On Sunday I flew back to Chignik after a wonderful break in California with Tish. The approach in Chignik is right over our camp. Here you can see the village and runway through the front window of the Caravan (Cessna 208) that takes us in and out.
Lots of flowers started blooming while I was gone and the path up to the camp has a ton of great flowrs right now. It definitely feels like the calm before the storm as everything makes a final go at blooming before fall sets in soon.
Ray and Ulrica Hilborn are also visiting camp for the next few days, and since we had a rare calm day we decided to go halibut fishing. No monsters, but we did get limits so there is plenty of fish to take home. We also baked some with nothing but a little olive oil on the pan to keep it from sticking. It was fantastic bare when its that fresh.
On Tuesday Ray decided he wanted to see the Alec river when all of the sockeye are spawning (the Alec is the biggest sockeye spawning stream in the system with probably half a million spawners). On the way out we stopped to check Conrad's pygmy whitefish nets (above). He is collecting fish from several depths to look at differences in feeding, morphology and genetics among the 3 morphs that exist here in Chignik.
Not surprisingly, the Alec river was full of sockeye. So many are spawning right now that the water is very turbid from all of the sediment that they move. In addition, there are also a large number of bears. They are in very high densities and so intent on fishing that they really pay little attention to us as we zoom by in the jet boats. luckily there are so many fish that they didn't seem very aggressive either.
1 comment:
Glad to see you made it back safely. We loved being able to see you and Tish. We can't wait until you are back in the lower states.
Claire and Co.
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