It’s like May here these days.  Beautiful mostly dry weather with a  breeze to dry things even more.  The huckleberries are budding or even have that little hollow bell hanging off them now.  Samuel Conteh and I went to the cabin to check the crab pots.  We’d been getting a few tanner crab so I took 2 other pots to set, and of course this time all we got were little king crab which Samuel was sad to see tossed back into the sea.  People are now putting up little “street” signs on our island, and one has a “private” sign.  Very sad to see all this, but so it goes.   The canvas cover on the boat had been leaking so I put some of the  flexsteel paint I got at recycle on it.  Seems to be bonding will and I think it’s gonna seal it up nice. A friend had some old firewood logs that needed to go so I helped another friend fill his available space and got a load and a half to start refilling mine, too.  I got to try out my new used Stihl 034 saw.   Never used a 28 inch bar, and as soon as I was an inch or two down, it started to bind.  I had to put a wedge in to keep it from pinching.  We figured out part of it was a dull chain, and Matt’s sharpening helped alot.  I called my brother – a former logger- and asked him about  the pinching and he said it’s gonna happen like that if the diameter you are cutting is about as wide as your saw.  So, learned something new.  And a beautiful day to cut.  The kids of the man we are cutting for always seem to be outside playing and that’s so good to see. 

Fished at the cabin yesterday and today.  Three other boats today there, too. No fish, but got my downriggers set up and working.  Got half a dozen crab in the crab pot so that’s for dinner.  Blue huckleberry bushes are budding.  Hope we don’t get another hard  freeze.  I don’t even remember this winter since we didn’t have one.  

Spent a Sunday making more blueberry syrup after finishing filling the firewood bins on Saturday.  The berries seem like they are breeding in the freezer.  A guy can pick alot of berries with a berry rake, especially when they are plentiful.    I put 49 cups of frozen berries in the big pot on the stove and it took hours for it all to thaw and nearly boil.  At that point, I put the berries little by little through the blender, then put everything back into the pot.  I added 11 cups of sugar and brought it back to a boil for another 15 minutes.  It tasted a tad sweet to me, so I thawed out 4 more cups of berries, ran them through the blender, and added them and it was just right.  Some recipes call for filtering the syrup, but I like the skins (and random hemlock needles) in the syrup.  I took the syrup off the stove, and added 3 packets of liquid pectin, and brought it to a boil for 1 minute, and took it off again.  I only used liquid pectin because that’s what I used for the first batch earlier in the winter and it came out good so didn’t want to switch anything.   Then poured the syrup into the 2 cases of pint jars we garage saled this weekend and canned them in a hot water bath.   That should do us for a year or two, depending on how much gets given away 

Finished filling up – mostly – my only empty wood shed yesterday.  You can make firewood as easy or hard as you want, I guess.  This was the hard way.  But not a bad way.  Several trees up the hill behind our house blew down years ago.  Most were still sitting horizontally having blown over at the roots.  So off the ground.  I thought about trying to drag them down with a series of chains/straps/rope with the truck, but then thought I’d encase them in muck and then have to cut thorugh that with my saw.  So I bucked them in place, and rolled each one down the 70 yards or so to the creek, then one by one across the 3 log bridge.  Then split the rounds by hand, and wheelbarrow them down the driveway another 40 yards to the woodshed.  Got me in many hours total of exercise, and this was welcome in another year of little snow and poor or non-existent cross country ski opportunity that I could get to and from in an hour or two of light at lunch hour.  The wood I put up this week we’ll probably use starting year after next when it will be good and dry.

While they are freezing back in the homeland in sub-zero temps in Bolivar, it was in the high 40’s here.  Ron and I went to his spot to try for rock fish and halibut on Friday.  I caught an octopus in the first little while after anchoring, and then nothing the rest of the day.  We really missed having John Auth with us as without him, that made me the youngster so I had to pull the anchor.   We had to beat into the waves back to Amalga Harbor but we just took it slow so as not to need dental work.  Turns out a couple left Lena Pt to go to Shelter Island – basically the closest point you could launch from Juneau to get to Shelter  – on Friday, too, and something happened.   Not sure what, but they both perished.  One found ashore at Horse Is and the other on Admiralty near Horse.  So sad. Sara made crab cakes, coleslaw and sweet potato and russet potato fries for Valentines Day.  Wow.  Was that good.  I finished the shower work this week, too, so love all around. 

Took Samuel to a local university workshop to work on his pinewood derby.  I took a bunch of hand tools – coping, hack and wood saw, files, etc.- to do the work.  When we got there, the kids were lining up for the band saw.  They’d draw their car on the block, and the shop supervisor would cut it for them.  Samuel wanted to do that at first, but I got him to use the hand tools.  He drew a car on the block from another’s pattern. His first cuts were crooked, but as the first hour turned into a second, he gained confidence with the tools.  He got a rough cut out of the wood block, then went back to straighten out his cuts after seeing how the coping saw could make bending cuts in the soft wood.  I was going to put the final touches on with the belt sander but saw he was getting it with a rasp.  We stopped on the way home at the hardware store and he picked out some paint.  He put two coats on it, putting away most of a pizza in between coats.   Later, I watched the Bengals choke away a sure victory over the Steelers – for no other reason that having too many millionaire punks on one team.  I feel bad for their coach.