Yesterday afternoon I went out for a while jigging (short retirement, I know…) on the Galic River. Got three hooks ripped off whilst trying to haul fish in as the hole wasn’t cut properly at the bottom and was catching the line so headed home, but did have a bit of fun riding out there – this is Pam bundled up in the sled behind Nick + Dana, Mott leading us, then a couple of guys obviously nervous the river was liable to break up

I’d guess they were just moving downriver to be able to get out seal hunting shortly, but was still funny seeing a boat being towed along the frozen river by a snowmobile!

This afternoon, moose foot and me wandered along to the airport and saw a Hageland 207 struggling to come in to land with the wind. Even the pilots have been joking on the radio about how windy it is when coming in to land. Barely seems like they’ve moving sometimes as they’re on final to land.

Least this guy took a little more time on his takeoff run-up – look at how much movement he got out the airplane whilst checking the elevator:

Kat’s feeling a lot better now, I’m blaming it on the broccoli she had on the Sunday evening with dinner The snow does seem to be slowly melting away, and there’s a lot of standing water and cracks forming on the rivers. Riding out to the Galic river yesterday the area looked so different to just a couple of weeks ago with patches of exposed tundra, so the ice may well start to break up in the next couple of weeks. Seems unlikely given how much snow and ice there’s still down (well over 5 foot thick ice yesterday), but the temperature has been slowly rising and due to carry on over the next week up to 40F. Maybe spring is here!

Anyway, other than Carl pretending he was a grizzly bear himself by sticking his hand into the water and grabbing a pike out that squirmed off Carie’s hook within minutes of starting fishing, there wasn’t much more excitement! There were stacks of people fishing round there, but no-one was really pulling out any great numbers, and I still came home with nowt At least it kept Carl happy as he joked there was someone worse than him this time as he’s not a big fisherman, highlighted by the two or three naps he took in the back of the sled through the afternoon, after which he’d calmly walk over to check his holes and find fish on the end of the line!

Coming back was a bit dodgy as the weather started closing in around 4.30p.m and by the time we left around 5.15p.m it was a whiteout all the way back to Tunt. Given that everything is so flat and devoid of anything out here, it was pretty hairy, though thankfully Carl knew exactly where he was going. Looking all around you and seeing nothing, or even being able to tell the ground from the sky in front of you, was a little different and made for slow going (around 2 hours) but we all got back okay. Once off the Kuskokwim river at least the trail markers every couple of hundred yards made it a little easier once you could see them, but I wouldn’t want to try it again in a hurry!

But, Kat was up in the middle of the night being sick so is off work today which isn’t too good. I made a run to the store to get some stuff for her and took a (little…) detour by the airport to see a plane come in. Since the weather was so overcast whilst fishing it wasn’t worth taking photos, but by chance that’s Carl winging his way up to Bethel just after taking off with a Grant 207 on the ramp:

I got my PC up and running over the weekend too – genius that I am brought over a bunch of game CD’s and applications for photo + video editing, but not the driver CD for the system board, so that took a while to download them off the internet. My graphics card (256Mb ATI Radeon 9550) seems to have gone belly up though, probably with bouncing around on airplanes when I moved over here. Works fine just on the desktop, but get all sorts of tearing, streaking and artifacts on screen at low-level (such as BIOS or OS splash screen is loaded) and anytime it kicks into a game. Tried different drivers, flashing BIOS, etc. but simply putting in a basic 32Mb don’t-ask-me-to-do-3D card works without problems so it’s not the system board. Annoying as it would still run at 50-60fps, just can’t make out what the hell it’s trying to display on screen! But, Amazon have a $30 mail-in rebate on a GeForce 8600GT with 256Mb DDR3 bringing it down to $65 delivered which is daft considering they were $150 a few months ago, and will kick the pants off the 9550 I paid the same for a couple of years back. That’s PC technology though, especially graphics cards.

Running a couple of fishing holes down river this afternoon. Pretty warm (25F) but a strong, cold wind. Didn’t catch anything, but was glad just to be outside for an hour or two.

Today has been a bit frustrating as I’d asked Carl at the gas station yesterday about open fishing holes as Greg was hoping to get the Juneau kids out ice fishing, so I headed off downriver as Carl suggested and sure enough found owld Grandad Pavilla (can never remember his first name!) jigging with a good half dozen open holes in the ice. Should have taken my gear as all day today it’s been rained in. Snowed in I don’t mind. Cold-ed (even a word?!) in I don’t mind. But rained in, at the start of March, in Alaska?! Nuts to that, I tried it anyway but by the time I got to the mouth of the river it was just whiteout and said nuts again and came home. It’s right around 30-32F (0C) and the top snow on the river is turning to mush so will need a good freeze to make it safe again, but it’s forecast to stay warm and rainy for a few days. Of course, now it’s 4.30p.m the rain/sleet/snow has cleared up, but after all afternoon of soaking the river it’s not worth trying to go out again.

Mark also called me in to work tomorrow which kinda figures given the weather. It always seems to be -20F, howling winds or just plain miserable when he calls over the last couple of months! I wanted to know what I was letting myself in for, to which he simply replied “ceilings”. “Ceilings?” I asked, “Yup, bring your shorts + sandals” he joked (I didn’t get it).

What do I know about ceilings – so long as they as they don’t fail on me head I don’t see what there is to them…

But, without any wind down in the river it was actually a lot warmer than it seemed. I’d bought a new (i.e ‘proper’) pair of goggles from the store a few days ago and they worked wonders – covered everything + more and stayed clear the whole time. Not bad for $44 as I couldn’t have got anything decent shipped in for that price. Weird how sometimes the prices are ridiculous and other times seem like a right bargain!

Never had a hunting licence before Not sure whether I’ll get to use it, but at least riding out with people hunting covers me in case the jobs worths arrive in the middle of no-where to check up on us (highly unlikely after the last time they turned up in Tunt a few years ago…). Was only $48 for the combined hunting & fishing licence for 2008 since I’m now officially an Alaskan resident, and could go king or silver salmon fishing around Kenai next summer too if I got a chance!

Later this afternoon Kat + I took the dogs out for a walk on the river and they both seemed to enjoy it:

Mia was full of energy and kept running around, even if she did keep loosing her footing on the ice underneath the snow at the edges of the river! Kept coming back and having a lie down next to us to catch her breath before running off again:

Kat tried to make a snow angel in the fresh snow, but didn’t get very far with all the dogs clambering over her – I did eventually help her out by calling the dogs away so she could get up:

My snowmobile tracks are somewhere in here from earlier – was so much nicer riding in the powder snow across the tundra and then on the river rather than the compacted snow:

Coming back off the river by the airport was fun – even close up it looks like standing water:

It is all frozen solid, but the wind and snowmobiles have blown the snow away. Still pretty dodgy walking over it and looking down to see yourself seemingly walking on water!

But, when we got home, the power was still out, having gone off around noon. Frank + Mark were dragging out extension cords to our duplexes and moving around inside the heater rooms, as they were hooking the heating units up the school’s generator. Didn’t sound encouraging, and turns out the frequent power cuts in the village have been due to only one generator actually working which had then frozen today and broken. There’s meant to be a smaller generator they can hook up, but it would only give out enough juice for each house in the village to run their heater and a single light bulb. That said, it’s now 7.30p.m and no power at all to the houses. Thankfully we at least have the heater still going at home otherwise it would be seriously cold, but it’s meant to be at least a couple of days before the power will be fully restored, and that’s “village” 2 days, which is likely to mean a week. No power, no water (electric pump), and nothing to stop the pipes from freezing for whenever power does come back and the water comes back on. The school’s generators are running fine, but they eat fuel at the best of times so things are being conserved here too. Hopefully something will come back on soon otherwise there’s an awful lot of food in the freezers going to waste, and it’s not like we can cook any of it either! A lot of the houses in the village can use wood burning stoves since they can’t get their mains heater going, and thankfully it’s around 15F today, as at the beginning of the week it was -20F and then people would really have had problems staying warm.

But, eyed up some ice fishing spots today just around the village, so might head out tomorrow and freeze my butt off catching nothing but a cold like over the summer! Apparently some people have been catching white fish and pike using nets and pots, but not sure about just using a line. Not like there’s going to be anything to do at home anyways!

After heading over to the grocery store, Alice from the post office caught me on the way back home to let me know there was a stack of boxes for school. By the time I got to school, Frank was already unloading them and one of them turned out to be my ice fishing stuff

Hopefully this weather will hold for another few days and I’ll be able to head out this weekend. It feels very warm again even though it’s around -10C, and so long as the snow doesn’t become too soft + sticky, should be fun riding out on the snowmobiles to the fishing holes.

But, also in amongst the mail were two letters of receipt from the USCIS for my forms for adjustment of status application. Helpfully shows the receipt date as being March 16th, so if anyone checks my passport over the summer, it will show the visa expiring on March 21st but USCIS receiving my application of adjustment of status before this date Also says they’ll arrange a date + time for me to provide my biometrics (fingerprints + photos), which hopefully will be in Bethel. I reckon it will be in Anchorage, so could be fun trying to arrange it for when we’re actually going to be around in the summer. Means the work permit is unlikely to be sorted by the summer to arrange social security though.

That was more than enough for the two of us! It wasn’t quite as bony as I expected other than down towards the tail, and much like when cooking trout the scales peel right off after cooking and you can easily separate the actual meat off the spine. Was pretty tasty, nothing all that special, though will look at making a proper sauce for next time since it was still a little try just on it’s own.

After driving through the old ice holes Nick had used on Sunday, it didn’t take long for Marie to catch a fish – note Dana in the background hadn’t even got her gear setup yet!

But, after hooking my first fish, I couldn’t then get it reeled in due to ice on the line. After it got off the hook, I re-baited and dropped again, then got this decent sized pike a couple of minutes later:

Although it was still going along with the idea of cutting a hole and throwing in a fishing line, it wasn’t quite as traditional sitting or resting on the snowmobile whilst fishing! But, a little before Marie had taken this photo one of the locals had ridden up with a bunch of kids and his wife in a sled on the back telling us we were fishing in the wrong place. When I asked him where the right place was, he smiled and pointed further up the river and simply said “Where we caught 300 fish. We were blessed today.”. Thought he was pulling my leg, but sure enough their sled was packed with fish to the point of having tarpaulin over the top to stop them falling out!

Coming back the temperature had started dropping, so we didn’t waste much time getting home. It really was cool riding back along the river coming home with the sun low on the horizon, knowing you’d been out and caught your own dinner. One of the books I’ve been reading is about the native cultures and stories of Alaska and one of the ideas the eskimo have is to only take what you need, so I was quite happy with only catching the one fish in the couple of hours or so we were there. As Marie still had fish in the freezer, she gave her’s to us, and Nick + Dana ended up with two fish. Not sure who’s were who, but these are the two we’re going to figure out how to cook tomorrow – that’s a 12″ rule to show their size!

Never had pike before, so will be different. Kat might give Martina a call and see if she has any traditional recipes we can try out. But, I’d really enjoyed getting out of the village for a little bit, and gonna try dragging Kat along next time too

About half-way to the fishing spot I realised why I’d drawn the short straw in driving the 4-wheeler as it has no heating elements on the handlebars or throttle trigger Even with thick mittens on, when it’s -22C without windchill, squeezing a metal throttle trigger isn’t much fun after a while.

But, after 30 minutes or so riding we got to the fishing spot and they brought out the auger, a petrol-driven machine to drill down through the ice. After 3 months wondering how thick the ice was, they had drive this all the way down so the engine was pretty much into the hole – a good 5/6 feet down:

Due to the cold, the engine kept spluttering and cutting out after they got the first hole cut, but a couple of other holes were just about open for the kids to start getting their fishing gear ready:

It’s literally a piece of wood with a fishing line wrapped around one end that is lowered through the hole in the ice down into the water below. Nothing too technical, but they’d caught two good-sized pike yesterday so it doesn’t need to be fancy!

Still takes a lot of patience sitting fishing when the windchill easily brought the temperature below -30C. This kid didn’t seem too bothered though:

Apart from the wind, it was very pretty out on the river. It was weird the way the wind had created different snow drifts over the ice, and even looking at everything through tinted goggles (which I was very glad I’d borrowed off Jason!) it was beautiful:

Even without a cloud in the sky to block the sun, it wasn’t giving off much warmth! After only half an hour or so the kids wanted to head back as without many fishing holes open and such a cold wind, they weren’t having all that much fun. I broke out a couple of heating pads for the kids to hold on the way back as they got bounced around in the trailer on the back of the 4-wheeler, and they seemed fine when we got back to school. Seems to be a lot of fascination from the kids when people come back from hunting or fishing wanting to know whether we caught anything as there’s still a good portion of their food that seems to come from their own hunting + fishing trips.

But, we got back to school just in time to see some of the native dancing really coming on well after a few days of practice:

I’d tried to take a video, but the camera doesn’t like coming in from the cold and working indoors again right away so the lens kept steaming up. Maybe they’ll have something tomorrow where the kids demonstrate what they’ve learnt over the past week and can try again.