Collecting Chum and... Baby Chinook!? Oh my...

Yep leave it to all of you guys to comment on the picture with the BOY in it. No "Oww nice fireworks" or "Oww a beach in Alaska! Fun!" Every single comment is about the boy. GEEZ folks! ha ha It's alright... I knew it was coming.

Sooo a few interesting things the past few days... 1) We started collecting "broodstock" for spawning. That means just the fish we are going to use for spawning... though there are SOME fish in the lagoon, we have a barrier net way out front to keep any fish from coming in. So to collect broodstock, a seiner boat catches a set of fish and they put them in a pen that we have along side the barrier net. Then we end up letting the net down on the pen so the fish swim into the lagoon. I know, it sounds kind of weird... I'm not sure if they said they got 30,000 chum yesterday or if there are that many IN the lagoon... all I know is that Adam said we are only about a quarter of the way there. We need like 125,000 chum or something. I went out and helped Adam and Steve on that a few times yesterday and woke up sore today. When there are 10,000 chum in a seine net, there's alot of weight pulling in all directions! (BTW, Steve is the main guy in charge of NSRAA... he's out here for a month or so.)

Well I guess the most interesting thing of the week... or biggest "OH SHIT!" moment happened on Monday. Branden and Sarah were transferring the chinook that were in the back round ponds into the round ponds out front. WELLLLLL... from what I heard, there are two valves of some kind... one going into the round pond and one going into the lagoon... apparently both of those were opened causing some of the fish to go into the round pond (where they should be!) and some of the fish to go into the lagoon (aka "FREEDOM!!" for the fish... "OH SHIT!!" for Branden and Sarah!) So we spent a few extra hours after work on Monday trying to recover 2 inch long chinook out of the lagoon and the WHOLE day yesterday doing the same thing. We did end up recovering alot of fish but they are still trying to figure out how many they lost. Plus, we were just taking all the fish we could find meaning there are baby Coho in there... baby chinook... baby anything that happened to be in the lagoon.

YEAH... nothing ALL that new here. We've been doing alot of odd jobs around the place and getting the spawning shed ready. It's going to kick into gear pretty soon sooo I'll probably be quite tired! Not sure if I'll feel very motivated to post too often but I'll try. Just a warning... Hey, mail would be appreciated. I'm not saying food... geh don't really want any food actually! But mail is fun... anything really. Basically I'm set on stuff so yeah I don't want 100 bottles of shampoo and 1300 boxes of snacks... PLEASE not that!

Oh yeah, I made some FABULOUS brownies from scratch the other day that got RAVING REVIEWS! I was pretty happy. :-) They were so easy too... lemme know if you want the recipe. My first attempt to make lasagna the other day wasn't a super great one either... tasted good... turned out sort of weird though. Hey if you have any good recipes that are pretty easy and are good, SEND EM! I need ideas! Speaking of dinner though... I've gotta go and make something... I have no clue what though!

SHOUT OUT OF THE DAY - Hey Mike, I wore your Stamp Farms shirt today with some pride! Got it all dirty today... looks like a farmer wore it! :-D Though I did get a "Stamp Farms... How do you farm Stamps?" HA I'm not sure if she was joking or not but I laughed!