At 50, I marvel at how long I can do something and never hear of a simple trick to make a job easier. Take splitting wood for example. Yes, I know about the wood splitter, which I find tedious bending over and putting the wood back up for another split, etc. Boooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrinnnnggg. So I split away with a maul. Then searching something on woodsplitting one day on the net, I see a few sites about putting a tire on the chopping block to put the wood your splitting it. Wah freakin’ Lah. Keeps the wood from falling off each time you split, and when your done, you have all the wood neatly split inside the tire to deposit on the pile and put another round in. Seemed like it cut the time to split a round in half or less. No time spent idly bending over for the split pieces to split again, and all the good physical work of swinging the maul.

Woke up early and was drawing my first sip of coffee a little after 4 am when I saw a dark body moving across the street in the neighbors driveway.  Realized it was a bear and when I saw it go for their garbage can, I opened the front door and shooed him away.  Beautiful medium-sized black bear.  He immediately shyed away from the can like he wasn’t really going to look inside and then crossed the next door neighbor’s yard into the big woods.  The bear probably came down our driveway and had crossed the road when I saw him.  Luckily garbage day was yesterday so I notified my neighbors about keeping their garbage cans inside.

Don Jackson came up from Starkville to hunt hooters with me.  We had warm weather and not a drop of rain for the 4 days he was here.  The first day we set a couple dungy pots and hiked up Admiralty across from our cabin and heard not a one hooter.  Don lost his binoculars as well.  We hiked back down and fished the rest of the day for nothing.  Next morning Don was up at 5am.  It was overcast as opposed to the clear day the day before.  He woke me up and said the hooters are hooting.  We made breakfast and back across to the same hill that was silent the day before.  We went bird to bird, getting the first one by about 730 am and the last one about 230.  We cleaned each bird as we got them, and I collected snow and put it in ziplocs to cool down the meat.  We hiked to a fifth bird that I swear was in a tree we looked in last year when Pat, Steve and Lorrie were here and again, we spent an hour doing the merry go round the tree and never could see the bird.  The tree was in a spot that meant we had to side hill through a train wreck of downed trees to get back to the side of the peninsula where we left the skiff.  It was as dry as it gets in the rainforest, and a ton of pretty skunk cabbage everywhere, with the huckleberry blossoming as well, so not too bad a walk back.  Next morning was clean and silence again.  Could be most of the hooter were shot on the hill, but I doubt it.  We fished for the day for zip, and when we checked the crab pots, both were full of immature king crab, so I didn’t reset them.  We fished Douglas Island on the way home and saw a few fish caught or hanging over the side of skiffs but no luck for us.  Don had brought down some bluegill fillets from his fish pond so we had a dinner of hooter and bluegill and invited Ron over so he and Don could do their secret Eagle Scout handshakes.  Don might have even talked himself into coming up to teach at the Juneau Boy Scout camp next summer, even though he called Ron by the name Dan.  We hit the hay early Friday and got Don on the plane early Sat to get him back to Starkville in time for mother’s day.