Oops...still snowing.

I really just wanted to show off the stone wall I built, some day plants will grow behind it. Started some seeds this weekend, am I jumping the gun?

The Jolyn Sunk

I got a comment from Jenny, she is running a dive boat in the Carribean. My advice to you Jenny: if it sinks untie it from the dock.

This boat was one of our favorites. It was a wooden double-ender hand troller. Kind of eerie seeing it through the water like that. We went down to check it out on our last trip to town, the dock was straining to keep it at the surface.

It is still snowing. It has been snowing for soooo long. Not normal. The Iditarod was earlier this month and the mushers had runs without snow even though they moved north a bit. Maybe they need to move south?

Where are we?

My students say that they had a hard time finding our town on Google Earth. Bob took this screen shot a while ago. Our cabin is in the lower right corner by the Google logo. You can just barely see the driveway going down from the main road. The larger point is Luck Point, that is towards the main part of town, unfortunately that part is clouded out as we usually have cloudy skies.

The first aerial is of town when it was a logging camp from 70s - 90s. It has expanded out from the center and runs down towards what you can see in the Google image.

The other is an aerial that I found on the internet, says it is our town but hard to tell.

We are in the Southeast panhandle part of Alaska kind of near where the Boardwalk Lodge star is. And a rainfall chart for our area, not many days clear of clouds. Time to start the garden.

Widow Makers

A little while ago we had a freak wind storm. It was a pretty calm morning when all of a sudden a wall of wind came across the cove and it blew for about 20 minutes. The destruction that happened in those 20 minutes was unbelievable. It was almost like a hand came down and slapped us around for a little while. I heard a bump and stepped outside to see a tree on top of the trailer, while I was standing there another fell on the wannagon. These were small trees, sometimes called peckerpoles, so they didn't do much damage, in fact Jonathan considered leaving one there so he could hang his deer from it. While I was still outside I heard a pop and a tree closer to the beach snapped in half at the trunk, it was about 4 feet wide(much like the photo above). That's when I had to make a decision: stay inside the trailer that felt like it was going to get launched or find a clear spot with no trees to stand in. I stayed inside channeling all the Judy Garland/Wizard of Oz energy I could muster up.
The next street looked like a spider web with trees down on power lines, there was something like 22 trees on the wires in about 1000 feet. Jonathan was further out the road near where our cabin is when he heard it come. He stepped out onto the porch and watched 5 huge trees at least five feet wide just go down like dominoes. These ones were easily 75 feet tall. They left a huge amount of open space in the woods above them , but an absolute mess on the ground around them. I am very cautious when walking in the woods now, because just one branch falling from the trees around here is enough to do some serious damage, I look up alot now, that is where the story is in these woods.
The pictures I have here were taken out at Luck Lake a few days later they give a pretty good scale of the power of this wind storm.
This picture of Jonathan next to a "wall" is really the root ball of a huge Sitka Spruce. The roots are not very deep, so this one just took the whole ground up with it when it went down. In the background of that shot, you can see another tree that is snapped part way up its trunk. We looked for the the rest of it to see where it fell, it was blown into the woods about fifty feet from where it broke.


This is a shot of an old trapper's cabin. We counted about thirty trees down all around it, but the old cabin made it through the storm. This day was very different without even a ripple on the slushy water. Nice enough for Ronny to get in and do some fly fishing and Jonathan and Dolly to wade around for sunken treasure.

Sqirrel Power

So Jonathan was fixing a furnace. The firebox caved in so that was the end of the furnace. He thought the squirrel cage(the part of the furnace that circulates air) looked alot like a water wheel. So I came home one day and this was in the living room.

His buddy Bill remembered seeing something like that on the internet. So after much searching he found this picture of a squirrel cage gone water wheel that someone did at their house:

You can read about it and other supercool home brewed energy makers here:

http://http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_experiments_waterwheel.html

INTRODUCING JONATHAN'S SQUIRREL CAGE WATER WHEEL

Compared to the picture of when it was in the living room, he modified the opening a bit so the water could flow in and out better. In that picture, he had an alternator off a car attached to the wheel, but it didn't work. Then he then got another motor off an old International Log truck. And he thought he was really onto something when he hit 1.5 volts, but then wired it wrong and burned the motor up. A few more (weeks of) trials and errors and scrapping together some material McGuyver would be proud of, and some help from the chat rooms on the otherpower.com site, some rare earth magnets lathed into the armature, duct tape, a chainsaw to notch a fallen log, and a rectifier, I am happy to report that we are generating our power. The batteries are charging at a range between 11.50 and 15.5 volts enough for some lights and a stereo. We worked on the floor all weekend with lights running and the stereo blaring and never ran out of power, we even played a UB40 cassette tape to really give it a workout. With a few more batteries we'll be able to power the cabin refrigerator, TV, computer (free blogging, yeah) etc. inverted into 120 AC power, the kind you just plug into the wall for. We are now able to flip a switch at the door and the lights and music come on. In the interest of not overloading the system, we plan to have a propane stove and hot water heater. We are also hoping to have some on-demand hot water heated by the wood stove. Other than that our cabin is now powered up.

You can see in this shot that we just used an existing log that fell across the creek a while ago. The water only drops about 3 feet. As it falls it turns the wheel, the wheel turns a belt(that he got from some old snow chains that go on a dump truck), the belt turns the motor (that he found left for junk in a closet somewhere). The motor he modified by taking out the center part that spins inside the coils. He lathed off some of the metal so there was enough room to stick 8 earth magnets(the kind that are inside computers) onto it and it could still spin. He arranged them 2 by 2 in a North South North South pattern around the center of the motor. I guess this is keeps them repelling themselves and makes the motor turn better to increase the RPM. (My high school physics teacher Mr. Zicko would be glad to hear that some of the stuff I learned in his class is still sinning around in my head) So from the motor you can see a green wire, that goes all the way up to the cabin where it charges the four car batteries. This is how the energy will be stored, we would like to upgrade to golf cart batteries (think weddding presents, I'll see if I can register at Allied Battery Co.). After the power goes through the batteries as DC power, it then goes through a 20 amp inverter which changes the power to AC and connects to the house. That is what we love because we can plug anything we want into our many, many outlets and sockets that we so carefully installed with the dream that someday we would actually have power running to them. And now we do!!!

Girls Night at the Oyster Farm

A couple of weeks ago we had girls night at the oyster farm. Griz and Sharon live on an island about 5 miles from here. They have had an oyster farm for about 25 years there. It gets pretty quiet in the winter so we went to visit. Jonathan's sister Misty, Becky, Ruth and I got a ride out there. We had our own little cabin. The refrigerator is just a box that is attached to the house and you can open a door in the wall and get your food. The outside temp is just right for refrigeration. Griz has a windmill making electricity for the whole place. We wired up an outlet to try to get Sirius radio but no signal.
We hopped in the skiff and headed for the Observatory trail.







This is a pretty wind blown spot looking strait down Clarence Straights. The view here is looking towards town.











Afterwards we headed to the beach and set off fireworks that Sharon hoards in case of visitiors. I was scared a few times. Good show. Of course we had the best oysters, she made them with just spinach and cream baked in the oven, mmmmm. Those are some oysters getting cleaned on the dock.











When we went back to town the next day, this rainbow was right over the oyster farm, where we had just come from.