Monthly Archives: July 2021

Alaska, Fishing

Alaska Giveth, Alaska Taketh Away

The big news of the week is that we have a new halibut record catch! After a couple weeks of pretty small halibut coming in, a guest landed a halibut that weighed an amazing 160 lbs! Not only was it a colossal fish, the story of how it was caught was a true “This could only happen in Alaska” kind of thing. So the halibut was brought in to the dock with much fanfare and pics taken. When it came time to process the fish, in its belly was found a half-digested salmon and a big silver-gray rockfish! The rockfish was still alive, it had been swallowed by the halibut and still had the fishing rig in its mouth! The lead had disappeared, but the rest was still in there.

So what happened was the guest was bottom fishing for halibut when the rockfish got on. The halibut, seeing the struggling silver-gray, swallowed the fish whole and that’s how it was caught! Somehow the fish was lodged in there good enough to bring the halibut to the surface. Seems like the halibut would have thrown it up, but for some reason it didn’t. The kicker was that the silver-gray still had the bait in its mouth! We had a fish-within-a-fish-within-a-fish kind of situation! I have fished all of my life and this was one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. Halibut are some damn greedy fish! They’ll eat anything that will fit in their mouth.

The elderly gentleman who caught the enormous fish will have one hell of a fish story to tell back home, that’s for sure! The best part is that the fish was 74 inches, which is two inches above what is a illegal fish to take. Halibut from 50 to 72 inches aren’t legal to take unless you buy a GAF permit that’s like 450 dollars. He got 73 lbs of fillets off the thing, at market rate that’s around 2200 dollars worth of fish without having to pay extra. Job well done!

Captain Jimmy and the guest that caught the massive halibut. Note Jimmy’s t-shirt, he did indeed catch the Jaws equalivalent of a halibut! It’s his new lucky fishing shirt now!

A pic of the mouth and the silver-gray that it swallowed. What a fish story!

Alright, on to my experiences of the past week. I really would have liked to start this blog post with a picture of some beautiful creek-caught salmon. Unfortunately, the wily salmon got the best of me! Not only me, but my beloved Shimano Clarus rod as well. I’ll explain, but check out the massive Dungeness crab that was caught earlier this week by some guests in my featured picture. It’s the biggest one I’ve seen so far this season, probably one of the biggest I’ve ever seen actually. Naturally I had to pose with it. I hope the guest appreciated it!

The night before my day off, I had a huge evening doing fish-boxes. The whole lodge checked out all at once, so I was responsible for boxing up over 600 lbs of fish split up between 25 people. I treated it like a military operation and my crew nailed it. I was so proud of the work me and my boys had done. I went to grab my vape for some celebration puffs and I noticed it was gone. We tore apart the fish-cleaning shed, but it was nowhere to be found. I even popped open the last 4 boxes I sealed and repacked them thinking it might have fallen in to no avail. I hope it didn’t wind up in one of the ones I didn’t check. It would probably not go over well for me. I do have a backup vape so all good, but it was a downer to lose something so key to my well-being.

Now, as I mentioned last week, I had ordered a new backpacking rod for my trips upstream. I was really hoping it would arrive before my day off so I would have it to use. Unfortunately, after the first couple of plane loads of cargo arrived it was a no-show. I resigned myself to using my nice expensive Shimano rod for the day. I broke it down, put some rubber bands around it to keep the halves together and headed up the trail.

It was a really nice day, bright and full of sunshine. It was a 98% chance of rain in the forecast, so I felt really fortunate. Not that the fish would have cared, if anything the bite seems better when it rains. I had heard that the salmon were everywhere in the lake at the head of the creek so that was my destination for the day. After about a half hour of hiking I found a small trail to the side I hadn’t noticed the last time I had been down there. I could see disturbance in the undergrowth that others had been down that way so I went down to check it out. Lo and behold I hit the jackpot! I found a still stretch of water that was LOADED with salmon! I could see swarms of them all over the place. They were jumping everywhere as well!

Views of the salmon from a couple of different angles. So close yet so far away!

I was only about halfway to my destination, but I figured that this was a good of a spot as any and proceeded to get my rod set up. I’m using these lures I got off of Amazon, I got 20 of these Kastmaster knock-offs for like 20 bucks. A pretty good deal, they are a quality product. A trick that Devin told me about is to paint one side with pink fingernail polish. Any color of pink, red or orange (but particularly pink) really gets the strikes. The reason being is that these colors look like salmon roe, which is like crack to these fish. The color might resemble baitfish they like to eat as well, not sure about that though.

An example of a dressed-up lure.

I began casting, and didn’t have a lot of luck at first. I had a couple of trout on for a second but they jumped up and cast the hook immediately. I fished for another hour and started to think that they just weren’t going to bite at all. I could literally cast right in front of them and they would ignore it! Just when I was about to lose all hope, BAM! I had one on! It came off almost as fast due to my drag being set too heavy. Still, now I knew that they would bite and sent a stream of casts to the same spot. I finally got another one on and this time it stuck. I didn’t have a net so I played it for a while until it got tired out and brought it in. I got it up to my feet and tried to grab for it but it did one crazy flop and got away. I almost had it!

The salmon hole. Salmon were constantly jumping out of the water all over the place here.

I tried again, undaunted. Probably another hour went by and several fish were hooked but came off immediately. Finally, another one managed to stay on and I played it carefully. After several runs and wild leaps I brought it to the shore and got my hands on it. I threw it up on the shore, and thought I finally landed my first shore salmon! Then, the salmon somehow got a last burst of energy and threw the hook at the same time it splashed back into the creek.

Well, it seems that a net would have been really helpful for me at this point. I was beyond exasperated, but having nothing better to do, I continued casting. It finally got time for me to head back, so I made one of my last casts of the evening. I had the last-cast luck, and got another fish on! This one I really took my time in fighting and tired him out until he seemed to have all the fight out of him. I propped my rod up on my right shoulder as I held the leader in one hand and tried to gill him with the other. Just as I slid my fingers into the fish’s gills, he jumped straight up. On the way down I heard a snap and the last six inches of my rod had broken clean off. Enraged, I lunged for the fish with everything I had and in one motion he wiggled right out of my hands, spat the hook, and swam away.

You could have probably heard me cussing a mile away back at the lodge. I was furious! Six hours of fishing and I had not only lost 3 nice silver or sockeye salmon right at the bank, I had broken my favorite rod in the process. Damn my rotten luck! I hiked back to the lodge defeated, covered in horsefly bites, and with nothing to show for almost a whole day fishing. When I got back and told my tale of woe to everyone, my new roommate informed me that I had received a package and he had laid it on my bed. Guess what was inside? My new rod! If only I had waited another hour or so, I would have had been able to take it with me and my Shimano would have been spared. Oh well, that’s how it goes sometimes. You break a rod, you get a rod I suppose.

One of the captains is pretty good at fixing rods, and he had a spare rod tip he glued onto the end of my rod. Now it is usable again, but it doesn’t quite have the same zip in the casts that the extra six inches provided. It’ll do for the rest of the time I am here. I’ll probably wind up buying another one when I get back to the world. So yeah, Team Salmon: 1, Dogfish: 0. I immediately placed an order for a collapsible net so this won’t happen again. Next week I will return to the salmon spot with my new rod and net and hopefully I can get my revenge. Tune in next week to see how it goes!

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Alaska, Fishing, lodge life

Seekin’ Salmon in the Creek

So this week was pretty uneventful by lodge standards. No particulary big individual catches (although we’ve been pulling in massive amounts of pink and chum salmon, lots of small fish) no ghostly activity, and the guests haven’t been that rambunctious. Silver salmon are starting to turn up in small amounts, the fillets off them look amazing! They are ruby red and really stand out against the more lighter colored pink and chum fillets. I hear they are much better eating as well.

The weather has been really rainy, sometimes days go by without any sun. The winds have been blowing pretty hard, it almost feels like the season is starting to shift towards fall already. I have to wear three layers of clothes most of the time, especially since I spend so much of my time in a freezer that stays around 0 degrees.

My roommate finally arrived, he’s actually a pretty cool guy. He’s in his 60’s I think, been all over the world and just travels around America in his camper with his wife. He makes his living doing fishing jobs all over the place, which is the way I want to start living. It has been an adjustment having someone in my personal space for sure. It’s something I have been dreading since I got here. I now have no privacy whatsoever, and I’m the kind of person that really hates having people in my personal space. We both keep each other up at night with our snoring. I have resorted to sleeping with white noise in my earbuds and it helps block out the noise pretty effectively however. It is what it is though, I only have to put up with it for two months. I think it will work out ok. It’s just another thing I have to overcome on top of everything else.

I’ve been catching a lot of these little guys. I can’t tell if it is a baby greenling, ling cod or cabezon. They all kinda look the same when they are young.

The main thing I did this week is go up the creek with my co-workers Devan and Brianna. I’ve been wanting to go try and catch some of the pink salmon that have been making their way upstream. Devan has been catching them like crazy and I wanted to learn his technique and spots. I’ve been seeing the pinks constantly splash all around the dock and have been fishing for them without success. As I’ve said before, Devan is the Jedi Master of freshwater fishing and I’m trying to learn some of his wisdom.

We headed up the creek this past Tuesday to a spot called ‘the S-turn’. It’s a place in the creek where it runs into a v-shaped crevice around 15 feet deep right off the bank. Right ahead of the hole is a spot of turbulent water. According to Devan, fish tire out and will slip back into this hole to gather energy for their next attempts to get up this rough patch. We got to the spot and fished for a while without success. We couldn’t figure out where the fish had gone, maybe they had all gone upstream? Suddenly, Devan yells “Fish On!” and he’s got a wild crazy jumping salmon on the line! He fights it for a couple of minutes and finally brings it in. It’s a decent sized fish, probably 5 to 6 lbs. It was amazing that such a big fish could come out of a small creek!

Pics of the fishing hole upstream and downstream.

He let it go before I could get a decent picture. I figured that he’d probably catch another and he did, not five minutes later! It was identical to the first, and it came up out of the same spot. He knew exactly where those fish hold up! The dude spends all of his free time up there on that creek so he knows how to pull out the fish. I was taking notes for sure!

Brianna and I are learning from the master.

After the second one came in, none of us caught any more. I thought I might have had one on, but I couldn’t be sure. After around 3 hours fishing, we headed back to the lodge. It was a nice little excursion for sure, we had a lot of fun. I learned so much from this little trip up the creek! I placed a bunch of orders for new fishing gear which I’ve started receiving in the mail. Hopefully I’ll have it all by my next day off so I can put what I’ve learned to use.

The main thing I’m waiting for is a new rod, my 8’6″ salmon/steelhead rod is too long to effectively transport up the rugged trail and to cast where there’s not much space creekside. Devan uses a 6’6″ Shakespeare GX2 that breaks down into 4 pieces that fits in a backpack. I ordered one just like his, it arrived in Ketchikan but hasn’t made it to the lodge as of yet. Portability is key for fishing equipment in this terrain. I also just got a brand new Daiwa BG 3000 reel I plan to put on it, along with some spoons that should catch me some salmon.

Well, looking forward to next week’s fishing! I’ll be sure to let ya’ll know how it all goes down for sure!

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Alaska, Fishing, lodge life

The Return of Yes Bay Johnny

As the title of this post suggests, our resident ghost has made another appearance! It has the lodge buzzing. So what happened is that the cook was making a bowl of beer batter. As it was sitting there (on a dry surface with no one within the immediate area) it launched itself right off the counter in full view of him and one of the server girls! It was like an invisible hand just up and swiped it right off. It made a huge mess on the floor, and it was a real pain in the ass to clean up as it happened about ten minutes before lunchtime. The only thing we can imagine that happened is that Yes Bay Johnny didn’t approve of the Coors Light the cook was using to make the batter! Maybe that was his way of saying use a better beer next time!

I asked the boss some questions about Yes Bay Johnny after it happened. As an amateur ghost hunter I like to know about these things. He told me that about 5-6 times a year things like that happen with no rational explanation. It’s always some kind of poltergeist-type phenomena, no actual full-bodied apparitions have ever been sighted. He also says that these things usually happen in the months of January, February and March when the lodge is closed, but can happen any time of the year. If I stayed here in the off season I’d be trying to catch some EVPs or maybe would set some cameras up in the kitchen or hallways. I bet someone would catch something of interest if they were persistent!

The same day of the ghost incident, our dishwasher Devan caught the first dock salmon of the season! It was a huge pink, and I guess they have finally arrived in the bay. He’s been fishing for weeks to catch one and it finally happened for him. He’s not the only one who has been fishing for these fish, people have been casting lures off the dock for weeks trying for them. I happened to be standing right next to him on the dock when it went down. It must have been waiting right up under the dock because he caught it only about a yard away from where he was casting in the water.

It was a hard fight with a lot of runs, but he finally tired it out and brought it up on the dock. Ty the dog was there as he always is when someone is fishing and I had to hold him back so Devan could fight and land the fish without dog interference. Devan let the fish go, something he took a lot of flack for. I thought it was a good thing to do from a karma standpoint. It’s not like we are lacking for salmon around here!

Ty wishes he could get ahold of that salmon!

On the same day as both the ghost incident and the dock salmon catching, I got tipped 100 bucks by some really awesome guests we had who came from Kansas! It was an older gentleman and his three sons. They were handing out bills to everyone and I got one kicked to me. This is the first time this has happened, usually guests tip out the house at the end of their stay and it gets divided up among us all. Getting it in person was really special though. I took it as a sign to buy some of the expensive lures that caught the dock salmon! They are called Blue Fox Pixees and run about 10 bucks apiece. I ordered 3 off of Amazon and they should be here in a week or two. I hope to get into some dock salmon action here soon!

In other fishing news, the guest who caught the monster 102 lb halibut last week caught an even bigger one the very next day! As it was on the day I publish this blog I didn’t include it in last week’s post but it’ll go in this one. The monster weighed in at 117 lbs! This guest had the super fish luck. He and his son went home with around 180 lbs of halibut, salmon and rock cod fillets! He got his money’s worth of fish on this trip, that’s for sure.

The halibut king so far this season!

I went out this week fishing with Captain Jimmy and his wife Erin who works in the office. Last week I didn’t go out and I deeply regretted not doing so. This past week I was really starting to go stir-crazy from being cooped up here all the time. Getting away from the lodge even for a few hours really does good things for my head. I spend my days in about a 200 yard area and it is just unnatural. I was really starting to get cabin fever!

We had a pretty good day. I caught my first silver-grey (a type of rock cod that is supposedly good eating) and my first pink salmon. I also caught a couple of chicken halibut, both were around 7 lbs each. Erin caught a huge goldeneye rockfish that we had to throw back unfortunately, only Alaskan residents can keep them. It was a pretty decent day fishing, it was overcast and drizzly but the winds & sea stayed down for the most part.

Two firsts in one day makes for a good fishing trip!

We had a really weird catch come to the dock this week. Some guests brought in a wolf-eel! It was a big, ugly sucker around 4 feet in length. It looked like something you’d find in the deepest parts of the ocean with its smushed-up face. We processed it out and the meat looked quite good actually. One guy said it reminded him of perch, I thought it looked like flounder. I’d definitely try some if offered. I know in California people eat the monkey-faced eel, I hear it tastes like cod or haddock. Actually there are places that serve it as fish & chips and people can’t tell the difference. Eels are just long fish I suppose!

Definitely the weirdest looking creature I’ve seen pulled out of the ocean here.

I just realized this week I’m at about 1/3 of the way through my stint here. While some days are better than others, time seems to be moving at a glacial pace. I really enjoy my job, but being stuck at the dock for 12 hours a day really is wearing on me. Being a landlubber ain’t my bag, man. I suppose I have to pay my dues as I’m sure all the skippers have at some point. It just makes it clear for me that I’ve got to get my Captain’s Licence to really be where I want in this racket. It’s not that hard really, the main thing I need is 1500 hours of boat driving time and around 1200 dollars in fees. Plus I have to take physicals and drug tests. Whenever I can get it it’ll open up a whole new world for me. At least I know what I need to focus on for the future. Until then, I’ll just have to continue grinding away at the dockmonkey life. Anyways, that’s it for this week’s installment. I’ll holla at ya’ll next week!

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Alaska, Fishing, lodge life

‘Tis the Season for Salmon

So as of this week, I’ve been up here at the lodge for a month. What a month it has been. I’ve heard from people the first month you spend up there feels like six, and they sure weren’t lying. It’s definitely been the longest 4 weeks of my life. Getting used to life here definitely has tested me in every way. It finally has gotten to the point where I’m feeling that I’ve gotten into the swing of things however.

There’s a lot of stuff I miss like my podcasts, watching movies and my favorite shows, and just generally feeling like I have control over my life. I really miss my truck, and I find myself daydreaming about all the places I’ll go when I get back to the world. There is something so liberating about being able to go get in your vehicle and feeling the miles slip away under your wheels. The Beast and I are going to have some good times out in the desert when I get back, that’s for sure.

So like I stated in the title, salmon season is in full swing here. Pink and chum salmon are coming into the dock in great numbers. The halibut are still going strong as well. It’s now my sole responsibility to do all the numbers and packaging of the fish so I keep close tabs on our catch day by day. We’re averaging around 200 lbs of salmon and 100 lbs of halibut coming in every day. Those are just the fillets, those numbers are half of the gross weight of fish the boats are bringing in. The silver salmon are yet to run, I hear the weights will go way up when they do. They average 10-15 lbs apiece, while the pinks average 4-6 and the chums are like 6-10. We have a limit for guests to hold them to only 6 per person, which is good or else we’d be down at the dock processing fish all day and night!

A typical haul as of late. Guests usually do half days of salmon fishing and the other half they hit the halibut holes.
This week Captain Nick landed the biggest halibut of the year on his boat, it weighed in at 102 lbs.

It’s astonishing how rich the waters up here are with salmon. They are everywhere. I’ve actually learned about a species of salmon I’ve never heard of. They are called white king salmon. The boss got a couple boxes from his friend in town and we processed them out the other day. They look like regular salmon execept they are completely white-fleshed. These species of salmon exclusively eat shrimp, which accounts for the white color. It’s really weird to see white salmon! I hear it’s fantastic eating but I never got to try any. I guess we had some high-dollar guests staying with us that only wanted the finest food so the boss obliged them with that. He was like a kid on Christmas when he got those boxes though, so I bet that it is some tasty fish!

In salmon news, I heard a story from one of the captains I thought was intriguing. He once worked at a cannery up north somewhere processing king salmon. One day, this behemoth of a king came into the cannery he said was over 100 lbs! There were some native guys there that told him that it wasn’t just an outlier, but there is a sub-species of king salmon that grows to that size regularly. Or rather, used to grow to that size, as they said its range was small and they’ve pretty much been fished out. I can’t imagine a salmon being that big. Around here they top out at around 30-40 lbs, but since they are protected in this area they must be released if caught. The king salmon in the featured photo is in our dining room, and it is the biggest one I have ever seen. It must have been around 50 to 60 lbs or so. To think of a 100 lber just boggles my mind!

For my day off this past week I really wanted to go salmon fishing. The day before I went however, the lead captain had his arm pulled out of the socket by a huge halibut he was trying to land in the boat and was laid up. I didn’t get a chance to ask him if I could go, and I don’t think there was a boat available for me to go out on anyway. We’re now at maximum capacity with our guests and all boats are booked all the time. Pink salmon are starting to show up at the dock however, so I might not need to go out to the fish, they may come to me! A co-worker saw them hit a bait-ball at the dock yesterday. I placed an order for some salmon spoons a couple of days ago, they should come in next week. Hopefully they arrive so I can get to fishing! The mail service has been erratic as of late so I’m crossing my fingers they’ll show up.

These little fish called pogies have been gathering at the dock in great clusters lately. It seems the salmon are finding them irresistable!

In other news, we’ve been getting a lot of traffic into the bay from yachts and sailboats. I guess this is a popular anchorage for people traveling the Inside Passage. Occasionally they drop in for dinner and are really interesting folks to talk to. They are mostly flagged from the US and Canada, but every now and then we get someone from far away dropping by. The other day we saw this enormous ship coming our way. One of the captains said it was the Russians, as they are known to ply these waters in their great big yachts.

As they passed by the dock, we were shocked to see how big this ship was. It was the biggest yacht I had ever seen, there’s no telling how many millions of dollars the thing was worth. As it passed we saw that it was a Bikini Island flagged vessel. I didn’t think there was that much money there! Maybe it was just registered there and was from somewhere else, who knows? It definitely was the talk of the lodge that day! They spent the night in the back bay and left the next day. It was a great mystery all in all.

It is crazy to be so far from civilization and have a ship like this roll up on you!

That’s it for this week. Hopefully I can get on a boat next week and have some salmon pictures to show ya’ll. Until next time!

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Alaska, lodge life

Meet the Yes Bay Fleet (And Dogs)

I find myself this evening relaxing after a long day with a full belly. Tonight we had grilled cheeseburgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad and Dungeness crab. The crab was donated by one of the housekeeping staff. She’s been paddling out on a kayak everyday to a crab trap in the back bay. Today she caught 3 nice ones, I boiled them up for her and she shared them with the crew. It was one one the best dinners we’ve had so far, we’re one happy crew tonight!

It’s been hot, I mean ungodly hot! It’s been around 80 degrees the past couple of days and no relief in sight. It feels much hotter due to the humidity and the angle of the sun. According to the boss, it never gets this hot up here. Everyone’s breaking out the shorts and flip-flops, it’s crazy! Supposedly this is going to go on for days.

It hasn’t hurt the fishing at all however! People have been pulling in halibut left and right. Just today, a couple of elderly gentlemen caught the first salmon of the season, a pink and a chum. They also caught a couple of huge halibut, both around 45 lbs. I was happy for them, it was the last day of their 5 day package and they hadn’t done so hot until the last day. My co-workers and I just boxed up their catch, both of them are going home with around 46 lbs of halibut, rock cod, crabs and shrimp apiece. They’ve caught the most fish out of any of the guests so far.

These gents are going to go home happy. Their skipper, Tina, knows how to put her guests on the fish!
Chloe, one of our house staff, pulled up this 70 & 25 lber. The ladies around have great luck with the big halibut!

As the summer heats up, we’re starting to get all kinds of critters coming in off the dock and the nearby creek. As I mentioned in my last post, my fishing has been curtailed by my lack of fishing tackle. My co-workers have been pulling in lots of small trout and an assortment of other small fish. One of the strangest things I’ve seen caught were these sea cucumbers. Today Devon, the dishwasher, was fishing off the dock and starting pulling them in off the bottom! He was fishing a spoon there and kept snagging them. They must be everywhere down there! He says he knows how to clean them, so he started stashing them in a crate under the dock. If I try them I’ll let ya’ll know how they taste. I hear that they are not bad!

A pic of a sea cucumber. Who would’ve thought they were edible? Plus an Alaskan frog I found today while weed-eating.

So that brings me to the topics I mentioned in the title. First off, I wanted to show off the boats that make this whole lodge possible. Almost all our boats have Mercury outboards and Yamaha kickers. Our main workhorses of the fleet are our 18 foot Silver Streak aluminum boats, we’ve got 4 of them. These come with 150 hp outboards. I really wish I had one of these. They fly across the waves! We also use a couple of boats I don’t know the name of, but they are modified ski boats with 115 hp outboards. These two kinds of boats are used for parties of two or three, plus the captain.

These are the boats most often used by the lodge. Today, one of the captains needed to work on the kicker trim tab so he took advantage of the tides to beach and work on his boat.

Next we have the boats used for parties of three or four. We have a 26 foot Boston Whaler with twin 250 hp outboards. The newest addition to the fleet is this new 24 foot Hewes Craft Ocean Pro that I am in love with. The boss just bought it for 100,000 dollars. It has just one 250 hp Yamaha outboard on it. This is the dream boat me and my fishing buddies would love to have. It comes with so many bells and whistles you wouldn’t believe it. We could do so much with this boat back in the Monterey Bay! It’d be great for salmon and could even do some long-range tuna fishing as well.

The Boston Whaler and the Ocean Pro. I’d love to have both but that Ocean Pro is one hot fishing machine! Love that enclosed cabin!

Finally, we have our work boats that are used for moving cargo, towing things and making trips into town. First we have what’s called a Water-Horse. Its bow has a gate that can be lowered to facilitate loading/offloading cargo. The boat occasionally is used to take out/pick up guests as well. It is a speed demon, its twin 250 horsepower outboards really rocket this boat across the water! This boat is the boss’s baby, he loves to dash around in it. It can make the 50 mile run to Ketchikan in less than 2 hours. 

Then there is a boat called the AJ that looks like it was a small commercial fishing boat at one point. These days, the boss mainly uses it to pull trees from the bank and to tow them back here to be cut up as firewood. Lastly, we have 3 skiffs that are used to move small amounts of gear, people and garbage around. One of the 3 is a jet boat that can get up the creek next to the lodge, but I haven’t seen it used for that purpose yet.

The Water-Horse and the AJ.

Here at the lodge, we have four dogs in residence. They roam around everywhere, barking at everyone and everything. Their main purpose is to keep away the bears. Last week a bear was sighted over by the generator, I don’t know if it was a black or brown though. That’s the area I was clearing trail a couple of weeks ago, I was lucky to not run across one. I think that they are pretty skittish, and probably the dogs help keep them that way.

So 3 out of the 4 dogs we have here are what is known as Karelians. They are bred to fight bears by the locals. These dogs look like some kind of husky mix. They are tough dogs, they don’t get sick or infections, and according to the boss they eat anything and can go psycho at any time. These dogs are really protective of their people, and are really well adapted to the environment here. The boss has his own really nice cabin in the woods behind the lodge, and at night that’s where the dogs go.

First we have the one who causes the most ruckus and interacts with us the most. His name is Ty and he is the alpha dog around here. His favorite thing around here is to attack the otters when they come around the dock. Unlike the otters who live in the Monterey Bay, these Alaskan otters are mean and nasty. The boss says they’ve even tried to attack him on the dock before! Ty loves to get in fights with them. He’ll get all cut up but I think he’s killed a few. The otters get up under the dock and Ty has chewed up planks trying to get at them.

Ty is a good dog, but has a really bad habit of barking insanely at you every time you try and fish. I guess he thinks you’ve got a fish on every time you retrieve your lure and gets excited. I suppose people in the past have given him the fish they catch judging from his behavior. A funny thing happened a few days ago. My fellow dock-monkey Jon was fishing off the end of the dock and Ty was barking his head off as usual. Jon got pissed off so he got on a kayak and paddled out a ways so he could fish in peace. Well, Ty barked at him from shore. Then, suddenly, Ty jumped into the water and swam over to him! He then proceeded to climb into Jon’s kayak and shake water all over him, completely soaking him. Mind you, the water here is ice cold and Ty is a very stinky dog! Jon was not happy about this turn of events, being soaked in cold, stinky dog-water was not his idea of a good time. It was funny as hell to witness though!

Ty and Jon, before and after the dog-water soaking.

The boss has two other Karelians named Niko and Kobe. Niko is older, and was once alpha. He and Ty have to stay separated or else they will viciously attack one another. Corellian males do not get along with one another at all. Females are fine, but males always battle for dominance. Lastly we have the girl dogs Juneau and Kobe. Juneau is an Australian Heeler and is the boss’s wife’s dog, and Kobe is very shy and doesn’t really have much to do with anybody. It was hard for me to get close enough to even take a picture.

The dogs are mostly a headache for me. None of them are affectionate and they just bark all the freakin’ time. Ty is the only one who will let you pet him and he won’t let you do so for long. Every time the plane lands or a boat passes by, they’ve gotta bark. They are pretty used to the staff by now, but every time new guests arrive (which is almost daily) the howling and barking starts. They make it impossible to sleep past around 5:30 or so as that’s about when the boss gets up and around. Earplugs are no match for the shrill yelps and barks. Still, I guess it’s good to have them around for the bear deterrence. I long for the day when my life is dog-bark free though!

The dogs of Yes Bay lodge from clockwise top left: Ty, Nico, Kobe and Juneau.

Well, that’s it for this week! I thought ya’ll would be interested in more aspects of lodge life. Dogs, boats and fish are pretty big parts of life here & I thought I’d showcase them.

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