Mark Stopha – Page 23 – Alaska Wild Salmon Company

Day Off

Getting more days off of work now that the tourist season is winding down. I got up with no plans on Tuesday. Then I thought- you need to get your fat ass out and do some walking after sitting behind the boat wheel for days on end since August 1. I looked at the tide table and saw low tide was right now. So perfect. I have about 90 minutes to get to the spot in the channel to snag cohos.

I already had my bag of items together from earlier attempts – extra snagging hook, lures, water bottle, gaff, plastic bags and fish cleaning knife. After slogging the distance in the super heavy wading boots I’d used at ADFG, I replaced them with some old Keen hiking boots. Heaven. Like walking on air compared to the heavy boots. I walk out onto the flats to the spot, and see 3 people fishing there. When I got there there were 2 fly and one spin fishers. Plenty of room for me to fish one end of the run while they fished the other.

One of the fishers had worked at the Salvation Army store so we quickly strike up a conversation. He told me there were lots of fish in the run. I soon see a school rush and make a wake. We’re in business.

For some reason, I can’t remember to buy polarized glasses. It was overcast today so I could see okay, though. It took a few casts to get back into practice, and then it was one fish after another. On the first fish, when I yarded it onto the beach, the line broke. I hustled down and moved the fish up the beach with my foot. Then I noticed the hook had come out. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Luckily I had a spare. I conked the fish, broke a gill, and put the fish on a ganglion line stringer tied to my pack on the beach. It didn’t take long to catch four more. On fish number six (the limit), I actually snagged the fish in the mouth – at least that’s what it looked like. Or maybe he bit it. Either way, just as I had it into the shallows, it broke off. I tried directing it up to shallower water with my leg, but it got away. I tried a few casts with a pixie but a pixie is no snagging hook. I start cleaning my fish, and as I get to the last one, I look up and see my pack floating away. The incoming tide was here and would cut me off from short-cutting it through sloughs if I didn’t leave soon. I load the fish into a plastic bag that’s in my big waterproof pack, shoulder the pack and slog back to the car. I make a mental note to bring a frame for this pack next time.

When I get to the car, I get a text from my friend and firewood source, Ed (and Kathy). The text read merely “Wood?”. I thought- I have 5 fish to butcher to get ready to can. But hell yes, I want wood. They key to being a wood recipient is when your source asks, you always say yes. So I tell Ed I can come over in a hour (which turned out being more like two hours), fillet, skin and chunking the five fish, and put the meat into colanders on a cookie sheet in the fridge.

I borrow Jeff’s truck and head over to Ed’s. I told Ed he called just in time as I had so many crab I didn’t know what to do with all of them. I hand bags of steamed dungy crab halves to Kathy, who thanks me profusely, which kind of embarrasses us both. He loads me up with a load of slabs from his mill, then says to bring back my chainsaw when I return. On the second trip, he picks up logs with his skid steer forks, and I buck them off into two-round lengths. After we’d cut most for the logs, Ed then switched the forks to a bucket, and started loading them into the truck. I gotta get a skid steer.

As I was leaving with the third load, Ed said to come get the remainder whenever was easy. At home, I bulldog the rounds off the truck and into my storage areas between the spruce and hemlock trees, spray out Jeff’s truck bed, and return his truck.

Next I look at my inventory of canning jars. I am getting down to the last of my pints, which I don’t remember happening in 20 years. I didn’t learn til I was about 50 to store jars upside down, so these jars have spiders and dust in them and need to be washed thoroughly. I put them in the dishwasher and start it. I won’t get to canning today.

Yesterday was a full day of boat driving in the day and boy scout meeting in the evening. I get up early this morning and start loading my jars with the well drained fish from the fridge. I load the jars into my two identical 21 quart Mirro canners placed on the three burner stand up cook stove I got on Craigslist. I had one of the canners since I my early years in Alaska, and bought the second off Craigslist when I was up in Kenai fishing with Keith a couple years ago. Having the two big canners and the big stove makes things so efficient. I can can 36 wide mouth jars at a time now, and the cook stove heats the canners to steaming very quickly. Another lesson learned after 50.

Scouting Outing

We had our August scout campout this weekend. The troop hiked about three and a half miles on the uninhabited east side of Douglas Island. The scouts hiked to a prominent point, which has a little creek that had pink salmon spawning in its lower reach. Keith and parent Chrissy hiked in with about 7 boys and 2 girls. We are the first troop in Juneau with girls in our troop, I think, and they are a great addition to the group. Seems like one of those things that adults might worry about but the kids don’t. When they were talking about the change of name from Boy Scouts to BSA Scouts, one of the boys said BSA stands for “both sexes allowed”. I like it.

I took my boat down and met them at the camp site with much of the camping gear and food. When the hikers arrived, they dropped their packs and 5 boys got on board my boat. We went to check our pots at the cabin. After getting nothing in the first pot, I could tell by their excitement there were crab (7) in the second pot they pulled up. Many had not pulled a pot before, but almost all of them liked to eat crab. We rebaited the pots, reset them, then went fishing for salmon. Meanwhile, another scout dad showed up and took the girls and mom fishing. They got 3 coho salmon right away. We fished for salmon for about an hour. We had one on, but it got off. I checked Jeff’s pot later and got 16 more crab.

I ask the kids as they are screaming in my ear in the boat who is loving me right now. They ask who? I say their parents. I tell them their parents all smile when they drop the kids off for campouts and tell us if we need to keep them out there all week that’s okay – they can miss school. When I see the kids all having fun with each other and gaining skills in camping and the outdoors – and self confidence in doing things on their own – I figure it’s worth it. I hope it pays off later in life for them. If nothing else, it was a weekend not spent playing video games, which has to be good.

It was getting late in the day now when we got back from fishing I dropped off the boys at camp and then anchored the boat in the nearby cove I’ve used when deer hunting. I then pulled myself to shore in the little sport yak I keep on top of the boat with the line from the anchor to the beach that another dad was holding. Back at camp I got to setting up my tent while I still had light. The campsite is my favorite so far in scouting. There were seven other tents all set up among the spruce and hemlock n the rain forest, and the scouts already had a campfire going with firewood I’d brought from our pile at the house.

The boys can pretty much run the trips now. The grub masters were a pair of brothers new to town and to the troop. They made pizza, and we got the crab steaming. The adults and kids gorged on all you can eat crab and the kids also ate pizzas cooked in the dutch ovens with charcoal. Keith then got to work on peach cobbler in the dutch oven. It was perfect with hot chocolate. The kids love hot chocolate. I think they drank up most of the powder in the new can. After a game of something called troglodites they were ready for bed. Incredibly, I had a good nights sleep for the first scouting outing ever. Been taking pills so I don’t have to get up five times a night and wow, camping is a lot more fun.

Today I knew it would be tricky as the mom and daughter and the oldest scout needed to go back by boat to make work and appointments. The other kids wanted to go by boat, of course, too. One said he’d die if he had to hike back, and I said to let me know when the funeral was so I could prepare a good eulogy. Sam, of course, tried to get his pack onto the boat, but Keith was not having any of it. He is good at being the bad cop, and after 20 years of scout leading, he knows how to handle middle schoolers.

Even though I slept well, it was still on a sleeping pad. On the ground. My knee hurts. My sciatica is acting up as I trudge with my pack full of sleeping bag, pad and tent out to the boat. And I didn’t even hike in. I hate some parts of getting old.

I get the group back to the trail head, then load the boat on the trailer and head home to off load the boat and wait for the hikers.

When I return to the trail head several hours later to collect scouts, it’s raining hard. Real hard. Like a thunderstorm. When I get to the trail head, I roll down the window to talk to two waiting parents. And then I hear it. Thunder. We rarely get thunder here. Soon, we hear kids talking and Samuel emerges as the first scout back. He’s always last in. First out. The boys walked through the thunderstorm in the big woods, so it wasn’t so bad. I ask if there were berries along the trail and Samuel said lots of red huckleberries.

More sadness awaits them when he and Issac find out we have to go get cans from the cruise ships that they give us to sell. The cans come crushed in blocks that are put in a cardboard tote that we we offload temporarily to a 20′ container. At the end of the season, AML places a shipping container next to our temporary container, and we load all the cans into it. AML then donates the shipping down to the recycler and the scouts get a nice check that we mainly use to defray the cost of scout camp. The boys are less than thrilled we now have to go get cans, but are consigned to the sad news. Samuel contents himself by eating leftover crab.

Canning Venison

First real day of rain in at least a month here. We need a week or two of this steady rain, at least, to get proper water in the salmon creeks. It’s been a record dry, hot summer. Jeff and I were going to fish the channel today for coho, but not in the rain. We’re retired. So I decided it was time to get all the old venison out of the freezer and can it to preserve it. Most of the meat was 2017 deer, with a couple packages even to 2016. The meat was still in good shape.

Seems like we are eating less out of the freezer than when we were both working our regular jobs. We both are working fulltime now, but I guess not eating as much or maybe we’re eating out more. And getting 2 moose on the Yukon River in 2018 red-lined our meat supply. I took a moose shank out with the deer for dinner. I salt and peppered all sides of the shank. After browning some onions and garlic in a pot, I put them in the slow cooker. I put the shank in the same pot and browned it on all sides. I then put the browned shank in the slow cooker with the garlic and onions, added water to about cover the shank, and set the temperature at about 240 degrees. It would be about 5 hours or more before the shank was cooked.

I looked up stuff on the internet as to how best to can the deer, and decided to grind all the meat and can the loose burger. I put the frozen packages of meat in a pot of water to thaw. I like to thaw the meat just enough to cut it into chunks as almost frozen meat goes best through the grinder. It took me a couple hours to thaw, cut and grind all the meat. Once I got a good amount of meat ground, I started to brown it by putting it in cake pans and cookie sheets in a 425 degree oven. So I was sometimes cutting meat, sometimes grinding, and sometimes tending the browning meat. A perfect cocktail for someone with severe ADD like me.

Once I had all the meat ground and browned, I started getting together my pint canning jars. I got all the regular size jars I could find as I have oodles of lids for those from major scores at garage sales – including a big score when I was back near Geneseo, NY years ago at my sister Paula’s. I put a piece of onion in the bottom of each jar. Then packed the jar tight with the ground meat. I filled each jar of meat with water, wiped the rims of the jars, and put a lid and ring on each jar.

I lucked onto a canner identical to the one I’ve had since I was in college a couple years ago on the Kenai Craigslist when I was up dipnetting with Andrew, Keith and Jane. I recently bought a nice 3 burner Tundra 3 out door cook stove, and what at treat now to can in the garage with the two pressure cookers. The University of Alaska cooperative extension service has instructions for canning the stuff we can up here, and sure enough, I found the instructions for canning venison in pints. I loaded each canner up with pint jars, got the first batch vented and under pressure, then continued loading more jars.

I had to hope that what I was doing was gonna be tasty since I had ground enough meat for 5 or 6 twelve pint cases. When the first batch was done and cooled down, I opened the canner. As usual, one of the jars broke at the bottom, but the meat was still intact inside, so I got to taste my handiwork. Tasted good. Great. So on to the second load.

After getting the second load going, we ate a dinner of moose shank. The last time I cooked it, the meat was the right texture but the broth too salty. This time, I just cooked it just in water with only the onion and garlic. Sara added carrots and potatoes to the broth for the last 20 minutes. The shank was kinda bland. Sara added dijon mustard and a little salt, and then it was perfect.

The second batch came off well and we’ve got several cases of canned deer burger now. I suspect we’ll use it often since it’s so convenient, as Sara likes to say. For me it’s like a big pile of split and dried firewood – it’s money in the bank.

Whale Fest

I’m into my third week as a full time whale watch captain, after working the past 7 seasons as a one or two day a week captain. Unlike the part-time job, now it’s a real job. I’m at the wheel 7 to 9 hours a day traveling at near 30 knots most of the time, in addition to pre-trip preparations and post-trip cleaning and fueling. Never thought I’d be doing this but here I am. I offered to work full time for a captain that wanted to work half the season before attending grad school. I agreed, even though she was going to Ole Miss……

There’s a huge humpback whale female named Barnacles who has a calf called Acorn this year. The whales are identified by the unique underside of their tail, which serves as their finger print. During my first week of work, as we were watching the two of them from a comfortable (and legally required) distance, Acorn decides she needs to check out my boat after her mother dives to feed. When whales approach your boat, the guidelines say you should put the boat in neutral until the whale goes by and is again at a distance of at least 100 yards. Well, Acorn comes right up to the side of the boat, and is looking up at us. With the windows open, it’s literally blowing into the window. By now, I’ve not only got the engines in neutral, but turned off. Then Acorn swims under the boat and looks into the other side of the boat. Now, I’m really nervous, despite the fact the 70-something year olds on the boat are just looking out the window at this calf at almost arms length thinking this must be what whale watching is like. Sort of like someone taking a photo of a brown bear coming down the sidewalk to them. All I can think of is – I’m going to jail. Even though I followed the guidelines I’m mandated to and didn’t approach these whales – the calf came to us – I thought this is like a guy with one leg of pantyhose over his head suddenly dropping a bag of money in your lap. You have the money. You didn’t steal it. But it doesn’t look good. The guide on the boat was brand new. He and everyone except me was ecstatic. “This is the best trip ever”…

Then mom showed up.

Right next to her calf.

Her nose and her calf’s nose right next to the boat.

Barnacles is one of the biggest whales in our area. Some 50 feet long. Now jail time was a distant memory. With two whales literally blowing into the boat I’m thinking: we’re all gonna die. Mom is going to think the boat is a threat to her calf and ram the boat. I was really glad I’d shut off the engines earlier. Maybe she’ll just think we’re some flotsam.

Mom showed no signs of alarm. After both of them blew a few times, nose to the boat, and looking at us, they simply submerged and swam under the boat. They casually surfaced on the other side and mom seemed to escort her calf away from the weird surface beings.

Fast forward about 10 days and I’m on another trip. It’s late in the day – about 8 pm – and I’m at a spot where normally there may be many boats watching whales and fishing for salmon and halibut at the north end of a long narrow island about 10 miles long. At this hour on this day, though, there’s just my boat, another whale watching boat, and a local watcher in his aluminum boat. We were watching two whales.

These two whales turn out to be one Barnacles and Acorn. Then it starts. First Acorn, and then her mother. Breaching. Jumping clean out of the water. Then one would slap it’s tail on the water. And then the other would. I’d never seen this behavior from a cow and calf. Normally, we’d see a calf slapping its tail or its lonnnnnng pectoral fins on the water, and also maybe breaching. I always thought this was the calf signalling to its mother who had left it to feed to come back. But to see both the calf and its behemoth 50 foot mother doing this was new to me. And just the three of us boats watching it at sunset. Wow.

Yesterday, the same thing happened. Only at the south end of the same island. But the same two whales and the same behavior. It all happened by chance that I even saw it. Normally, I travel up the east side of the long island to the north-end location where I expect to see whales, but this time I went up the west side as I’d had a tip there might be whales bubble netting. As we traveled along the southern tip of the island, I see a huge splash a mile or two away. That usually can only mean one thing – a whale just breached. I changed course for the splash, and as we got closer, we could see a calf breaching. When we got about a quarter mile away, both a cow and a calf were regularly breaching. Sometimes in unison. Barnacles and Acorn again. Of course, the passengers and guide were totally captivated. I tried to keep the boat positioned so everyone could see well. More importantly, I was trying to keep my distance as the whales will dive before they breach, and you can’t exactly tell where they will come out of the water. This is one time you have to pay full attention so you keep a good distance so as not to endanger yourself. 50 feet of flying whale is nothing to mess with. After awhile, the boat is rocking pretty good. The splash from an 80,000 lb marine mammal makes a substantial wake. Long days of driving, but it could be worse.

Berry Bonanza and full time whaling

The candle is officially lit at both ends. I’m back to working full time as a whale watch captain. I took over for a friend who is going to grad school. I wish her luck, despite her selection of Ole Piss. I mean Ole Miss.

My days off from boat driving are Wednesday and Thursday. With scouts on Wednesday evening, I won’t have any chance for overnight trips elsewhere till the end of the season in late September.

Roy emailed and said the cherry trees in Haines were overflowing like never before. They’d picked what they wanted, and I was welcome to the rest, and would be good if I came sooner than later so he didn’t have to keep telling others no. I got tickets for the small plane to Haines for Thursday.

Roy’s brother Ron was finishing his trip here and headed to see his granddaughters in Fairbanks Thursday morning. I drove him to the airport, parked the car, and went to my terminal. It’s a pure delight flying the small air carriers. No TSA. No luggage screening. No nothing. Just say hello, leave your luggage, and we’ll call you when we’re ready. On this trip, I even knew the pilot.

The flight from Juneau to Haines on a calm clear day is spectacular. Mountains come right down to the water on both sides of Lynn Canal, with many glaciers, small lakes at the end of the glaciers, and then waterfalls that tumble for hundreds of feet down to the ocean.

About a half hour later, I arrive in Haines, where Roy picks me up. We have coffee. Brenda leaves for work when I take Roy to the airport to start his week of forestry work down near Wrangell. Then it’s just me and the cherry trees.

I brought four 5-gallon buckets and a berry rake with me. The most cherries I’d ever picked was 10 gallons with Andrew, but I wanted to be ready just in case. When I had over 5 gallons by noon, I knew a record was in the making. Brenda came home at lunch time, and we went downtown to eat after she pitted a small pail of cherries and loaded her dehydrator.

We returned an hour later and I continued picking. By 4 pm I had picked another 5 gallons. By now, I had picked all the low hanging fruit I could reach from the ground, and was now using a step ladder to get the higher cherries. At 630, I had four more gallons, and it was getting difficult to reach some of the higher berries so I called it a day. At the airport, the cherries weighed out to 100 pounds. On the trip home, I sat in the same seat as I rode up on, so saw the other side of Lynn Canal, and it was just as spectacular.

Sara was glad to see all the cherries. Jeanne’s sister Deanna and her husband Albert were here with Ron fishing last week, and the two of them went to the cabin with me to pick berries. We picked blueberries and blue huckleberries and a few red huckleberries. We got about 7 gallons. I was surprised when they didn’t want any to take any berries with them, so we got them all. I’ll send them some jam from the recipe I used with Eaton. Sara spent the next day cleaning the berries, and we vac packed them in twenty seven four cup packages. We’ll pack the cherries whole in similar packaging and remove the pits when we use them.

The summer here has been hot and dry. It’s been in the 70’s and 80’s here. The interior of Alaska has seen lots of rain and flooding. Just the opposite of what the climate is supposed to be. The berries seem to like it. But the salmon won’t if there’s not enough water in their streams here to spawn.

This is my 8th season driving a whale watch boat. A couple of the humpback whales have been returning since I started, and one has a calf this year. Three other whales have calves as well. It’s the most any can remember. Whales can be identified by their unique tail shape and markings. Some tails are all black on the underside. Some virtually all white, and some have varying degrees of white and black. The first seven years I worked one, or at most, two days a week. Working full-time is a real job. Eight to 11+ hours a day, including prepping the boat before the first tour and fueling and washing the boat after the last tour. The days fly by. Most tours are different depending on whale location, water conditions, and the tide. At low tide we can see critters like harbor seals that haul out. Sometimes I switch routes if patches of the water have rough seas. If killer whales come through the area, we my be able to reach them in the two hour and fifteen minute tour once or twice but by the third trip they are too far away. Life and the seas are always changing out the boat cabin window.

Afterlife

I took my nephew to our cabin for the second time this week. Yes, he’s on his electronic game or whatever it is all the time he’s in the house. But when it’s time to go outside – to the cabin, fishing, etc – he leaves them at home and doesn’t go through withdrawals without them.

We pulled the king crab pot we’d set down Chatham but no luck. We caught a couple of undersized tanner crab and the door was partially open on the pot. We fished for a couple hours and no salmon. When we got to the cabin anchorage and checked our dungy pots, we had one. So at least the dinner menu for Eaton was decided.

We walked in and I put the crab on to steam. Eaton was immediately at home at the cabin now. The outhouse doesn’t phase him. Nor lack of electronics. He inhales half the crab, as he’s now much quicker at picking the meat out of the shell.

He asks me if I’ll give him the cabin when I die. Maybe, I say. It’s not just up to me. He understands about marriage and decisions and all. Then he starts counting out loud about how old I’ll probably be when I kick the bucket and how old he’ll be when he gets the cabin. It’s kinda creepy.

What do you want to do on your last day in town tomorrow, I ask him. All the fun stuff to do, he says. Like what, I ask. Swimming. Check the crab pots. Maybe fishing. An easy kid to have along. He tells you when he’s hungry. You ask what he wants to do and he actually thinks about it and gives an answer other than “I don’t care” or “I don’t know”. He wants to be here.

I get up early the next morning and start picking berries. When I return after a half hour of picking for some coffee, Eaton is up and making pancakes. This is his first time cooking them, and they are perfect. We put lots of Dul’s maple syrup from Bolivar, NY on them. Then Eaton says he wants to make blueberry jam for his dad, so we go back out and pick more berries.

We check the dungy pots on our way out and have one more keeper. Then we fish for an hour and a half and get one bright chum salmon. When we get home, I have a couple king salmon from Chris to butcher. One is for Ron and one to send home with Eaton.

That night, we made the jam. Blueberry jam is simple: crushed berries and sugar. Blueberries have enough pectin to jell the jam. We were out of sugar. I ask Eaton if he wanted to go and he said “nah”. Then I said there was ice cream involved, and he was soon ready. We got our sugar and ice cream at Costco. I put the food processor together and we fed the berries in to crush them. Eaton measured the mash. Then we did the math of how much sugar we needed based on the ratio in the recipe, and he measured the sugar and added it to the pot with the berries. I read him the part of the recipe about stirring constantly to keep the jam from scorching, and Eaton stirred the jam until his arm hurt.

He tasted the jam as it thickened, and each time got more excited because it tasted so good. He knew his dad would love it. When it was finally ready, we poured it into the half pint jars. He cleaned the jar mouth, and put on the lids and rims. While the boiling bath was heating, we made another smaller batch of jam with the red huckleberries, and by the time that was done, the boiling bath was about ready. We were able to can the 10 half pints in one batch, and Eaton was pleased with the result. He put each jar in a ziploc bag, then wrapped it in a piece of clothing in his suitcase for the trip home.