or miss. There is no significant agricultural farming up here. I think a bale of hay is around $20. So we are enjoying the greenhouse and plan to expand it this winter.

Camping High and Dry

We went camping for a few days this week to get out of town. We took the boat, a tent, a chainsaw (for firewood), and a really crummy map. The crab pots had few crabs in them so we brought them alng for the trip. Jonathan really liked old barnacle eye.





We went into every nook and cranny that we could. The first night we found a really cool spot that you can only get to at high tide.








We did a bunch of exploring and got back out of the next day to find ourselves in another spot that you can only get into at high tide. This one had a Forest Service Cabin with boat access. This picture is of our boat high and dry.






The little island you can see under the corner of the sign is where we beached our boat and then walked the creeekbed to the trail head. That trail is supposed to go to a cabin 1.5 miles away on a lake. Well, a few hours later we still hadn't found the cabin or the lake, and the the trail just sort of stopped. Back to the boat in case it floats.It was a nice hike though.

Floathouses

I seem to take a lot of photos of float houses around here. This first one belongs to Jonathan's family. I tis in a cove near here. The water has just about reclaimed it. We have salvaged a bunch of stuff from it for the cabin.


This one is also on (well just offshore) the island. It is one of my favorites with a separate floating chicken coop, greenhouse and workshop all floating in a beautiful cove. My friend Jenny and I dove around this one a bit.




Floathouses can also be for community business, this one is the community center and postoffice. The school district is housed on a floathouse and Fish and game have floathouses scattered around to use as bases in the field.

Cabin Interior

Just wanted to show some details of the inside before we slap up some insulation this week. This is the ceiling of the entry way that extends into the bathroom and the pantry. I cut most of it with a chainsaw and a template so that the notches would all fall into the same place. Jonathan was so romantic back in Marshfield when he told me the first thing we were going to do when we get to Alaska is... teach you how to use a chainsaw. Well he followed through. So half way across the floor, he says "you're going too slow, give me that chainsaw" and he cut a hole right through the spalt. I finished the rest of the floor. Dat da da da.

The hearth is still under construction. Most of the beaches around here have rough angular rocks but we found a beach that has these nice smooth round rocks. We hand picked each one. We still have to put up the back wall but we ran out of cement. We will get it the next time we go to town, about 1.5 hours away on mostly gravel roads. Please tell me you can see the flower pattern. We still have to put Coca Cola on it to get the cement "dusty glaze" off the top. Coke eats cement. Do you eat Coke?
The smaller room will be the computer room. That floor in there is the top side of the spalt ceiling I cut from the chainsaw. The bigger room is the bedroom. The wood stove pipe goes through the room, we hope that it will help with heating. The door in the bedroom goes out to a little deck that looks over the creek. It's really there so Jonathan can pee outside at night, old habit I guess. The bridge is made of two more spalts. The center pole was around 25 feet long. Jonathan found it floating in the cove. We stood it up by ourselves, in the snow, very tricky. There will be some railings around the upstairs floor, and I am sure by the time anyone sees them they will be covered with laundry drying. We aren't sure if our plan for electricity (a pelton wheel, like a water wheel in the creek) will produce enough power for a dryer. It rains too much for a clothes line. Jonathan's family had a wall behind their wood stove on the floathouse that opened up and had rows of line for hanging clothes. Just one of the details we have to figure out. We'll cross that bridge when we get there, thank god we already built the bridge. For now we are off to put in the wiring, switches and plug-ins. Even though we are not sure how we will get power to run through those wires, it is good to have wires in your walls before you cover them up.

No Frills Gas Prices

A glimpse of life around camp. This is our no frills gas station with a view... This is our no frills gas price... Yup that's $3.70/gallon. We have our own key to the pump so it's 24/7 service and they just send us the bill every month. Whoopeee.

More Meat

We did some smokehouse work this week...salmon and deer jerky. We used alder with the bark peeled off for the wood. The smokehouse is over at Jonathan's father's house so we had some help keeping the fire going for a few days. The fish and venison were both marinated for a couple of days. Then it was in the smokehouse for a couple more as it has been raining, alot.