A small serving of Frosty Flakes...

Well it’s official… winter has begun. The weather for the past few weeks has been horrible, but it got worse this week. And today…. It snowed. But mostly it’s been RAIN RAIN RAIN! That’s the word of the month. I’m not even sure if we’ve had a day WITHOUT rain actually. Last week, Scott said that it was time to start building the Ark!! This week, though, we had gale warnings and it’s been pretty nasty. Tuesday is when it really began. Adam and I had to go out to the Chinook pens to feed them and the water was pretty choppy and it was pretty windy. Not a real fabulous day to be on the water. That was at the end of the day so we went home after that. Well that must have caused us to miss the MEMO from our boss that we wouldn’t be coming in to work the next day… so we came on it! We sat there for a little while at the “morning meeting” wondering why the heck no one was coming in. Finally around 8:20am, the boss came in to change the water around for some fish eggs and told us. He figured it was going to be too nasty out to feed fish. It actually wasn’t that bad out for a while, but it did get worse. The next day, Thursday, started out to be WAY WORSE than the day we took off for “bad weather.” OH BOY! Thankfully Adam and I worked on stuff in Incubation, but I did feel bad for Angie, Lexie, and Deena who had to be outside splitting some fish. I’ll get into that in a bit. Scott did ask us to feed the Chinook again, which was looking horrible, until the weather oddly cleared up after lunch.

THEN TODAY… snow was in the forecast for the afternoon. At lunchtime, Adam noticed a few snowflakes among the raindrops that were falling. NOOOO! Then we went out to feed the Chinook again… still a few flakes. We took a break on feeding the fish to check on the chum pens and to bail out a boat. Suddenly the weather went from a few flakes to a BLOWING BLIZZARD within a matter of a few minutes! It was pretty crazy. It was just some odd blast of snow that subsided but it stayed pretty windy… it’s still snowing a bit though.

So, work-related business… Last week, we “split the coho.” The Chinook were in three rows of freshwater round ponds up until a week or two ago, but then they got moved out to saltwater. That left a bunch of empty ponds. The Coho are in all the rest of the round ponds, however they are basically outgrowing their ponds so they needed to be spread out. Depending on which pond the fish needed to be moved to, we had to either 1) pour fish into buckets and walk them over or 2) pour buckets of fish into a hopper, connected to a pump, which pumped them through large hoses to the pond. These fish are still fairly small, just a few inches long, so try not to imagine large adult fish here. However, it’s still a lot of fish per pond! We’re talking about moving around 55 – 20lb buckets of fish… one bucket at a time. It’s time consuming. Of course it was pouring the whole time! This is where I learned something about my internal body thermometer… IT’S BROKEN! One minute, I could be sitting there, writing down bucket weights and FREEZING MY WHOLE BODY OFF! But the next minute, I could be moving buckets to ponds and SWEATING MY WHOLE BODY OFF!! It’s pretty ridiculous! Lesson learned… keep moving and you can stay warm… even in Alaska! And I don’t mean just jumping up and down trying to stay warm… that doesn’t work!

This week we started to spawn the coho. It’s a short thing compared to the length of chum spawning…We only have one day left until we are done, which will make a total of three spawning days. The first day, we finished the eggs for Deer Lake. The next day we started on the eggs for us. It would have been a faster process if we could have shocked the fish. Unfortunately, since we only have a certain about of fish set aside, and some of those fish aren’t quite ready to be spawned, we don’t want to kill the green fish yet. So we used clove oil to basically knock out the fish, like when we sort the coho earlier on. Each fish needs to be checked for ripeness and the green fish get thrown back in the raceway. Next week we are going to go back through and spawn those fish, hoping they are ripe enough. We only need about 1.5 million eggs.

This brings us back to when the REALLY crappy weather started… That’s basically the whole theme of this blog I guess. Crappy weather… I guess one of the days this weekend (Sunday?) it was decent. Adam and Scott went out deer hunting and came back with one deer (Scott’s though). I’ve been, admittedly, pretty lazy! I attempted to make something new last weekend, Pomegranate Truffles, but that was a bust. I had the wrong chocolate, unsweetened instead of Bittersweet, and they were horrible! But we finally got our plane today, only two days late, and I’ll try again this week! I did get out last weekend for a little bit though. Adam wanted to go pick berries to make some muffins so we hiked up to the lake and managed to pick about 4 cups of blueberries and the red and blue kinds of huckleberries. The muffins turned out great tasting!

Besides all that, there isn’t much going on. We make it a point to creep over to the bunkhouse in the dark (they took down the lights for the round ponds… I’m not happy about it!) on Thursday nights to watch Adam’s hometown guy, Bob, on Survivor. He’s made it past week 6 so far, and we have a kick watching him! I’m really ready for my vacation now… I’m growing tired of the rain, as is everyone else, and I’m not looking forward to the snow to stick, which it probably won’t for a while. OK, according to Adam, who just came in, “It’s still snowing…….. and it’s sticking in the grass.” That was last night when I wrote this... the snow definately stuck but not much. It's barely in the trees, but it's on the grass. It'll be gone if it starts to rain, but right now it's pretty calm and doing nothing. I can actually see some blue in the sky amid the clouds.

I’ve already begun planning what I’ll do at home… I sent out a few emails but I’m trying to plan a little get-together probably on the 20th of December. It’ll be sort of a Melissa’s birthday/ Christmas/ Adam’s send-off Party. Nothing is set in stone yet but I’d like to know if that’s a bad time for anyone? I hope for the whole family to be there! I think I've gotten emails back from everyone I've sent them too, except Uncle Richard. I don't even know if I have the right email address for him so someone see if they can get ahold of him for me? THANKS!

Here are a few pictures...


WHAT IS THAT? I can hear you guys saying right now. That's a Sea Lion swimming upside down. There have been 2 sea lions swimming around all the time around the wier and one day I tried to get a picture. They are really big... a few thousand pounds. When the swim around, they've got these two side flippers that stick out and look like wings. Alot of time, they swim around on their backs so they can see into the water, looking for food I'm assuming. Make the picture bigger and it might look cooler. I think they look like giant dogs.


This guy is a seal. I think I've determined that we have Harbor Seals here. I thought we had two kinds since you see some lighter ones with alot of spots and some darker ones, but I think they're all the same. This is one of the lighter ones.


Harlequin ducks... two males and a female. How come the males get to look so pretty!? I guess this isn't a great picture but I wanted a picture of these ducks. They have the coolest markings... they are dark navy or black with those white and dark red markings. They are really cool and they are always around. They just happen to want to dive or stick their head in the water when you go to click the picture.