Before/After

Dolly hung out with a back hoe today. The backhoe took a dig, then Dolly took a dig in the newly unearthed mud. It looks like this went on for a while.

The Dentist Boat Came to Town

The bush dentist stopped in town on Sunday. He and his wife have been running a dentist boat "The Jenny B" since the sixties. They go to all the camps and small towns in the area. He just pulls up at the dock, you can go down, make an appointment, and get your teeth worked on onboard. The funny thing is that you have to hold this button thing in your lap to ground his instruments. I guess you also have to hope no one goes by too fast and makes a wake while he's drilling. There wasn't room at the dock, so we had to climb over the deck of the packer "Towego". After he left here, he headed out to the gillnetter opening in Clarence Straits and was going to work on a fisherman while his nets were soaking.

The Greenhouse

In February Jonathan and I spent a morning staring at an empty space behind the cabin. We had no idea of how to go about building a greenhouse. We used a stick to scrape out a hollow in the dirt. We set two long pieces of scrap wood in those hollows and that became the foundation or skids to build the greenhouse on. We used scrap lumber from the cabin to build the frame. Jonathan had traded some plumbing for some clear corrugated plastic. He also salvaged some nice old boards from his family's floathouse for the flooring and potting bench. Of course we got some beach wood in there too. So here is our super Alaskan greenhouse that we have been harvesting out of for about 2 months.

We started our seeds in March. We did radish, lettuce, spinach, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, zuchini, summer squash, tomatoes, bell peppers, cilantro, basil, and thyme. I've also been doing some flowers and perenials. It was our first year gardening up here so we have to do a lot of trial and error. But, we have already decided to put an addition onto the greenhouse for just tomatoes. We are also going to do some 50 ft. raised beds outside. Some things we will start in the greenhouse and then move out to the beds like broccoli and cabbage, other things are going to stay inside, like the tomatoes which are five feet tall right now.

Pretty Pictures

I have some requests to show what it is like around town, also known as camp, so here are few photos that I have on hand to show you.





This is the view from our front deck at the cabin. We have a tent set up to kep the generators dry.

The cabin we like to camp out at. It was an old homestead and later used for an oyster farm. The floathouse used to be the gym in a school for one of the towns on the island.





Just some shots with nice light from around town.




These photos were taken from a floatplane (DeHaviland Beaver) from Ketchikan to Craig.

More on Milling the Lumber

We had to pick up the mill in town and tow it out to the road. (Yup that's one of our trucks. Maybe I should do an entry just on island trucks). When Waylon came to help Jonathan with the motor, he says "Man, did you pull this out here with your truck?" Jonathan says "Yup". Waylon says "huh, well I'll be". Waylon's Mom was not a fan of Waylon Jennings, I asked.

We(Jonathan) backed it down the road to the top of the driveway. I got out of the truck for safety. He lined the mill up with the first log in line and jacked it up about 5 feet on one end so it would be level.
Of course before we could do this, the log boom truck had to come out and prepare the logs for the mill. Danny had to make a roll-away(like a ramp) to load the logs on. He lined up seven Sitka spruce logs.

Joanthan and I managed to roll the first one into place but after that we had to use a peavy and some local teenagers to move the rest into the right position on the mill. I am not sure how many days we were out there making boards, but it was a great way to keep warm. Between yarding the logs onto not so even rollers, fixing the mill deck because we got tired of our feet breaking through, hauling all the boards down to the cabin, shoveling sawdust, burning scraps, etc. we managed to keep pretty warm.

Low Tide

This morning we had a -3.5 low tide, this afternoon's high tide is aroung 17.3 feet, so we have about 20ft. difference in tides today. Too much current for diving so we went tidepooling



















We started out by some islands in hopes of finding some abolone. We only found one.







The seals were keeping an eye on us while we were slipping around on the rocks. Maybe we should try flubbing around on our bellies like them, less bruising.










Then we moved to our secret oyster beach and got a couple of buckets for dinner. Pretty low tide, huh? Dolly, the dog, doesn't miss a fishing trip. today she tried jumping from the skiff onto a floating log, her front paws made it but as she pushed the skiff away, her hind legs stayed in the skiff. She got so stretched out before she finally went in the drink.
The silver salmon are in. Last night I caught a nice one in a creek as long as my arm and landed it myself in a tricky rocky waterfall situation. Today they were jumping all around us in the skiff, but not biting, for crying out loud.

Salvage
Over the winter we salvaged a bunch of stuff for the cabin. We call it going shopping. We have an idea of what it is that we need to build with and head out in the skiff. Beachcombing the small islands around here has provided some great stuff. This is the story of how we got the beams for the living room and the porch for the cabin.

We needed straight logs not too round but 20 feet long. With that in mind we made about six "shopping" trips. We would head out in the skiff to a beach like this... and and search for what we need.
When we find the log, we tie a rope around it and Jonathan pulls it down the beach with the skiff. I stand by to untangle it from other logs. With 17 foot tides, it can be a long tow down the beach. When we have enough, we make a log raft and tow it behind us back to camp. There's J with the tow in the background.







When we get back to camp we grunt the beach logs onto the back of the truck and tow them through camp to the cabin. Dolly helps.
On this particular day, the ground was either frozen or dry enough to drive down to the cabin to unload our beach logs.

Finally they have to be hung...

We had a great 4th of July here in camp. Heavy on the Crisco and wrestling, but somehow the two were never combined. Maybe we didn't stay up late enough. Some of the events were the greased pig chase, the greased pole contest, electric arm wrestling, and Sumo wrestling.



I think the pigs got pretty hot, not as hot as they are going to be in four months in the smoker.













Then there is the greased pole contest, where you have to start from standing and run all the way out to the end of the pole to grab the pinwheel. This years winner got $511.











Sumo wrestling was a big hit. The suits were really heavy and so were the finalists, except for one 16 year old girl who held her own pretty good against some 250 plus pound burly Alaskan guys.











Dolly gets painted each Holiday, this time she was American. She got in a bit on the grease and wrestling.









It got dark enough for fireworks around eleven o'clock. Up in Anchorage they said they didn't start till around midnight, and it still looked pretty bright out on the news. Six degrees of latitude makes all the difference.

Whoaa--is this actually working? I did some trouble shooting and my uploads via the satelite dish outside our trailer are working. Hoorah hoorah!

So now you've got to see the saw mill we used for all of the dimensional lumber in the frame of the cabin. It's called a mobile dimensional sawmill. It produces rough cut lumber that we obviously don't kiln dry or treat. We used mostly 2x6s for the frame. Any scraps were used in the greenhouse or for firewood.
It has a Volkwagon engine on it. Jonathan borrowed it from a friend in town, there are several here as there aren't any Home Depots within a thousand miles. We still can't drive down the "driveway", too much mud and roots. So we parked the mill at the top of the driveway and jacked it up about 6 feet on one end so that it would be level. Jonathan milled the logs (spruce, hemlock, and red/yellow cedar) and I chained 6 boards at a time onto the four-wheeler to take down to the cabin.

This was back in January, so we were in the snow sometimes and the days were short, dark by 3:30. But we worked hard and cooked on the wood stove. I did catch on fire one day getting a little too cozy with the stove, my insulated Carharts burn from the inside-out apparently. Fortunately Jonathan is experienced in this and we cut the backs off an old pair of Carharts, then Shoe-gooed them to my warm pants, chaps style. Very nice. Made it through my first full winter in Alaska that way.

We are now in July since the last post in February we have milled all of the lumber from the trees that were on the ground. All four walls are up(we milled all the lumber ). The roof(had some uncut plywood barged in from a plywood maker in Washington $10 a piece vs. $22 on the island) and then drove a few hours to pick it up). The windows we salvaged from a neighbors yard. The doors are cut from one solid piece of wood, huge!). Our greenhouse is flowing over with greens. I even chainsawed the bathroom ceiling from some scrap spalts from the saw mill (the left over slabs at the bottom of a log when it is milled). Lets see if I can get some good pictures up here...One from the backhoe that put our wood into a pile for the mill and one of the fire from limbing the trees, it burned for three weeks and was seen about fifty miles away, yeowwww.