fishing town

Okay, a lunch-time post. I really want to get all my Alaska pics up so later I can go back through them and remember the trip. I like this drawing of the house just the other side of the bridge on the slough.

I sat on a rock to draw it and hoped the kids on the bridge above me who were snagging salmon wouldn’t snag me by mistake. Here they are, hitching a ride to the airstrip. We saw a lot of them, although I don’t think we ever learned their names.

Here’s the harbour. There’s a huge derelict ship docked there called the Husky II, and its hull is so thin that someone’s foot can go right through it. If it sinks in the harbour, it’ll cost a bomb to raise and remove. It’s all stripped down and ready to take out to sea and sink to become a shellfish reef, but the politics of removing it are so complicated that it’s been sitting there for several years, threatening to go down at any moment. Lovely rust patterns on it, though.

Halibut and a rock fish. It’s better to catch the halibut when they’re not so big (they can grow to over 400 pounds) because the larger fish are the breeders. That’s because, while halibut start out male and female, they all turn female when they’re older. Cool fact of the day. Well, it’s what I was told, but they might have been teasing.

We went to a wake for my uncle’s old fishing friend, Tuggle Int-Hout, who had also been a good friend of his father’s. He died last autumn, but everyone was in town for the 4th of July. So the next-door neighbours invited Tuggle’s wife, Esther, and the people who’d known them to a gathering where everyone told stories about Tuggle (a lot of them pretty raunchy).

Tuggle had made a big impact on the community and was much missed. This is a book his brother made about him (using iPhoto).

We went out deep-sea fishing with Tuggle last time we were in Seldovia because he knew how to navigate well and where all the fish were, but this time we didn’t fish, just went otter-watching and stuff like that. That was great, but we were sorry we didn’t get to go out with Tuggle again.

Here’s the Harbor Master at the wake. She’s a force to be reckoned with; I loved listening to her give the boat owners hell over her loudspeaker if they didn’t dock where she wanted them to. And the guy is Kirby, who does construction work on the stilt houses and has the greatest Clint-Eastwood-esque features.

Here’s my uncle baking oysters on the barbecue (we had some raw and some baked – both very tasty), and a couple more house shots, just because I like them. Fortunately the oysters and the outhouse were in no way linked.

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