As I was retiring tonight, I had the radio on as I always do when I go to bed. And on the news, it was reported that Molly Ivans had died at just 62. I met Molly Ivins just once, here in Juneau, soon after Sara and I were married a decade ago. She was in town to speak at the ACLU chapter event. A friend of ours was taking her fishing, and asked if Sara would take her hiking at the glacier with a long time friend of her whose name I forget. I just remember her friend was a TV person who worked with Ed Bradley on one of this news shows.
Sara and I met Molly and friend at the original Ba Cars restaurant here in town. The place was known for it’s atmosphere and food, and certainly was not a place associated with elegance or “high end”. I remember how this Molly person was like a friend you’d always known, and how she commented that although newlyweds, that Sara and I seemed like an old couple with the way Sara finished my sentences. I had no idea of who Molly was nor ever had read her columns. It was only after I met her that I saw her columns and realized what a genius she was for seeing through the political hogwash and stating with clarity what reality really was. And the reality always seemed as how things actually were, not as she saw them. So, it’s a sad day that she’s now gone, and way too young.
My buddy Ranger Doug and I took my boat out to try our luck at with some crab rings yesterday south of town. We ran about an hour south to a place called Taku Harbor, where an old cannery used to be. There’s a public dock there now, and we were the only ones around. We measured out line – about 120 feet for each 6 foot diameter, net-webbed covered ring – on the ice covered dock in the sun. We attached a buoy to each line, baited the center of each ring with fish scraps I grabbed from my processor, and left the dock again as the wind picked up. We tried close by first. We tossed the rings about 100 yards apart in about 100 feet of water in Taku Harbor. We pulled up the rings in about 15 minutes, and didn’t catch a thing. We moved down to Limestone Harbor nearby, and repeated the process. This time we caught half a dozen legal male dungeness crab, and half a dozen undersized crab which we threw back. Although we were after king crab, the dungenss were at least something to take home.
We started home in a north wind, and got the crap pounded out of us for about an hour. The wind was coming right out of the mouth of the Taku, and the flat bottomed boat did not ride comfortably in the 2 to 4 foot chop. We finally cleared the mouth of the river, and the rest of the ride home was fine. I just made it into my state job at 5 pm.