I flew down to Craig with Larry, an old workmate, to help him bring back a boat he bought there. Brian and Ellen gave me a 135 hp outboard to replace my 115 for more power.  We spent a few days in Craig for Larry to understand the new boat and get any last minute items.

The container was in good shape. Except that some mice got in. At least 2 were dead in the bottom of a dry bucket. I have no idea why they went into a bucket they couldn’t get out of. They weren’t able to get into any food stuffs, and so maybe they were looking for food. I cleaned up their mess and then spray foamed around any line entering through the wall.

The water line was frozen under the floor in the container. I opened up the faucets and got to thinking about how to thaw the line.  I turned up the heat in the house and left. When I returned a few hours later, the temperature was up to 42 outside, and the pipe had thawed and the water was flowing. We left a trickle on the rest of our time there.

Mike, a former captain for this boat, helped Larry everyday to learn maneuvering with the twin jet motors, as well as the systems on the boat. We worked on the boat all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The boat was only making 12 kts, but the former skipper didn’t think it was out of the ordinary, although he hadn’t run the boat in years. We were a bit worried that it was going this slow without much of a load. We loaded the outboard on Sunday afternoon, had dinner with Brian and Ellen on Sunday evening, and left on Monday morning, anticipating a 10 hour run to Wrangell. Before we left the container, I turned off the water at the service port, then used the spigot below the house to drain all the lines in the house and hope that solves the line freezing problem in the future.

After several days of the boat only operating at about 12 knots, when we left town, we were soon up to about 20 kts as we sped north toward El Capitan Passage. Something must not have been right with the trim tabs or the cups jet units during the shake down cruises around Craig, but we don’t know what it was. The boat was running now as its builder thought it should.

We headed north and Larry had me drive while he went through one “issue” after another and was able to fix about all of them. Fans that blow engine heat up to the cabin were out of order, and he figured out one had a broken wire and bad switch and the other may have been a fuse. The winch that pulled up the bow door had a tripped breaker. The batteries that were for the electronics and accessories were not charging, and Larry found the switch near the engines that sends the alternator current forward and solved that. The boat was looking like a good rig the more we learned about her.

Larry was eager to see the sea otters that have populated the area since he lived in the area on his dad’s logging camp in the 1970’s. As we entered the Passage, we started to see otters. Lots of otters. Soon, they were old hat.

As we headed further north and then west, the passage got tighter and tighter. When we got to the narrowest section, it was at low tide, I was driving, going about 20 kts and could see the bottom. Larry was confident it was fine as he’d been though here in the 70’s so I stayed on step and we squirted out to the other side and into Sumner Strait and back to the bigger ocean. There was a little chop but no eventful seas or weather as we rounded the tip of Prince of Wales Island, skirted Zarembo Island, and coasted into Wrangell.

The boat’s builder in Wrangell was our first destination. My friend Dave Svendsen built this boat in 2007 for a logging company to haul loggers and equipment around Prince of Wales Island. Larry needed some information on the boat for some of his business ventures with the boat from Dave, which Dave didn’t have in his records, so we overnighted  in Wrangell first before heading to Juneau.

We spent the day with Dave and then went to dinner at Bob and Chris’s, where we spent the night. Chris cooked a turkey and we drank lots of home made wines and talked about our food gathering trips and canning from the past year.  I sent them some deer meat in November, and hope Bob can come over and hunt himself with Chris and his new knees next fall.

The next morning Kyle, Dave’s shop supervisor, and Dave did the measurements on the boat they needed to do, and Larry peppered them with questions about the boat’s operation and options he had for adding things to the boat for his business. We had hauled an old Cummins engine and 2 old transmissions this far, and Larry offered the transmissions up for the taking.  Dave and Kyle said they’d take them and Larry and I used the harbor crane to drop them at the city dock for Dave and Kyle to come get them, and we headed towards home about 1 pm.

We knew the trip would take us running the last ~ 2 hours in the dark, but we had a good weather window and thought we’d be alright running at night as even if we hit a log, it was unlikely to do damage with the get propulsion.  As we cruised up Stephens Passage, it was getting dark as we passed the entrance to Tracy Arm. We saw something white in the distance and thought it was a boat. When we got closer, we saw it was an iceberg from the glacier in Tracy Arm.   We might skip over a log, but an iceberg was another story.  As it got darker and harder to see when the snow started, Larry mentioned going to Taku Harbor for the night and I readily agreed and we headed that way. It was pitch black entering the harbor as there were no other boats at the dock, but we idled in and tied up without incident.

I suggested going up to use the public use cabin there and Larry said it could be hip deep snow getting to it, so we decided to sleep on the boat. We had prepared for this and had sleeping bags. The cabin was nice and warm when we shut down the engines and turned off the lights. By 430 am, the heat was gone and I was cold. Larry heard me stirring and suggested starting the engines again, which he did. It didn’t take too long for the cabin to warm up, and we got a couple more hours of good sleep. We rousted out of our bags at  645 as it was getting light, and we were on our way at about 7. There was not much chop crossing Taku Inlet, and we were tied up in Juneau an hour later.

Finally got back over to check our crab pots after 3 weeks of the truck in the shop and still there. Jeffy let me borrow his truck, and an uneventful ride to the cabin. There were 3 dungies in the pots. One pot was full of juvenile king crab, and so glad to dump them out so the pot can fish again as I’ve never had dungies and king crab in the same pot that I remember.

Almost had a catastrophe at the cabin. I tipped over the table that had the radio on it, and the batteries came out of the radio, and then when I put them back in, the radio wouldn’t work. It’s an old AM/FM/CB/TV/Shortwave/Weather radio I got at a garage sale 2 doors down, and similar to the radio I used in the Peace Corps. It uses 4 “D” batteries, but I bought some adapters that allowed me to use “AA” batteries. I put the batteries back in, and it wouldn’t work. Then I saw the old “D” batteries I had in there before, and loaded them, and it did work. GREAT! I thought. I didn’t break the radio. The “AA” batteries stuck out of the adapters, and were sort of too small to make good contact on the negative end with the spring in the battery holder.

I used the old D batteries through the night and in the morning and then it hit me: tin foil! I took them out and put a square of tinfoil in the negative end of the batteries in the compartment where they contacted the springs and problem fixed!  The radio worked. So problem solved. I can use the 50 pack or whatever it is of Costco batteries that should last me til I’m in my 60’s, which ain’t too far now.

I steamed the crab at the cabin but didn’t feel like picking the meat since there were just the three. I brought them home for Sara to give away to some freshman colleagues to welcome them to the Capital.

I’ve made a couple batches of ice cream the past few days and both were good. The base for the ice cream is “Philadelphia Style” ice cream, and is 2 cups whipping cream, 1 cup milk and a cup of sugar. I added 1.5 cups of very finely ground bull kelp stipe, after draining off the liquid.

For one batch, I simply added 2 tbs of vanilla extract to make vanilla kelp ice cream.

For the second batch, I took 2 cups of frozen Haines cherry juice from Roy and Brenda’s cherry trees, and boiled it down to a cup, after listening to my friend Marc Wheeler’s Butterfat podcasts about ice cream making. Then, I added the one cup of sugar for the ice cream base to the juice concentrate and heated until the sugar was dissolved.

I then churned each recipe in our Kitchen Aid with the ice cream bowl and mixer attachments.

Both came out good! For the vanilla ice cream, you can certainly taste the bull kelp. For the cherry ice cream, if you didn’t know the bull kelp was in there, you’d think the chunks you were eating were cherries.

Sam and Andrew left for Sierra Leone on Friday and Gloria back to college on Saturday.  Dad left me some money when he died and I sent it with Andrew for the widows of my friends in Sierra Leone.  Sam has been on the middle school cross country ski team with coaches who Sara grew up with. The start of the season they were having to do dryland training when there was no snow, and this was tough so Sam was trying to get out of practice but luckily Gloria is wise to his ways and asked me when he said there was no practice and we got him there. Once the snow came, he was good to go and is a natural at classic and skate skiing. No drive, but the skill is there. And anything to get him outside.

Today, I started grinding venison for burger and sausage.  I experimented using some rhubarb and sea asparagus a few weeks ago and really liked it. It fell apart because of too much rhubarb, I think, so will try again now with less rhubarb. I’ll use half the deer and organic pork fat for that, and with the other try using red huckleberry puree and maybe devils club buds.

I had enough pork fat for half the burger I ground.  The other half I froze just as burger, and so will give to the cross country ski coaches and my bear hunting partner.

I ended up using 85/15 venison/pork fat, and made sausage using rhubarb, devils club buds, sea asparagus, a hot African spice mix Andrew gave me, and some wild bull kelp fronds w/ herring (?) eggs sprinkled on them. I cut back on the rhubarb from the earlier try, and now it will stay together. For the others, I would measure out the weight of deer, and then mix in measured amounts of the plants and spices, then fry a small piece and taste, then add more ingredients as needed. They all came out okay and will encourage me to get some more devils club buds and sea asparagus next year as these are really great ingredients. The sea asparagus replaces salt altogether, and the devils club buds have a very distinctive flavor similar to carrots that adds a nice contribution to the sausage. The kelp was perhaps the most surprising, as it added both sort of taste of the sea and added nice texture.

I set the crab pots over a week ago and then took truck in for a problem with the transmission and other things- an electric issue I think. Buy my mechanic got backed up with a problem and now it’s going on two weeks so itching to get back to pull the pots and spend some time at the cabin.

My brother in law took the 135 Merc Optimax off his skiff and got a new 150 to replace it.  My wife’s sister obviously loves him more than she loves me, as I’ve not been able to get the same for our boat. However, my brother in law said he’d give me the 135 as it just needs a new alternator. I got quotes from air carriers and barge lines for shipping it here. Then I found out my friend Larry was going to start a freight operation and could get the outboard up here for me because the boat he was buying for his business was in – you guessed it – Craig!  Next thing I know I’ve offered to go down and bring the boat up with him and he wants me to be his relief captain. He then said he’d have to make a stop in Wrangell for some documentation measurements at my good friend’s shop where the boat was built. He thinks this is a deterrent to me, and I think the trip just keeps getting better and better as I’ll get to see Dave and Bob in Wrangell.

Paul in Petersburg then calls and said he needed to break the news to me that we should not have our annual superbowl get together. I had been thinking the same thing and he was relieved I agreed with him, but he had items he had wanted to get to me. Now that we have a plan in place to bring Larry’s boat back, we’ll be traveling right by Petersburg so I can pick them up from Paul on the way from Wrangell to Juneau.

Today, I made some jam with red huckleberries and rhubarb. Also got the bagel factory going again. This time, blueberry, fiddlehead and bull kelp stipe bagels are on the docket.

It took awhile, but Covid has finally touched our lives, as one good friend lost their aunt in Virginia, and another close friend lost their dad in California. President Trump’s second impeachment is now sharing alot more time in the news with Covid, but things with Covid, while seemingly okay here,  do not seem to be getting better elsewhere down south. Just two simple acts asked of our citizenry to protect their fellow citizens – distancing and wearing a mask – and yet many still think it’s all part of a conspiracy or it’s their right not to be bothered protecting each other or it’s some leftist propaganda. Juneauites seem to be doing it for each other, but elsewhere, it’s become a political thing now. You really can’t fix stuid, not even deadly stupid.

Versatile Sea Asparagus

Sara and her friends in Craig picked sea asparagus in the early summer and gave about all they picked to her. Some people say to soak it first to get some of the overt saltiness from it, but I just sort of packed it down in a 4 cup measuring cup as my uniform volume for preserving it, and then this amount in a vac pack bag, and froze it. Although most recipes I see are to pickle sea asparagus, I’ve been finding great ways to use the plant fresh frozen raw, and embrace its saltiness.

The first try was to use it in my bagels. I followed a standard bagel recipe, and added sea asparagus finely chopped in the food processor to the dough. The sea asparagus gave a neat appearance, sprinkled throughout the bagel, and the sharp saltiness was perfect in a bagel.

Today, I used it to make venison sausage, as I wanted to experiment with sea asparagus and rhubarb – two plants I have in abundance in the freezer- with meat I have in abundance – deer burger.