GREEN

Green, green, green, forget snow, how many words must our natives have for the shades of green?   This was my thought on a recent (rare) sunny day while looking across the waters.  Southeast Alaska is home to the Majestic Red and Yellow Cedars, Sitka Spruce Trees, Fir, and Hemlock each with their own distinctive hue of green.  The under canopy consists of primarily Alder, blueberry bushes, or Crabapple and the infamous Devil’s Club.   Each plant has its own unique shade of green.

Alder growing along the mountain road,
 Tongass National Forest.

 

Witches' Hair

 The South may have their Spanish Moss but we have Witches’ Hair as they call the yellowish green moss that hangs in the trees.  There is also a silvery green lichen that grows on branches and a black green moss on the ground.  Along the shoreline the bronzy and golden green shades of the kelp and popweed are visible.  One would think that it would get monotonous but it just all harmonizes and constantly turns your eye as you see something else.

Popweed on shoreline, thick forest with deadfalls  to climb over, crawl under and walk on.

My favorite greens are the ones growing in the green house.  We have had peas, spinach, lettuce, and  the squash and tomatoes are starting.  It is our best year ever.  We even have a visiting gnome, the Uncle Ed from Charlotte’s Gnomeburt living in my bonsai.  Say what you will about living in a rainforest but it lets impatient gardeners like me bonsai.

Uncle Ed watching over young to be bonsai tree.

We have been out in the forest picking blue berries recently.  They make healthy crepe fillings, pancakes, cobblers, or as Zach says, “You can just eat them fresh!”  There is nothing as reassuring as keeping the bear dog close when one can’t find any berries in the bushes but sees plenty of fresh, berry -filled  bear scat around.  As Larry says, makes you want to dip your undies in gravy.  Or does it?  Would that keep the dog close or the bears???

Did he trick me again?

Alaskans nicknamed Sour Doughs

I don’t know if this brings me closer to being a true Alaskan, but I have been regularly feeding and using my little piece of“starter” for many recipes. All the guys report to thoroughly enjoying me doing so too.

By this I mean my sour dough. It seems that to have fresh bread through the long winters the old prospectors would keep their starter in something tied around their necks and under their clothes to keep this precious bit of comfort from freezing. It tends to smell like very yeasty, somewhat sour, beer so coupled with the fact that they probably didn’t bathe all the long cold winter, I’m sure that these grizzly ol’ guys did smell like sour doughs which is just one of their colorful nicknames.

Personally, I don’t wear mine but I make a pretty mean loafof bread with it. Thanks to a friend’s cookbook I can also make sourdough pancakes, and lovely crepes with wild blueberry filling.

Sour dough fresh out of the oven.

Zach fried up some out of this world sour dough croutons for our homegrown greens salads (He is our designated fry cook and a great one!) The SD bread crumbs make for some zingy crab cakes and fish batter too. I’m sure that given enough time we will come up with many more delicious dishes. Being this far from the nearest store we can get pretty creative with our cooking!

Baklava 

Just today I made Baklava from scratch. That's what you do when you have way too much time and a 50 lb. bucket of honey!! Have a sweet day yourself.

Whale of Pictures

Mistic morning on the water. 

Whale in motion

Brick the Bear dog....on point in the boat with a whale at  1 o'clock. 

Zach with a whale next to the boat. 

What we love about living here is we are so close to nature.....the solitude..... Living on the water....so close to some of the worlds best fishing and getting the bonus of seeing whales doing their everyday acrobatics....

Humpback whale came up to say "hi" while Zach and Jerry were scouting for salmon in Skookumchuck.

Brick (otherwise known as the "boy") the fearless bear treeing, whale watching dog has seen his share of what nature has to offer hanging out with us everyday. We have cruise ships passing by from time to time with boat loads of people from all over the world hoping to catch a glimpse of what we see on a daily basis. I hope it isn't to selfish of us to want to keep it to ourselves.....it seems like too many people tend to mess up the pristine areas of our world. Living in remote areas have a price to pay.....like no electric company to plug into....or running water like we know in America (continental 48) like we call it.  We do have water (from a mountain stream behind the house) and electric (via honda generator and battery bank/ inverter) which we haul gas to run. We are not complaining.....we love it and wouldn't trade it...

We all carry a little Canon point and shoot camera with us.....so when we see something remarkable we snap a few shots of it to share (if we think of it).

Another Perfect Day!

Hard to believe that so soon after the first one. Larry and I had the pleasure of experiencing another perfect day.  We give thanks to the Lord for the conditions and our friends John & Emily for taking us out on this adventure.

Every since we moved to coastal Alaska I have wanted to see the Tucan bird of the north, the Puffin but our boat doesn't safely travel out as far as they nest.  Our friends have a bigger, covered boat and agreed to the trip.  We took our regular delivery trip to Craig and then spent the night to get an early start out.

Wednesday dawned sunny and warm and we were off.  We headed south and west to open waters and cliffs and caves around Addington Island.  We were scooting along watching humpback whale and sea otter and more eagles feeding then you would normally see in one place.  The bait fish are really thick right now.

We got to open ocean and the rocks were ruggedly carved by the wave action.  

The Sea Lions were everywhere sunning on the rock ledges and barking at our engine noise.  We were watching all sorts of water birds diving and sunning on the rocks but as much as I glassed them I could not identify any Puffin.



John cut the big engine, they set up the fishing poles, and we started trolling the coastline.  I kept seeing the red legs of the Mere birds and then someone said that is a red beak!  We have spotted the elusive Puffin!  There was a small flock floating, fishing, preening, and even sleeping as we trolled along the shore passing them again and again.  I got to view my fill.

About this time we spotted fins near the shore and soon we were watching a pod of Orca whale feeding and floating and unbelievably, got a picture of one of them breaching fully up out of the water!

It was almost an interruption of the wildlife viewing to stop and attend to the fishing poles but we managed to pull in a limit of silver salmon and some nice black bass.  This was the second day of catching any salmon, they are just starting to move in from the deep.

Soon we were surrounded by charter boats chasing after the salmon.  We were fully satisfied by then and headed back to check the crab pots and go to the campground where the Carrolls spend their summers.

They were surprised when we cleaned the fish and wanted to fry some for dinner instead of having some sort of shore food.  We enjoyed Emily's cooking and the Black Bass, Salmon livers and hearts!

We spent another night in the ol' mini camping van and had a great summer break from the oyster bags.  We returned to the float to find that JR and Zach had been catching salmon and viewing whales as well.  JR got a picture of a huge humpback coming out of the water looking like a speeding freight train.  Truly we had another perfect day!

The Perfect Day

July 5th
(52-58 degrees, clam, partly cloudy)


We were dressed and loading up the boat to go and spray oyster bags this morning early with the tides when JR and Zach came in to tell us how calm the waters were out beyond the islands.


We took the chance and repacked to go adventuring instead of working. We have learned to take advantage of good weather when it comes. We ran hard out to the edge of the open ocean and started to fish.

Right away I hooked a nice sized Ling Cod. I had forgotten how hard they fight. We were fishing just 134 feet down but just when I would get it close to the boat, it would rip out line and take off again. Larry soon hooked another ling even bigger.

We were watching whale all around us. It was amazing. There were water birds feeding and darting by in all directions. We could see three or four whale at a time scooping fish on all sides of our little 16 foot skiff.

At a curious sound we turned to watch a sea lion rolling and feeding along. Another sound had us turning to see two different whale jumping and breeching in the open waters. You could hardly take it all in. I pulled up another fish after a fierce fight only to see that his tail was a bloody stump. Evidently I had been playing tug of war with some creature in the deep. At one point Larry remarked that one of his gadgets marked the water at 428 ft. The random thought floated through my mind that this is too deep for any dragging of the water for a body. They would just say a prayer, toss some flowers, and not eat the crab from that area for a week or so!

Eagles where fishing too! There was an amazing amount of bait fish in the water around us. It was quite the show watching the eagles soaring by and snatching a fish from the water.

Thankfully we stayed in the skiff except for a short landing on the shore of an island. We have seen refuge from the Japanese Tsunami that people are starting to find. I got a buoy, a piece of net, and a spray can with foreign lettering. (Zach says it is Chinese, not Japanese).

The whole day was magical like this. It followed us right back to the float house. We all met up and sat on the front deck to share our day and eat dinner. We cleaned our fish and put the carcasses on the front log boom. We got to watch more eagles fighting over them.



We could see seal feeding on on shore across from us, a whale lay on its back repeatedly smacking one flipper on the surface, and in the distance we could just see a Black Bear rolling and feed on the tall grasses by the shore. It will be hard to top this day.

Sitka Blacktail Deer

Fawns are showing up

Momma and baby

wait for me.

I'm hiding

What is this car doing here by me.

Hi there......

Larry recently got some great pics of the local deer.  They are not like the vehicle savvy Whitetail deer you see down in America.  These deer just stand and look at people or cars.  When they do run, it is a hilarious kangaroo- like bouncing gait.
Another curious behavior they exhibit is this hiding pose the fawn here is modelling.  When danger is near the baby will drop down and freeze while Mama lures the threat away after her.  What this fawn failed to grasp was to drop and hide in the tall grass, not in the middle of the road!  We pulled right up beside it.  Larry opened his car door to take these pictures.  The baby looked up at him but still didn't run off.  We sure hope it got out of the road after we left.  There might be another car by some time today!

Bringing Gas to the Floathouse

I wrote this in March when we first returned.  Now we just had our one summer day here last Saturday; it was sunny and up to 87!!  The next day was back in the 30s and sleeting.  So, when does the Petrol Marine schedule our delivery??  Zach was here this time to help but we were all pretty hot and miserable and we missed out on a prime boating day!

Living on a float house as we do, everywhere we go involves a motor.  Our house too is powered by a gas generator which we need to run about three hours per day.  Our business processor building requires generated power as well for light and to tumble and wash the shellfish.

That gas has to be carried to our remote place, no pipes or deliveries here.  The first years involved JR loading 5 gal. cans in the boat, carrying them up the ramp to a truck, driving said truck to town, carrying cans down another ramp at Petro Marine to be filled, then the trip was reversed.  In the winter months it becomes even more tricky.

When Larry and I arrived to stay and consumption went up threefold, we begin to seek easier methods to run the place.

We have explored wind turbines – not the right sustained wind in our cove as we know it to be now but still opened minded.  We put up some small solar panels and built up the battery storage.  Again, as we know it to work now, not too well in a rain forest above the northern latitudes.

So we still have need for gasoline.  We moved a 350 gal. storage tank onto the ramp on the mainland.  For this amount the supplier will deliver to Naukati.  We still need to carry 5 gal. cans to shore and return them full to the house but we are buying at volume pricing and can better plan the our shorter trips around the weather.

The next summer we bought a second tank to keep at the house.  The tank had to be situated up on skids to gravity empty so we have to climb a ladder to fill it from the top, but it works!  Now we fill our shore tank, spend a painful day moving gas and filling the house tank (where is Zach when we need him) and have fuel at our finger tips for weeks.

This year, with the uncertainty of gas and prices we have a second set of two big tanks operating.  We just ordered 600+ gallons of gas at a bulk discount and spent two miserable days moving 5 gal. cans.

It is these little pesky details that make our lives interesting.

Lar would still like to explore a water/wave power generator.  We do have that action constantly.  Anybody with more knowledge or suggestions please chime on in, we could use the advice.