Paul’s daughters, with help from the rest of us, put on a great memorial for Paul. It was held at the Moose Club in Petersburg. At Paul’s request. It was his go to place to take people for dinner. And where he participated in sports’ pools for decades. The place was packed.

Kris gave a long biography of Paul’s life. I think everyone there learned something they didn’t know about Paul. I didn’t know Paul had been on the city council at one time. There were lots of pictures of Paul on tables, and many of the model airplanes he made in his lifelong hobby hung from the ceiling.

His grandson told a funny story about bugging his grandpa all day on the boat about seal bombs, and at the end of the day, Paul finally relented and uncharacteristically handed his grandson a lit seal bomb!  The grandson retreated to the back deck and threw it off the boat before it blew his fingers off.

I met Paul on the road from Freetown to Bo in Sierra Leone in about 1987. His daughter Nina had arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer a year before me from Georgetown, where she attended college with Patrick Ewing. She worked in a coastal village introducing improved fish smokers, if I remember correctly.

I had just graduated from UAF, and, on the advice of another mentor, Don Jackson, I joined the Peace Corps to work as a fish farming extension agent. Paul and Nevette were over visiting Nina and I just happened to meet them on the road. This was before I met Sara or lived in this part of Alaska.

Years later, I would meet and marry Sara when I moved to Juneau. Sara, it turns out, had been friends with Nevette since they were in high school. Paul came up to me at a troller meeting in Petersburg when I was there working for ADFG in about 1997. It was the first time I’d seen him since we met in Africa.  That started a friendship that grew stronger every year till he passed away this past Aug 1.

Paul and his best friend Tyler duck hunted together for decades. Paul was very secretive about just where they went down the channel from the house. So much of that trip was tradition and culture between the two of them. I knew I was “in” when I got invited on my first of several duck hunts with Paul.

Their duck blind was a large tree that had, I assume, come down the Stikine River. Paul said the tree had been there since he first came there duck hunting – so likely the late 1960’s or early 1970’s. The saltwater had preserved it well.

You had to get to the island as the tide was flooding, and be sure you left before the tide had fully ebbed, or you might be there another tide cycle before you had enough water to get home or back to the Forest Service cabin. We beached the boat on the shoreline opposite the tree, then hauled in more shells then we’d ever shoot in a weekend. Then the beer.

Paul tossed out decoys onto the mud flat in front of the log blind at shooting distance. When the tide came in far enough, it would float the decoys, and then the ducks should start flying in to them.

Paul then told me he hoped I didn’t mind, but since we had to wait for the tide, he and Tyler liked to enjoy a beer waiting for the ducks. Sounds good to me, I said. Then he said we also like to listen to the Seahawks game (it was a Sunday) that was carried by the local Christian radio station, as it didn’t seem to bother the ducks.  I told Paul I thought maybe we were Siamese twins separated at birth!

Paul sat at one end of the log, and Tyler at the other in the root wad.  They had me a short distance from Tyler is some other sort of woody cover. I’d hear Paul yell down to Tyler asking if the game was on yet, and Tyler would yell back, “No Paul, it’s time to pray!”. That was the beginning, really, of a lifelong relationship.

From that point on, the phone calls between us became more frequent. In the last decade, they were weekly and more. I started going down to Petersburg for every Super Bowl, and we were joined by Kris, Steve, and Dick – and Tyler when he was in town. All now my friends, too. In later years, I also went down for the college football championships, and maybe a college basketball final.

The night before Paul’s memorial, Sara helped Nevette and Nina and Andrew and Peter put on a meal for several dozen people who gathered at the family house on arrival from out of town for the celebration. King and coho salmon from Petersburg, moose sausage, Portugal seafood tins, and imported cheeses from us, and baked goodies for desert from the in-towners that joined us.

The family house has become one of the most familiar houses I know now, having spent so much time there over the past decades. I always feel at home there, and glad the girls are hanging on to it.

After Paul’s celebration at the Moose, we again gathered that evening at Paul’s house, with left overs from the night before and left overs from the Moose Club. Most of the wine and booze was taken care of as well.

The next morning, Steve rode his ebike to the house, and he and I went up to the Petersburg landfill for scavenge day. We got there shortly after opening at 9 am, and one guy who had got there before us was busy taking part an electric box of some kind. A fresh 4 inches of snow overnight covered everything, making it a little difficult to see just what was there.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. The last time I was there, I was looking for seine netting, which I found right away in a recycle tote designated for fish netting. Then Steve helped me get some beautiful aluminum plate that now serve as the bases for the downriggers and pole holders on the tug. I also gathered hundreds of dollars worth of stainless steel nuts and bolts and washers.

On this morning, I spotted some kind of structure that may have been an antenna tower, all taken apart and in a bundle. There were multiple heavy wires with loops crimped in both ends that were stays to hold the tower in place. Each end was attached to a pad eye with a stainless steel quick link. I tried loosening one of the links by hand, and it backed right off. Soon, Steve and I were busy removing every link on the pile of antenna tower. We got 37 of them in the end, worth about $300 or more at the hardware store. Steve took some lengths of the wiring and a couple links to use on Paul’s boat, and that’s all he wanted. I took the rest of the links home with me to Juneau. They will come in handy on the boat or for pulling logs down the hill if I can keep track of them, which is always an issue with a hoarder.

We got back to the house from the dump at 1030 am, and people were gathered for coffee and pastries. Most of us were on the 1 pm flight north to Juneau and beyond. An hour later, we started to filter out to drive the short distance to the airport and fly to Juneau on a beautiful crisp sunny winter day.

Paul would be happy with his weekend.

A mutual friend of my nieces’ cousin called on the cousin’s suggestion. I know the mutual friend just casually through trapping correspondence, and remember he told me his sister lived in Madagascar when I was planning my work trip there.

His two boats were dead for now, and he needed to go out and check his trapline. I’d told him years ago if he ever needed someone to go along, I wanted to go to see what dryland trapping for big furbearers was all about. Did I want to take him in my boat tomorrow?  You bet, I said.

The hour was late – approaching 10 pm – as he’d already tried asking a dozen other friends, and only came to me when the cousin suggested it. Normally, I’d like to leave early on such a trip, but the boat hadn’t been out of it’s stall in over a month, and I didn’t recall just how much fuel I had. So, I told him to meet me at 8 am, in case we needed to stop at the fuel dock.

We left at 8 am, as tanks were nearly full. It’s a 3 hour ride over to the mainland where his traps are in my 6 knot boat. It was a fine winter day, with some blue patches of sky and almost calm seas.

I put him off into the punt to row ashore at his first beach trapline. I was having issues again with my charging system on the boat, so ran offshore a bit, killed the engine, and changed the V Belt. That seemed to help, and I could tell now that the other belt was stretched out, so maybe not working just right. I wasn’t sure how long he’d be, and so I dallied around the boat putting things away and such. With nothing else to do, I put out my fishing gear to see if there were any king salmon around. I fished up and down the shoreline. No action, and nothing showed for feed on the sounder.

About 2 hours after I dropped him off, I saw him come down to the beach for a spell, and eventually to the punt. He radioed that he’d row down the beach to the point, check his traps there, and be done in about 20 minutes.

The 20 minutes turned into an hour. Eventually, I saw him coming through thigh deep snow through the trees behind the beach. He would pull something out of my view towards him, trudge a few steps more in the deep snow, and pull it towards him again. When he got almost to the waterline of the snow I could see it: he’d caught a wolf. A big wolf.

He pulled the punt down to the waterline, loaded his trapping gear, then dragged the wolf to the boat and rolled it in. Out he rowed. The wolf was massive. The largest I’d seen in person. The only other wolves I’d seen were on Prince of Wales Island, and they are smaller and leaner. This wolf looked all of 75 lbs, with huge feet. I can only imagine how impressive the 100+ lbs wolves are up in Alaska’s Interior. My friend also caught 3 marten – two of which were almost jet black in color. Much darker fur than those I’d caught on Admiralty Island or down by Craig.

We motored to the second beach, and repeated the process. My friend rowed to shore, and I fished. Nothing showing for feed on the sounder along this beach either, nor any birds working. This check was shorter, and produced one marten.

I dropped him at a third beach. I almost wasn’t going to fish here since I’d seen nothing at the other two spots, but there were a few gulls on the water. They weren’t diving on feed or anything, but looked like they were there for a reason. I put the gear out – I put 50 feet of wire out and fished in about 60 feet of water. I fished out of the little cove past the point where the beach turned north, then turned back into the cove. There seemed to be some feed on the sounder here and there. And then it happened. I looked back like I had all day, and this time the rod was bouncing up and down. I immediately thought I was in too shallow of water, but the sounder showed I was not. I put the boat in neutral, and ran back and grabbed the rod. The fish was taking drag. A few more runs, and I thought it was a keeper for sure.

When I got the line tight, I cranked up the down rigger wire the line had been attached to. Then stepped over the wolf on the deck to the other rod and down rigger. I managed to get both of them up and out of the way, playing the fish as necessary in between.

I got the landing net under the fish, and the king salmon was on board. I stunned the fish, removed the hook, broke a gill, and slid the fish carefully into a bucket of seawater to bleed.

It was almost dark now, but I put the gear back out and made a pass where I caught the fish. When I didn’t hook another, I cranked all the gear up, as it was now dark. My friend was soon rowing out, the twinkle of his head lamp moving to the rhythm of the oars. We got him on board and the punt secured for the run home. He caught nothing in his traps on this beach.

Two hours later, we neared the harbor, and  stopped at his last beach. He had a couple otter sets here, but neither connected.

We got back to the harbor, long after dark, about 9 pm.

As I tied up, I thought: I’m never leaving this place.

We got socked with snow again. Three feet of snow in a couple days. People looked sort of shell shocked when I passed them along the road as the storm progressed. Shoveling again. And again. And again, as the snow just kept coming. Many don’t have driveways you can really plow, so it’s shovel or snowblow.

I was all fine with it til I managed to bury the truck nearly to the axles in soft ground under the snow in our gravel driveway while I was plowing.  Now it was back to the shovel for me, as I’d given away the snowblower and my tow truck company’s truck was down.

When Sara got home at night, I was bushed, and a little depressed. “This is why people move south or get a condo here” I told her.

But as the storm progressed, and the shoveling went on and on, I realized: hey, this may be good for my hip.

Today was the best my hip has felt in a year and a half. The inflamed bursa finally seems to be subsiding.

I went to the boat to do the post storm shovel off. Chris checked the boat for me yesterday when he went down to check his boat, and said mine was okay, but would “need a haircut” before the rain started. When I got down there today, I saw what he meant-  the wet exhaust pipe, which is usually showing the top half of the pipe above the waterline, was all underwater. Chuck, the dock manager, had just sent me a text when I got there regarding the boat, too, to let me know it was time to get her cleaned off. I looked around and saw I was one of the last boats to get cleaned after the storm. And with my hip feeling so good, I kind of enjoyed it. And I noticed Eaton’s work painting the boat name on the bottom of the skiff pulled up on the stern of the tug has been impervious to the snow.

Weather has warmed up to freezing and supposed to be in the 40’s for a week. Ski trails should be able to weather the warm up now for a long time.