Chignik Olympics II

Fishing. OK, this is a bit of a stretch, but hey, we spend a bit of time fishing; some for fun, some for science, and sometimes your arm gets sore from all of the casting. Tish wore herself out fighting a couple of nice halibut a while back

Boat pushing. Ah, the dark side of Black Lake trips. To get into the Alec River, we navigate two deltas, and each has its pitfalls. Late season when the snow is gone and the water is low can be treacherous. At its worst we have to take all of the heavy items out of the boat and push until we find knee deep water, then reload everything and hope the cooling system isn't completely jammed with sand.

Net pulling. Well, our job here is to catch fish after all, and the fly rod only goes so far. In the end we pull lots of nets, usually beach seines in Chignik Lake, Black lake, and Chignik Lagoon. This is probably our most common "activity."

OK, net pulling gets two. Conrad has been conducting research on pygmy whitefish for a couple of years here. In order to catch the deep morph we sink small-mesh gill nets to the bottom of Chignik Lake (~180 ft.) and pull them up each day. Its a haul.


The Chignik Olympics are nearly over for this season, but if we leave with all of our digits intact we are all winners right? Someone help Jen on to the podium.

Chignik Olympics I

Its a well known fact that we just don't get much exercise here in Chignik. Jen and Lindsy were pretty vigilant about running up and down the trail from the cabin to the boats, but in general our hearts don't get much of a day to day workout (unless you count pumping pork products). That said, we do have a few activities we affectionately term the Chignik Olympics. Here are a smattering of them in no particular order:

Generator starting. Ever since the alternator went out on our 1982 Lister 5kW generator we have been starting it by hand. Originally we would have one person crank and flip the compression lever, but lately we have all been cranking and flipping on one fell swoop.

Cart pushing/pulling. Our camp is about 400 feet from the river, and to get anything to and from the boats (which is everything) we load it on a cart and roll it up the hill. The challenge is to see how much you can load and roll without dumping the whole load on the path.

Barrel rolling. This is a big one. We need approximately 18, 55 gallon drums to fuel our boat and power requirements for the summer with a little left over to start the next season. Gas barrels weigh about 350 pounds, and diesel about 390. We bring them in our large boat, push them over the side and roll them up to camp. Champs in this sport like Conrad (pictured) can push a barrel all the way up the path to the fuel area by themselves.

Rope pulling. This is kind of an odd one, but we sometimes try to tension rope to hold a beach seine in a boat or in this case hold a boat midriver in the current. We pull so many ropes that we all have hands like velcro after a couple weeks.

instrument search and recovery

A couple weeks ago we spent a lot of time looking for one of my lost acoustic receivers. In the end we decided to use a big water pump to blast away sand in the area we thought the receiver may have been buried over the winter. Conrad put together this video of the result:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRNJCmkfRpg

Fox

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Tish and Lindsy are both gone now, so there are only three of us left in camp. Today we made a foray to the Alec River to try to calibrate some of Jen's equipment. Coming around the bend we saw this fox with the better part of a sockeye. He was pretty reluctant to leave it or haul it off and was tolerant us a quick photo shoot. I will try to post more soon.

The Hike

For several years there has been discussion of climbing a local peak near Chignik Lake. We have been excited about it (the peak on the right in this photo) because it looks like it would afford good views of both Chignik Lake and Black Lake, our main study areas. This has become known as "the hike." We have been waiting for good weather for this, and yesterday (August 6) we finally got some, and decided to go for it.

We planned out our proposed route a bit and decided to make a run up a long wash coming out the the drainage behind the peak. This was a little longer and required some stream crossings, but allowed us to hike up without too much bushwacking through alders. Eventually (seen here) we left the creek and began our ascent up an old landslide to avoid thick brush.

After about 5 hours we finally made it to the top. The view was spectacular and worth the climb. From the top we could see all of Chignik Lake, some of the lagoon, and a bit of the bay (gulf of Alaska). Turning the other direction we could see Black Lake, and Bristol Bay.

The very peak of the summit (3642 ft.), with Mt. Veniaminof in the background. Its a pretty sheer drop off the back side.

Chignik Lake, from the Black River delta on the left to the outlet on the right. This is the view that we climbed for.