Mark Stopha - Alaska Wild Salmon Company

Hooters. Again. Finally.

Finally got out hooter hunting after, if I remember right, I didn’t go at all last season. It seems like years are passing in 100 days now.

Bob and I went to a spot I hadn’t been since my Bolivar classmates came years ago. It was Bob’s first time hooter hunting. He’d harvested spruce grouse up north, but not these big grouse in Southeast Alaska.

We found a beach to anchor that was fairly protected from the 1 foot chop. The winds weren’t to come up today, so I thought it would be okay. When we beached the boat to offload our gear, there was a beautiful plastic boat dock cart that somehow floated to this remove beach. In great shape. We were already making money for the trip.

We couldn’t hear many birds hooting as I anchored the boat and rowed to shore in the punt. It was a beautiful day. Partly cloudy, dry, and on its way to about 50 degrees.

As soon as we got out of the white noise of breeze and waves on the shore and entered the big woods, we heard birds. We got to the first one after a short hike. We looked for this bird for 45 minutes or so. It wasn’t in the worst place I’d ever seen, but the bird was sitting somewhere up there that we just could not detect it. At least that’s what I hoped it was, and not that I have 56 year old eyes and Bob’s eyes are a decade older.

We finally gave up and side-hilled to the next bird, again a short hike on about the same elevation This bird, too, seemed to evade us. We looked and looked and I thought – is this how it’s gonna be all day? That we never see a bird? After 20 minutes or so, I finally spotted the bird. When Bob looked at it, he didn’t think it was a bird. Then it moved.

I forgot to stop to get my 12 gauge shotgun I’d stashed at another skiff I have stashed in the area, but as Bob had a .410 over .22 and his .44 pistol, and because there were two of us, I didn’t go back to get it as I felt we were okay for the birds and protection from bears. I got this bird with the .410, and we side-hilled again a short hike to the next bird.

This time, it took us 5 minutes or less to spot the bird. He was high up in the tree, right next to the trunk, and facing away from us. I positioned myself below the tree in case the bird flushed, so I could see where it landed, and on the third shot with the open sites, but hit the bird with the .22. The bird immediately glided towards the ground about 50 yards to the right of Bob. I couldn’t see where the bird landed, but Bob did, and he mentally noted some land marks to where we’d search. He got to the spot, and I joined him about 5 minutes later from my position. There were blueberry bushes under the trees and a couple little creeks and the open green of the forest floor. I was very doubtful we’d find the bird since it went so far. It could run on the ground, and I’ve seen wounded birds crawl under a deadfall or into a hole to hide. We kept looking. I went a little further away than Bob was looking and as I crested the side of a little creek- there it was. I couldn’t believe it. Bob came over and collected his bird and we were both relieved, and I especially happy that Bob got a bird. On my way back to get our packs, I found a 3 point with eye guard shed as a bonus.

We went downhill to the next bird hooting, again a short hike. We found an almost full set of deer bones on the way. The bird was in a tree located in a muddy little flat that had lots of skunk cabbage. There were several deer tracks in the mud. And a very recent brown bear track. We saw this bird even faster than Bob’s bird. I laid down and had my back against a log and shot. And missed. The bird flushed, and went to a nearby copse of tree tops, but we didn’t see exactly where. No feathers fell from it, and it looked like the bird was flying in good health. We hoped it would start hooting again, but it did not. We decided to call it a day and head back to the boat.

I’ve hunted the side of this ridge for 20+ years, but rarely, if ever, happen to get to this section during deer season. I’ve been here a few times hooter hunting. We came to a series of beaver ponds. We weren’t sure if the ponds were active or not. Then we saw some fresh beaver sign. The beavers were working on a big tree 2 to 3 feet – maybe more- in diameter. One side was about chipped to the middle, and on the other side the beavers had stripped the bark and started in. Almost look out of place in the wilderness where we were standing. Like it was man made.

We ambled our way along the ponds, and found our way down to the beach, right where we came in. The boat was just about to go dry, and we got there too late to skid it into the water. We figured we had 3 hours to wait til the tide went the rest of the way out and came back in. We pulled the birds out of our packs, and plucked and dressed while we sat in the beach grass in the evening sun. As we lauched the boat on the rising tide, two mink ran by, one chasing the other and chirping. Spring is in the air.

Ten years ago I would have thought two birds for the day wasn’t that much and how I need to get back and get more before the season ends. Now, it was just a perfect day in the woods. I had some expected leg cramps overnight, but other than that, I slept like a baby. Luckier than ever to live here and still be able to get around, stiff knees and all.

A little surprise in my deer

So, I just went into the garage this morning and noticed 3 of these grubs laying under the road kill deer I dressed for the food bank (see pic) and wondered- where did they come from??

Did some critter come in and leave them? No tracks in the blood or any sign of disturbance.

Something in the ceiling that was dislodged when I pulled the line up through the pulley? No sign of that.

Then I saw it – something in the deer’s nose sort of peeking out of a nostril. I got the grabber off my workbench and reached up and pulled it out and realized – they are coming out of the deer’s nose! The don’t seem alive when you touch them on the ground, but they are obviously are, as they are moving up and out of the nose.

First two words that came to mind were Nas Tee.

I looked them up on the web and of course, they are common – bot fly larvae.

So Why The Bot Fly?

I’ve never seen them on any deer I’ve ever harvested or cut up. I think I remember a different phase of the bot fly larvae under some caribou skin once, but never blacktailed deer. Could be their life cycle is such that the larvae only exit the nose during months of the year when we don’t normally harvest them.

Hunker Down Day in Douglas

Well, there’s now a statewide hunker down order. Which for me basically means to carry on and business as usual.

I got up early to check on the bagel dough I made last night. It looked ready enough to me. So I made it into a dozen bagels and put the dough in the fridge.

Then I found the smallest pair of cross country skis we had – some old hickory wood skis with 3 pin bindings that were Sara’s. I hoped these would work for skate skis for Sam. I removed the old bindings and mounted NNN bindings I just got in the mail for another pair of my skis so they’d fit Sam’s boots.

I made salmon berry jelly later in the morning from some juice I didn’t see when I made cherry and high bush cranberry jellies earlier in the week from other juices saved in the freezer.

Later in the afternoon, I made my first batch of sourdough bagels using starter from Laura. Wow, are they good and seem pretty hard to mess up. They just take a couple days to make and they aren’t gonna last long so I need to make several batches at a time and freeze the rest.

Then my daily cross country ski at Eagle Crest. The groomer was working the trail as we got there and it was fantastic. Unfortunately, the skis didn’t work for Sam as they acted like classic skis, even though I scraped off the old kick wax and put glide wax all the way down.

I got home and got a message from Sara that she’d be home from the legislature between 830 and 9 pm so I took out some ling cod from the freezer, planning to make deep fried.

Then the Juneau Police dispatcher called. Did I want to get a deer for the Salvation Army Foodbank? You bet I do. Where is it, I ask. She gives me the address, and it’s literally walking distance from the house. So I get knives and tarps and buckets together in the garage, and head out to find the deer.

It took me awhile to find it in the waning daylight, but there she was in the ditch. Still warm.

I put her on a tarp I keep in the car for this purpose and drove the 100 yards back to the house.

When I open the deer up to remove the innards, something looked out of place. Like there was something extra. And there was. A fetal buck and doe. Twins. And not far from being born.

Sara pulls up from a long, long day at the Capital, and when I tell her about the twins, she calls her former colleague at the high school who is a biology teacher to see if he wants them.

I pile the innards into a bucket, and save the heart and liver.

I pull the deer up by the neck on at rope through the pulley mounted in the ceiling that lives there for that purpose, and soon have the hide off and into another bucket. Then I yard the deer all the way to the ceiling so it should be out of the reach of any weasels or marten around the house. The temperature is perfect for hanging, and the deer will be fine there for days.

Back at the house, I put the heart and liver in a bowl of cold water and add salt to draw out the blood. Then I email Shane, the current Salvation Army major here with his wife, and tell him I’ve got a deer for the food bank. I tell him about the fetuses, and am sure to copy the former major Dana, who gets squeamish just by the word blood, and her husband Lance, who will be happy I did.

The deer meat could not have come at a better time with so many people suddenly out of work.

Jam, Sausage and the Flu

Finally got out to set some crab pots earlier in the week. I set them, spent the night at the cabin, and checked the next day. Just a couple tanner and a dungy but all the bait in the jars eaten up so must be lots of sand fleas down there. I rebaited and will let them soak a couple days. Not much going on at the island. No snow under the trees but about a foot in the open area of the trail to the cabin. Had a peaceful night reading old Alaska magazines and drinking coffee.

When I got home, I decided it was time to do some canning to get ready for next year. I pulled out 42 cups of blueberries – I bag them in 4 cup batches so I don’t have to measure when I take them out, and got to making jam. I didn’t use pectin and tried to duplicate the jam my nephew Eaton and I made last summer, but the jam was runny. I think I tried to make too big of a single batch instead of smaller batches. I let the jam sit a few days thinking I could just use a spoon instead of a knife to use it, but I finally couldn’t take it. I bought some pectin, poured all the runny jam into the pot, and put it to simmer. I then pulled off 8 cups at a time and added pectin, sugar, and lemon juice from a fix for runny jam I found online, and redid it all. Came out good this time. Jello-y but not too stiff. I noticed when I was in the store, the shelves were full, including toilet paper, as I’d heard things were low due to the mass panic over the coronavirus.

After the jam was done, I got to making something from the Stikine River geese and ducks in the freezer. I knew Sara had picked up some organic pork fat on her way through Seattle at a farmer’s market, so I decided to make breakfast sausage. I found the waterfowl has to be frozen well or it will come through the grinder pasty. When I saw that happening from some of it that was pretty well thawed, I stopped and put it back in the freezer till it was frozen but just barely pliable enough to cut through. The frozen fat ground beautifully. I made two 10 lbs batches, with 16 lbs of waterfowl and 4 lbs of pork fat. I first mixed the ground fat and fowl together. And no way to do it really than by hand, but it’s easy to tell when it’s well mixed since the fat is so white and stands out from the reddish bird meat. One batch was to be kind of an Italian blend with fennel and parsely and the other sage and thyme and . I measured the spices for each, and put them in a little food processor to mix them well. Like mixing the fat, the spices have to be well worked throughout the meat by hand. The meat was so cold I had to pause a few times to let my hands warm. After both batches were done I made a little patty from each batch and fried it to test the recipe. It’ll work.

Sara wanted me to get some frozen vegetables in case something happened to supply of fresh vegetables. I’ve got enough canned salmon, deer, jam, high bush cranberry ketchup, fiddleheads to last a year, along with some canned shellfish and kelp relish from Sara’s sister. That’s not counting any of the moose, ling cod, salmon, deer, blue berries, cherries and cranberries still in the freezer. We’ve got rice and flour and sugar and other staples here and there. I’m not worried about any food supply. But seems like lots of people are. When I went for the vegetables, Costco was mobbed. Long lines at all the registers. And this is mid-day on a Thursday. Not a Friday night.

During President Obama’s term, somebody got someone to start a rumor that gun ammunition was going to be restricted or outlawed or something, and suddenly – and then for a long time – it was hard to get .22 ammo. Stores were putting limits on how much you could buy. And the tighter the limits, the more the demand, even if you wouldn’t shoot that much ammo in your lifetime. The power of the NRA.

Under President Trump? It’s toilet paper! Our Costco here is actually limiting the amount of TP per customer because people are going crazy buying 20 cases at a time, according to one of the checkout people. The media has people in such a panic they are worried that somehow what- TP is going to be outlawed? And, unlike .22 ammo, there are alternatives. Tissues. Paper towels. We used Newsweek Magazine pages in the Peace Corps. The power of NPR.

The panic is complete. I’ve got .22 ammo and toilet paper currently in stock. If I was a prepper, I’d have my gun loaded next to the door and my TP in a safe underground. Luckily I’m not, so the guns stay in the safe, and I look forward to helping my neighbors if they run out of ammo or need a roll.

December Shrimping

We went to the container house in Craig for Christmas with Sara’s sister’s family. Lots and lots of wind and rain. This was Sara’s first time spent in her container house, and she immediately went to work organizing. She liked it a lot more than I think she thought she would, as do I. The more time I spend in it, the more I like it.

After several years of finishing the container after receiving it mostly constructed, we’ve got the place dialed in pretty well for living. There’s a bathroom with sink and shower and small hot water heater, a kitchen sink and cabinets, two futons to use as couches during the day and beds at night. Most of our cooking is done with an electric frying pan and toaster oven. I put in shelves along the front wall that are about 7 feet above the floor where we can store boxes or duffle bags with our clothing and spare bedding. We have a shed that my brother in law gave us where we keep a chest freezer and dorm-sized fridge. It’s warm and dry with hot showers. It’s simple. I have a cell signal booster so we have good cellular service now. We have good reception for XM radio to listen to ballgames when we’re not listening to KRBD from Ketchikan, which is one of my favorite public radio stations ever, alongside KDLG in Dillingham.

I’d replaced the old, bigger Toyo stove with a practically new smaller Toyo stove. Perfect size for the container. The only problem – I came to find out – was when the power goes out and comes back on, regardless of what temp the stove was set at, it resets to 70 degrees. This isn’t a problem when you’re in town, but it is if you’re not. I set the stove at 50 degrees when I left, and there must have been a power outage shortly after I left in November based on the number of gallons of fuel burned heating an empty building to 70 degrees for over a month. I figured all this out only after we got there and I experimented with unplugging the stove and plugging it back in. I hope an uninterruptible power supply battery will fix it. I also put a big thermometer in the window so my neighbor can see it and asked him to adjust the heater if he sees the thermometer too warm or worse yet, below freezing, although that’s a rarity here.

I also brought down a dehumidifier after not being able to dry things out much when Charlie and I were deer hunting in November. The place is warm and dry, but clothes didn’t dry very fast with the humidity contained in the small space. The dehumidifier really did the trick, as I could see how fast wet boot prints on the door mat evaporated when the unit was running versus when it was not.

My brother in law had not checked his shrimp pots in quite a spell due to the weather and the distance the pots were from town. When the weather broke for a day, he and Sara’s sister, my two nieces, and a cousin of the nieces recently graduated from UAS, all headed to check the pots at first light. It was the last week of December and the temperature was in the 40’s. Not much winter in this part of Alaska, at least at sea level. For some reason, varied thrush birds were all over the place along the coast.

The trip to the pots took about an hour and a half. We saw several humpback whales along the way, feeding in groups of up to six or seven whales. Groups of sea lions were at their regular spots along the way as well. At a couple narrow passes, water rushed so hard with the tide and current that marker buoys can be taken under water.

As we checked the pots, they had some shrimp, but not the usual bonanza they see at this spot. It looked like a combination of the bait being consumed in the pot and some of the shrimp escaping, as well as an abundance of shrimp-eating octopus, as we caught one in about every other pot. Everyone on the boat had lots of fishing and sea time under their belts, so there was always a hand to help the captain handle a pot or remove bait from jars or move gear around the deck.

Lots of hands made the shrimp cleaning easy. We pinched the tails off the shrimp in between pulling pots, and ended up with about 6 gallons of tails, along with the octopus, so it wasn’t a bust by any means. Gale winds were forecast for the afternoon, so we headed straight home. The crew shucked their rain gear and went inside the boat cabin. I left my rain gear on, pulled up a half barrel full of crab line, set it next to outside wall of the cabin for a back rest, and took a seat for the ride home. It was comfortable in the 2 to 3 foot chop.

As I looked at our wake behind the boat, I saw a humpback breach. Then it breached again. Then did a tail lob. As we put more miles between us, I could see it slapping the surface with it’s long pectoral fins. All these behaviors I’d seen when captaining the whale watch boats near Juneau, but they seemed especially wild now out here with only me watching. I could still see the whale pectoral slapping the water when I finally lost sight of it when we were some 5 (?) miles away. I settled in for the rest of the ride home, out of the spray and snug and warm in my layers of clothes and rain gear.

As we got closer to home, we were protected by islands and some of the water was almost flat calm, even though I could see the trees along the channels bending in the wind higher up. As we neared town, we lost much of our protection and had some more chop, but I knew we’d beat the blow and would be in port before it hit.

We entered the harbor just as the wind picked up. As I wrapped the stern line around a cleat at the dock, a big gust shook the harbor. Then the gusts became just wind and the blow was here just as we secured the boat. We gathered armfuls of rain gear, fishing gloves, and buckets of octopus and shrimp tails and fought the wind and rain for the short climb up the dock ramp to the parking lot .

Sara picked me up in our truck and I stripped off my rain gear and climbed in. The rest of the crew went home in their truck. Back at the container, I welcomed the rush of warmth as I entered the house and began putting my gear away. I hadn’t spent this much time with my nieces in many years and it was good to reconnect with them.

Deer Hunting 2019

Went to Craig to deer hunt in late October. Weather was lots of wind and rain much of the 3 weeks I was there. The rain was a blessing after a dry season that left many of the hydroelectric lakes in the region in a desperate situation.

This was the first time I’d hunted down here out of my boat. It took a few trips to gain some confidence with anchoring the boat and going to shore in a punt. Turns out it’s a lot easier than in Juneau. The tides are smaller here, and lots of coves around the numerous islands to get out of the wind. Since the weather was crappy during the first two weeks, not many friends and family wanted to go out in the boat and I wasn’t confident enough to go myself so I hunted spots from the big road system. Didn’t see much.

The first trip in my boat was with Brian and Howard. It was exciting to be the boat driver for the first time in 20+ years of hunting, and Brian remarked how great it was for him to just get dropped off and picked up, instead of having to be the last in the woods and first out, along with worry about the boat, when he did all the driving.

I dropped the two of them off at one spot, then traveled down the beach about 5 minutes to my spot. I carefully anchored the boat, rowed to shore in the punt, changed out to cork boots, and headed up the hill. At the first spot, I called in more deer than I think I saw driving the roads all week. I think there were 4 deer that all came in from below me. I saw a medium fork stop, and took him. There was at least one doe, and another deer that sure looked like a big buck that came closer, but I never could see the head of the big deer and it walked away up the hill and wouldn’t come back. I dressed the deer, turned it over so it could continue to cool and drain but not be open to scavenging from ravens, and continued hunting up the hill. I didn’t get another deer further up the hill, and so about noon, I returned to my deer. I hung it up in a tree, got the hide off, then cut off both front quarters, the torso at the hips, and kept the hind quarters together. I stuffed the four sections of meat into the big game bag I sewed from a sheet that lined my pack, put the pack up on a stump, sat down under it so it sort of fell onto my back, and headed down the hill.

Then my friend from Kodiak, Charlie, decided to come down. He had only hunted from the roads here, and showed me some new spots. But when the weather broke and we got out in the boat, that sort of changed everything. Now I had a captive audience to go every day. We hunted alot in pouring rain and wind. We ran into a nice 4 point one day – a deer just in the wrong place at the wrong time, as no bucks were coming to our deer call. Charlie got the deer, then made the mistake of thinking it would be a good idea to drag it back to the beach. We were some distance from the beach, with lots of woods and dead falls between here and there. I’d advised him to bring a frame pack when he said he was coming down, but he only had a little day pack on. I’d been in this position before, packing out someone else’s deer in my frame back because they didn’t bring one, and had decided I wasn’t gonna do that again. It was a long, wet, up and down hill drag for Charles. But he made it. The next day was a gale and we weren’t gonna hunt anyway so lucky for him we just slept in.

I wanted to go to a spot we’d gone to 10+ years ago with the brothers Bue, and we tried there next. As great a place as I remember, but we didn’t see much. Then we picked out another spot on a new app my sister in law showed me. It’s called On X. You can download satellite maps to a smartphone or tablet that has GPS capability. Then you can use those maps to show your location via the gps, even if you don’t have cell phone reception. Some simple high tech stuff that sort of changes your whole operation.

Although I can tie up my boat to my inlaws dock, I like to keep my boat on its trailer, especially when the weather is so windy I’d need to move it off the dock anyway. The boat launch is located about 3 miles from our place, and so places I normally hunted with my inlaws dockwould mean considerable back tracking from the launch to get to. I used the On X maps to find some promising deer hunting closer to the boat launch, and we headed there after sleeping in til past 8am. It was a little lumpy in some of the exposed weather, and when we were just about in the lee of an island and calmer water, I realized we’d forgot the guns in the truck, so back through the lump to the truck. By the time we got to the spot I’d picked, it was getting on 10 am. Days like this where things don’t go as planned sometimes produce the best memories.

I dropped Charlie and our packs, survival gear, and guns on the beach, then backed off the beach, anchored the boat, and rowed the punt to the beach. As I swapped my regular extra tuffs for corked extra tuffs – rubber boots with golf spikes – our friend cruised by hunting the beaches.

We saw some deer and got one small fork horn late in the day about a mile from the beach. This time Charlie had a pack I’d loaned him, and it was a lot easier for him getting back to the beach. We cruised the beaches looking for deer on the way home when I spotted a downed evergreen I thought might be a cedar that my brother in law might want. As we idled to the beach, we saw a deer near the tree. And it was a buck. As we touched the beach, the deer walked into the woods. Apparently, when I blew the deer call it stopped him, as he was just inside the beach fringe and we got our second deer. Since we’re not rural residents, we can take 2 bucks each here on federal land (which most of it is in this hunting area) as the deer hunting success for the local hunters has not been good. Normally we could take 4 bucks each. And that’s okay with us. We’ve now got our deer for the season here, and can take a couple more up in Juneau if we want.

By the time we got the deer dressed and into the boat, it’s about dark. I white-knuckle it in the darkness by GPS through the rockpiles back around the island in front of town, and once we see the town lights, I relax as I see the boat launch in the distance.

I got up the next morning at 5 am and had my deer butchered and packaged by 9 am. Then Charlie started in on his and he was done in the early afternoon. We both wished we had more deer to get because we were just getting the hang of it but we’ll be ready to go next year.

Getting home to Juneau is an all day affair. Howard and Michelle pick us up at 630 am for the 40 minute ride to the ferry in Hollis. After a 3 hour ride to Ketchikan, we take a taxi to another ferry that crosses to the airport. Then it’s a 5+ hour wait til our flight to Juneau, which stops in Sitka on the way. We get home on time at 8 pm. After 3 weeks of sleeping on a futon, it’s a simple pleasure to be back in my own bed.