Black lake

One of our first tasks of the season is to head up to Black Lake to check on Jen's stuff and get some monitoring equipment in the water. Its a two day trip and we overnight in a bear hunter's cabin. The accommodations are spartan but it keeps us dry.

Jen keeps her weather station on a cabin at Black Lake (different from the one we stay in). After downloading the data from the winter and re-powering the station we break for lunch in the lee of the cabin.

Our season opening crew includes Jen, Conrad, Lindsy, and Curry (left to right).

After the weather station is in, we install water height gauges and conduct flow measurements in the Alec River (a tributary of Black Lake). This involves stringing a steel cable across the river and making depth and flow measurements every meter from side to side.

First science

We have doubled our limnological efforts this year, and it means a full boat when we sample. Luckily the weather was perfect for the first shakedown sampling this year.

To make the sampling easier we added some moorings to the lake. With a clip we can attach the boat easily and maintain position for sampling. Previously, a boat driver was required to maintain position, so this is way better. To make moorings we found old outboards in the bushes and tied them up to lines. As it turns out, Evinrudes do make good anchors!

Its been a cold spring here, and there are still large patches of snow around the lake and mountaintops.

There aren't many moose in Chignik, but we occasionally see one. There are lots of bears and hunters, so I think they don't stand much of a chance. This little guy was hanging out near the edge of the lake on our way back from sampling.

Back in Chignik

Conrad and Jen are excited to be flying back to Chignik this year. Here we are leaving King Salmon for Chignik Lake. The last leg of our journey to camp.

A view of Chignik Bay from the air. Spring is late this year and everything is brown and snowy when we arrive.

Willard was nice enough to drive all of our stuff form the airstrip to the lake, and the Fish and Game smolt crew gave us a ride across the lake to our camp.

First order of business at camp is to unboard the cabin and get the generator working. Our efforts last fall paid off as there were no voles in the cabin (or vole evidence) when we arrived.

The new generator shed we built last season was welcomed by the bears in fine style. Now it looks like a real Chignik generator shed.

Last days

It occurred to me that I never posted a final image of the new building we worked so hard on earlier this year. Partially I was waiting for the final paint job and other touches. Here it is in all of its "wavecrest" glory.

The weather has been poor the last few days. Today we have winds around 45 mph and haven't been able to get much field work done. It has made for some interesting clouds and sunsets though.

Our closing helpers, Molly and Pete have been forced to endure long hours in the main cabin with us during the bad weather. We have been reading and cooking alot.

Finally, the secret to working at Chignik. A barometer, shotgun, first aid kit, and inspiration. That's all we need to survive the summer around here. Well, that and a fishing rod, but we have a whole extra room for those.

Sexy Salmon

Well, now we know why there hasn't been much beach seining in late August in past years. There are a ton of beach spawning sockeye that get caught up in the net! This is a particularly large male that we found at one of the bigger spawning sites.

Here is one of the Dolly Varden that I have been working with. Males get a hook in their jaw and associated notch when they are getting ready to impress the ladies.

Late night fish workup in the lab/shop.

There are some scary isopods in Chignik Lake. Seriously. These things will strip a fish down to bones in a matter of hours.

The beginning of the end

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.

Back in action. Sort of.

Sorry for the outage. The internet has been out here for a couple of weeks. We have had pretty poor weather which I am sure has not helped the situation. Our internet works by beaming a signal about a mile across the lake to the satellite uplink station in the village (like a really beefy wireless router). This means that when the internet goes out we have a couple of options. First, we can use precious satellite phone minutes to sit on hold with our internet provider. This is pretty poor because it really burns up our minutes so we try to avoid it. Our second option involves sending someone across the lake in the boat to Julie's house. Then they can call tech support on a regular land line and radio back across the lake on the VHF with instructions. I am sure its pretty amusing for the village to listen to us hash out our computer problems over the radio. Well, that's what Conrad and I did the other day, and in the end we got it all working for now. I am leaving in two days to go back to California and see Tish for 10 days. Its a weird time to take a break because our summer is way more than half over and it will be a mad last two weeks when I get back from the states. But, I am really looking forward to it and Jen and Conrad probably want to get rid of me for a while anyway. (here is a view from the deck for Claire).

The weather has been so bad lately I haven't been taking the camera out of the case. Our last trip up to Black lake it was blowing ~20 knots and I wore a drysuit, which proved a wise choice. One of my projects this summer has involved collecting DNA from Dolly Varden fry in several small streams throughout the watershed. This has been fun because we get to go to places where the regular work never takes us. We even named some streams that weren't on the map. The collections were generally done with a backpack electrofisher as we hiked up the streams. This has been a great excuse to get out and hike around, something we don't get much of here. Normally we just ride around in boats all day and count some fish, occasionally cutting their heads open.