Kurt had Friday off and wanted to go deer hunting. We headed out about 8 am, figuring to hunt the south end of Douglas as it was pretty windy for getting across to Admiralty. Our first choice was taken and like so many other times, that was a good thing, it seems. We rounded the south end of the island where there was the north wind blowing that we expected. We cruised along the shore line until we found a tiny bite that was protected from the wind. The tide was high so we knew as long as the wind stayed the same, the boat should be fine as the point behind the bite would increase the wind protection as more of it became exposed as the tide dropped. I used Sara’s gift to me of a small punt made at Juneau Douglas shop class she bought for my birthday. I dropped Kurt, the gear, and one end of a shore line, paddled the big boat out into 20 feet of water, dropped the anchor with the other end of the shore line tied to the anchor, then gingerly piled into the punt and pulled myself to shore with the line. It was a blue bird day with blue sky. This stretch of the mountain was great hunting. Nearly all of it was open woods and the leaves were gone from the blueberries and devils club. We steadily climbed the fairly gradual ascent for an hour or more before we tried calling. I’d guess we were about 2/3 of the way to the top of the mountain when we called for the second time. I saw the top of a blueberry tree shake and knew it was a deer coming. I was in a position for a shot in a prone sitting position when the deer appeared above me about 50 yards. I should have been more ready to have a tree next to me so I could have used it for a better rest. I snapped off a shot, and the deer just stood there. I chambered another shell and “click”. The bolt did’t chamber the next round. By the time I did get another round in the deer had retreated. As we learned later we should have taken off after it rather than try to call it back. I also should have waited to see if it would have come in closer to me but was too anxious. We worked our way to the top, where we found the only really brushy conditions, but still not too bad. We could see the channel down one side and Stephens Passage on the other. After hunting around the top for awhile, we decided to head down. I was in the lead and almost took us down the channel side. I let Kurt take the lead to at least get us down the right side of the mountain. We would call at good looking places on the way down, and at one stop, I called up a deer, Kurt tried to get off a shot but could not find the deer in his scope, and it retreated. He said it was a big doe. I did not see it. We were coming down the middle of a valley, so Kurt went down one side and me the other as we figured the deer would not go far and it was pretty open country. Not long after we split up, I saw the deer, retreating back up the hill in a little side valley, standing just past a big rock with a tree on top of it. It looked like a big deer. This time I got a solid rest against a tree, fired, and saw the deer wheel around and out of sight as if it went right down. A few seconds later something caught my eye moving down the gully in the center of the valley. I told Kurt to come over below me in the valley. I went to where the deer had been standing, and there was no deer. I looked all around and no deer. No fur. No blood. Nothing. Then Kurt yells “here’s your deer”. Somehow, a deer with a 30.06 through the wheelhouse had not gone right down. When I got down to Kurt I was relieved. The bullet had gone through one lung and out further back. Must not have hit any bone. The deer ended up being not a very big deer – a button buck. I dressed the deer, gave my soft pack to Kurt, and loaded the deer whole on my BullPac. It was mid-afternoon, and probably took us another hour to get down the mountain. Being up the mountain is very deceptive. It looks like the water is right there, and you forget it took several hours of climbing to get to the top. We finally got to the bottom, only to find we were perhaps a mile down the beach from the boat. Always hard to tell just how far you are from the boat since you think the next point on the beach is where the boat it, only to find it’s not and it’s a long way to the next point to see if that’s the right one. We decided to get back up into the woods to try to walk the beach trail, but that wasn’t much better either, as it was mostly along cliffs to the beach. We finally found a small creek through the cliffs that allowed us to get back to the beach, and I left Kurt and our packs there and headed to the boat along the beach. It was like using a doughnut on a baseball bat in the on-deck circle. Once freed of the pack weight, it was so much easier walking. Plus, knowing there was PBR from last week’s hunt made the walk even easier. I got to the boat, pulled in the anchor, loaded the gear, and tied off the punt with the groundline piled inside. I did not want to take the time to wind it on the spool. After starting for Kurt, I noticed the punt wasn’t riding right. When I got back to see it it was filling with water and the ground line had come out. I was not able to save the ground line and it was gone. I pulled the punt on board like I should have done from the get go, then went on for Kurt. I knew after about 5 minutes I’d passed him, so turned back for another look. It’s amazing how hard it is to see someone on a beach, even when you’re looking for them, and especially if they have on drab colors or camo. His pack was lime green, and he was waving that back and forth and I just caught a glimpse of it. I picked Kurt and our gear up and we headed home. By now, it was calm in Stephens Passage but really blowing across the channel. I’d not closed the front door as both of us were still hot from the walking. Next thing I know we take a wave directly over the bow which hit me right in the waist. Still learning about the new boat! We closed the door, but didn’t secure the canvas roof. By now we were taking on waves full on the side so I had to get dripped on from the roof the rest of the way home. I couldn’t see out of my side but Kurt could out of his, so we limped through the waves about half way down the channel to Juneau, when we were finally out of the wind and in calm water for the rest of the trip to Douglas Harbor. Both of us were exhausted, and drank fluids the rest of the night, trying to hydrate. I was glad not get get any cramping overnight. Today will be butchering and listening to the college games on the XM.
Deerless
Went hunting this weekend with my college buddies Todd and Keith. Keith is a guide on the Kenai, and Todd and I dipnet with him on the Kenai River. Todd has been here twice before with his son Alec, and both times were monsoons. This weekend looked like more of the same. On Friday, we launched the boat and first checked the crab pot. A pile of legal crab were in there. I rebaited, and then we took off for Admiralty. We hunted some large muskegs I’d seen on the map but could not remember hunting. It rained. And blew. And rained some more. We saw no deer. But back at the cabin we settled in for the weekend in a nice warm, dry place.
The next morning when we headed out to the boat, it was gone. I looked down the channel and saw nothing. Then I saw the boat. About a 100 yards down the beach. Nestled above the big rocks, right in the small gravel, at the high tide mark. Luckily, the evening high tide was the lower of the two, and we saw that it would float again in the afternoon. I said we could take the kicker off the boat and use my skiff that lives on the beach there, but they were having none of it. Both were apparently wore out from the day before and voted to go back to the cabin and listen to football games. Mississippi State was playing Auburn, and could potentially go to number 2 in the polls, I thought, if they won. Oh, and by the way, the line from the boat to the pull out didn’t break. My know came undone. Yikes.
So back at the cabin, and football all day. Minnesota (where Keith is from) won. Then Mississippi State won. Even Ole Piss beat A and M. We went back to the boat about an hour before high tide and it floated easily and I putted back to the anchorage and put a better knot to hold it tight. Saw some real rain again on Sat. I managed to pick a coffee can of huckleberries still hanging on.
Yesterday, we went to my best known trail and up we went. We called at all my usual spots and it was a great day of weather. Todd and Keith got to see all the skunk cabbage uprooted by bears, and some fresh deer sign, but we could not call in a deer. I think they are still at higher elevations as it’s still so dang warm – about 50 here in the middle of October. And the fog was running just a few hundred feet up the ridge from the top muskeg so we didn’t try to climb the steep stuff.
This morning was another dry day, with little wind. I did the dishes and tidied up, then we headed out around low tide. We ran the beaches on Admiralty and Douglas and not a deer to be seen. I saw one humpback whale just as it dove.
A great weekend all the way around.
This Old House
The washing machine leak had finally reached the point that I needed to replace it, since it looked like it was a pump replacement and the old gal wasn’t worth fixing. I’d garage-saled on Sat and saw now washers. On Sunday morning, there was a new advertisement for a rare Sunday garage sale that had a washer. I grabbed my tip money wad from the summer and headed out the door, hopeful it would still be there. When I arrived, it was still there, and looked to be in good shape. The couple said their new house had a washer and dryer so they didn’t need this pair. I paid them for the washer and the husband help me load it in the back of the Aerostar.
Our laundry room fits the washer and dryer. Barely. So first the dryer had to be disconnected and moved out, then the washer. So far, so good. After removing the washer I noticed the floor was spongy under the linoleum. Spongy like I’d felt on the Dutch Master decks when they were rotted. So I cut away the linoleum and saw there was some rot in the flooring.
No sweat. I’ll just cut out a square to the centers of the floor joists and put in a new piece of plywood. Of course when I did this, I saw that the ends of the joists and the bottom of the stud wall were rotted. Now it was getting interesting. At this point I realized I would have to go from the outside in to see what the foundation looked like and how far up the stud wall the rot went. I took off the cedar siding and tar paper, and saw I was in for a project. The wall was rotted down to the sill. When I cleared the rot out, it looked like there was no barrier from the cement foundation to the sill. Even though the sill was pressure treated, it transferred the water from the foundation cement up the wall. I could see the problem was not likely limited to this wall, either, but decided to tackle the rest next summer.
So, it didn’t look too bad. Just take out the old and replace with new, sistering where necessary. The water spigot came out this wall, too. As I was replacing the floor base under the spigot, I pulled it up to get the board under. Whoosh. The piping that teed off the line to the washer to the spigot gave way, and I had a full pressure shot of water coming out. Luckily I’d had a valve installed to easily shut off the water to the house years ago, and so turning it off was easy.
I set out sweat the spigot pipe back in. Got the flux, solder and torch and went to work. Problem was that I couldn’t get the pipe hot enough because of water still in the line. I you-tubed a solution and saw I needed to cut the line before and after the tee so I could drain the line, then rejoin and put in the spigot line. I tried doing it all like I watched on the you tube and Tommy on This Old House. Put it all together and turned on the water. And sprinkler city. By now it was late in the day, so I wrapped the pipe as best I could to keep the leaks to a drip so Sara could have water, and called it a day.
The next day, I remembered seeing another you tube about new fittings that worked for copper and pex called shark bite fittings. How could I not know about these? I recut the piece from the day before, went to Good Hardware for a length of pex and the fittings, and was back in business. You can even take the fittings apart with a simple little plastic tool, which of course I had to several times.
I finally got the piping tight, and started in on the floor joists. At 20, I might have thought this too big a job or would have tried to find a book about it. At 50, I’ve seen this stuff before. It was just a matter of sistering new lengths here and there, putting some extra blocking in between the joists so I had something to support the floor, and putting in a pony wall between the floor joist base and the section of wall that had rotted. Pretty simple work and a sense of accomplishment with every piece replaced. Of course it always takes longer than you think down the home stretch. Thought I was about done when the tar paper went up outside. Then realized I had to still put in the spigot, which meant going to buy a new one, and also a redo for the dryer venting. Then an extra piece of dry wall to cover up near the floor where the drywall on the wall was tore out. Then put the replacement floor pieces in under the units, and put in some
connecting rubber floor matting I’d garage-saled years ago under the washer and dryer. So 6 days after what was going to have been a simple replacement, we had our new washer. Mama was happy, so everybody was happy.
First deer hunt
Went to the cabin and picked berries for a few hours in the evening and planned to hunt Admiralty the next day. It rained all through the night and I thought it was going to be another berry picking day as I didn’t want to hunt this early in the season in the rain, but then the rain stopped about 8 am and I got my gear together and headed out. The wind was wrong to hunt the spot I wanted to on Admiralty, so I headed over to Douglas Island. I headed to mostly new country today, and got into some nice spots for calling but didn’t see any deer. I wonder how many the 2 wolves that appear to be living there are getting these days. I did find some bumper crops of blue huckleberries, and almost got so obsessed with picking I was going to end up getting out of there at dark. Planned on coho fishing on the way home but it was too late and I was too bushed and dehydrated to stop. My water bottle is sitting full on the cabin table as I write this.
Moose Hunt
Bob, Kurt and I tried our hand at moose hunting on opening days (Sept 15-16). I talked with a few people familiar with the area and got the general layout of the land from the cabin to where the moose might be. We loaded our gear and headed to Amalga harbor for the trek to our hunting area. When we got there, the parking lot was full, and it was pea soup fog. We waited about 4 hours for it to lift. When we could see about a mile we thought it had lifted and so headed out. Only to find that it was just a break in the fog, and soon we were out in Lynn Canal in more pea soup fog. All eyes looked for boats while I traveled by GPS in flat calm water all the way to the cabin. We found the cabin easily, and got settled in. The cabin is located right on the beach, so no long packs of gear and camping equipment. Bob was on for dinner than night, and we had asparagus with steaks cooked over charcoal in the fire pit.
There was more fog the next morning but by about 10 am it had lifted enough to see. The three of us headed out. It was about a mile and half or 2 mile hike from the cabin to the mainland over connections between land masses that were islands at high tide and connected at low tide. We saw bear tracks in the sand – maybe a sow and 3 year old cub or so. We also saw what looked like canine tracks of either a small wolf or coyote. Geese were honking and flying regularly around the bay, and terns were diving on balls of feed in the bay.
It was kind of the blind leading the blind as we tried to decipher where we were an where my friend had told me to hunt. When we finally found some moose scat in a small copse of spruce trees looking out on a little bog of alders surrounded by more spruce, we spread out and I tried to cow call. I’d never really done it for real, but had watched some you tubes on it and practiced the days before we left. I found a patch of high bush cranberries, then called and picked for awhile, called again and picked for awhile, and more of the same. After maybe 45 minutes, I figured we’d move so I shouldered my pack and gun and headed over to where Kurt and Bob were. Kurt signaled to me that there was a moose Bob had seen, and when I got close enough to whisper he said a big cow had come in. When we got over to Bob, he said the cow had moved on, but had definitely come in to my call, advancing each time I called again, until finally drifting off. I hoped there might be a bull around so I scraped a tree with a scapula and might have bull called (I forget) but no more moose. Kurt didn’t see the moose, but heard it walking in the boggy ground. I had not a clue, and was pretty happy my first try called in a moose.
That was the only moose we’d see. We kind of drifted around from meadow to meadow, and it looked alot like Gustavus to me. We timed our return to have enough land between the islands and were none too soon as the lowest of the land bridges was awash not long after we crossed it. We were all bushed at the end of a day of several miles of hiking, and got right into the PBR as soon as we made the cabin. Kurt made a fantastic dinner of coho salmon with rosemary on top and lemon slices on top of that cooked in a cast iron fry pan over a wood fire with a piece of tin foil placed loosely over the top. We had some rice and squash Kurt cooked in water with butter.
The next day Kurt’s knee had had enough so he decided to stay put at the cabin. Bob and I realized we could use the boat to cut maybe 3/4 of a mile or so off the walk through the islands and make it so we didn’t have to worry about making it back before high tide. We found some meadows we hadn’t hunted the day before and did some more calling. I wanted to get us over to another area between 2 rivers where we were told most of the moose hunting occurs, but ended up getting us semi-lost for about 2 hours walking around in some old second growth forest, walking around in a circle before I realized my GPS was not hooked to the satellites so the position I would see from time to time was false. When I realized this, I put Bob in charge of navigation. He figured out where we were, put the sun at 2 o’clock, and quickly got us back to a great area to call. It also held a bonanza of cranberries and I picked a full gallon bag there. But no moose.
It got to be late in the day as we headed back to the boat. We went on the wrong side of the peninsula we had anchored the boat, and so had to walk around it back to the boat, but it turned out not to be as far as we feared. We came across our tracks on the beach from the day before, and a bear had walked in our tracks at some time over the past 30 hours.
When we reached the cabin, Kurt had had a great day. He’d met a guy fishing in his skiff who was familiar with the area so got a little more intel on the area. Unfortunately, he’d not made dinner as planned, so I took over as it was my turn anyway and Bob and I were in more of a hurry to rehydrate with PBR than eat right away. I made moose burger with beans and onions and spices and cheese melted in at the end in the cast iron pot over the wood fire and then we went inside and made burritos with them. I was surprised at how salty it came out, and Bob said the canned black beans likely made it that way, so I’ll remember that for next time. Two days of flat calm weather with a little rain over night and perfect weather for hiking. We told stories the rest of the night until the Jim Beam was empty and went to bed.
We got up when we felt like it the next morning, and had muffins Bob had brought with my cherry jam with coffee for breakfast. We gradually started packing up our gear and carrying it out to the beach on another bluebird morning. We loaded up and then cruised the entire bay hoping for a wayward moose out on low tide but did not see any. It was a flat calm run across Lynn Canal back to Amalga Harbor, and I am really happy with my new boat, although still a few kinks to work out. I’m looking forward to taking Sara back there, perhaps a great place to spend Christmas.
Pink Salmon, Sockeye, Canadians, and Cherry Jam
Spent a day canning about 30 pink salmon worth of fillets. The fish came out great as the pinks were big and bright. It kills me people who think they are “true Alaskans” turn their nose up at pink salmon. The fish were bled and handled like king salmon and taste great. I cut the fish into chunks when still semi frozen and packed the jars, which I realize now was not wise since some jars weren’t plumb full after the fish fully thawed but live and learn. I also used reusable lids for the first time, and went through a little learning curve on those, too. Did the canning on a single burner propane stove up in the garage, so didn’t even smell up the house.
Then Ron and I went to Haines weekend before last. Up on Saturday, get off the ferry, hook up Roy’s boat, and head to the river. We arrived at the river at 2 pm ish and had 30 sockeye by 530 or so. Ron called it a day so we would not have to clean at night. We got back to Roy’s, pressure-bled and cleaned the fish in about an hour as Ron and I have been doing this trip together now for 4 years or more so know the routine – including ordering pizza for dinner.
Next day I got up pretty early eager to pick cherries. Roy thought they were mostly past due, but they looked great to me. I got out ladders and started picking cherries. I think I got about 4 gallons of whole cherries. I put them in a bag, and the bag in a box, and then used a hand pitter to pit them on the ferry ride home. I figured nearly a 1:1 ration time for picking to pitting – 2 hours to pick and 2 hours to pit.
I pureed them the next day, and then put them in the freezer as I wouldn’t have time to make jam for about a week. My friend from the Peace Corps, Joe, came up from Smithers, BC, with his two children – aged 7 and 11. Joe and his main squeeze came up to fish with me my first year on the Dutch Master, and I went down to their place a few times, but all before the kids. So this was my first time to meet them. I picked them up from the ferry and told them I’d been waiting their whole lives to meet them. Could not have had 2 better-behaved kids. No whining. No crying. No fighting. They were up for doing anything we were doing, and never said “I’m bored” or “It’s raining” or “I don’t like that food”. Not being used to kids around full-time, I had to explain that many of the words I said meant “happy”. Kathryn said there sure were alot of words that meant “happy”.
Could not catch them a fish or a legal crab. We walked around Horse Island and they enjoyed tide pooling and exploring in general. They loved the smoked salmon and deer kabobs and spaghetti with moose burger sauce. They swam at the pool while I delivered fish on Friday, then all 4 of us went for an open skate, and those kids looked like they were born with skates on their feet. I was sad to put them on the ferry home.
After they left I pulled the cherries from the freezer to make jam. Wish I’d had more rhubarb, but it’s late for that now. Ron donated about 6 cups from his freezer. I used 30 cups pureed cherries, 6 cups pureed rhubarb, 2 cups water, 2 cups sugar and 2 cups birch syrup, along with 10 packs of no-sugar pectin. Set up pretty good, although not quite firm. Might leave out the 2 cups of water next time if I use the birch syrup, and add another box or 2 of pectin. Tastes great, though, and likely won’t last long, and handed out half pints to my coworkers yesterday. With the jam and pink salmon jarred for the season, we’ll have plenty for the winter. We’re off to a moose hunt near Juneau on Sunday, and hoping for some good weather and at least a look at one.