Gratuitous bear photo of the day

Across the river from our camp there are some nets that locals use for their subsistence fishing. The neighborhood dogs patrol the area pretty hard and sound the alarm when bears come by to pick the nets. The dogs are pretty tough and will often challenge the bears to a point. Even the bravest dogs will turn tail and run when the bears take a serious nip at them though. These nets are a constant source of entertainment for us. Thanks to Chad for the cool shot.

Fish On!

So after dropping Chad at the airport we headed down to the lagoon to get front row seats for the commercial salmon opener at Hume point. Fish and Game keeps sockeye counts at their weir and finally had enough escapement (~200,000) to allow a 48 hour opener. So, they decided to open the season at 3:30 pm on June 20. We arrived a half hour early to ensure that we would not miss it. There were about 20 boats waiting for the countdown to make their first sets of the season.

At 3:30 the Fish and Game boat gave a radio countdown and fired a flare gun ( a couple seconds early) to indicate the fishery open.

Nets out!

The Kurt Eldon makes their first set of the season with the tender practically pulling the net up on the beach. He is only about 50 feet from where we stand on the shore.

Kurt Eldon with a nice haul pulling the boat over. The first day of lagoon fishing netted about 19,000 fish for the fishery, so now the cannery is in full swing as well. More on that later.

Chad goes home

Two significant things happened the other day (June 20). In the morning we took chad to the "airport", so he could go back to Oregon. Luckily he had a nice relaxing vacation here with us. See how happy he is?

Luckily the lines at the airport were short

The security can be pretty tough though.

Chad's ticket out of here, a Caravan. He said that after he left Chignik they landed on a beach somewhere and loaded up 35 50 pound boxes of frozen salmon from a fisherman, which brings us to the next significant event.

All decked out

Last year Ray Hilborn mentioned that a deck on our cabin could be nice and might help keep the cabin cleaner (note sweet inlay of steel grating near the door). Anyway, we made it happen this year. It tooks a couple of days to pour the concrete footers and get it set up, but in the end we are pretty happy with it. It was even t-shirt weather the day we finished. Thanks Ray!

Black Lake Sampling

A few days ago we headed up to Black Lake, the trickiest sampling we do. To get to Black Lake we have to run through the delta where the Black River flows into Chignik Lake. At points it is a foot or less deep. Running the delta basically involves taking a jet boat as fast as possible while swinging the boat back and forth to keep the jet intake as near the surface of the water as possible. Sometimes it is very smooth.

Sometimes you get stuck.

For our two day trip we stayed at a cabin on Black River. When we showed up, we had a rare and amazingly clear view of the volcano, Mt. Veniaminof (seen in the back).

Sampling at Black Lake this trip involved lots of hydrology for Jen's work. She has river height gauges in the rivers flowing into Black Lake, and we were there to set them up and calibrate them. All in all it was a successful trip.

Finally, some science

So we finally got to some beach seining the other day and caught several hundred thousand sticklebacks. We had to sample 1/2048th of the sample just to finish in a reasonable time. It must be some kind of record. We have had some extraordinarily nice weather for June though.

Down in a hole

Well, it was high time we dug a new outhouse hole, so down I went. We ended up about seven feet down and only hit a little ice. This one should last a while. I hope.

A man, a can, a plan

We kind of live with our food here in Chignik. We essentially buy enough for 3 months of living all at once, so at the beginning of the season it is stacked up all over in the living quarters. We all have boxes of dry good under our beds, and yes, lots of cans. Due to an accidental ordering several years ago we are still trying to figure out what to do with about 30 cans of creamed corn.

Moving fuel barrels to the bay to get them filled

Our little cabin. Getting a deck on the front soon.

Moving In

To get all of our stuff from Seattle to Chignik we ship up containers on a barge to Chignik Bay. From there a local purse seiner (Lisa Marie, above) puts them on his boat and gets them very close to camp where we move them with our small boats. We also gave him 14 drums to fill with fuel so we would have gasoline for our boats and diesel for our generator.


This year we are buiding a new generator shed and a small deck on our cabin. This requires lots of building supplies, and we have to get them up to our site. This year we tried hooking our cart up to a gas powered winch with a very long cable to pull the lumber up the 300 foot path to the cabin. This worked great for the first few times, then while Jen was taking pictures we lost control of the cart, and dropped the handle. Meanwhile I was trying to signal to Chad to stop the winch and the handle caught me in the back of the leg and pulled me off my feet. Chad was 300 feet away in the shop and saw none of this until he looked up to see me flat on my back and the lumber spilled form the cart. He stopped the winch. Luckily for me the winch is slow and the tundra is soft. No harm done.

Beautiful day at camp

Nice day in Chignik. Its still all brown though. It should green up soon when it start to warm up.

The Weatherport

The weatherport is a storage area that gets set up every year to put all of our extra stuff and keep it dry. This sequence shows the installation.

Back in Chignik

Hey all. Well, we got in about a week ago, and camp was in pretty good shape. Our first order of business was to get our generator running so the camp would have power. Then we set about unboarding and cleaning the living quarters. Finally, we got some boats in the water so we could move around and pick up our supplies that were shipped up to the bay earlier.