Cruise ship visitors

So, another part of my job here is to talk to visitors who come to Kodiak via cruiseship. When I drive into work, the cruise ship tied up at the dock almost dwarfs town- these things can get pretty big and require hundreds of staff to run them.

We have had some interesting visitors- Jacques Cousteau's son was on board one ship, a lady came in who was an entertainer for the cruiseline and she busted out some opera in the middle of the visitor center, a little old lady I spoke with knew Bouckville and the Antique Show! Mostly I talk with an older, retired crowd, usually couples who are often sporting matching rain gear which is cute.

Bear!

I am living on an island with roughly 3500 bears, that means about 1 bear per square mile. You would think I would have seen one by now. It's not like they are small critters. Well, I finally saw one! There is a male juvenile bear hanging out and fishing right down the road from where I live and I caught him playing around in the river last week. I got this shot of him coming toward me up the river.

shipwreck

This is the before (1949) and after (2009) pictures of a shipwreck down on the VFW beach in Monashka Bay. It was an iron ship called The Santiago and was built in 1885 in Scotland. Apparently it was a record-breaking fast schooner that later turned into an oil barge that was used here by the Navy during WWII. It was beached in 1941 because of a leak in its hull.

sparklers are fun

Chad took this picture out at Pasagshak on the 4th of July. We all camped out there for the night.

Amikuq

Amikuq means octopus in Alutiiq. An Alaskan native, Herman (or the Hermanator as he is known in some parts of AK) caught two octopuses yesterday morning and he shared them with us for lunch! He kept one tentacle raw, that was good, then cooked up the rest and we dipped those in yummy sauces, even better. My belly was full of octopus :)

Far Side

warm and fuzzy critters!

I know you might have been thinking, Hana has seen a bear! no. But, I have seen a few others mammals lately. There was a fuzzy red fox curled up near Buskin Lake the other night. The fox is one of just six native land mammals here on the island. There is of course the Kodiak bear, red fox, ermine, tundra vole, river otter, and little brown bat. We have bats living near (in?) our house, so that was an easy one to spot. I have yet to see an ermine and a bear. I did see tracks of a bear down on the Buskin beach the other morning, must have been in early to get some breakfast.




Palin is resigning?

Wind power project

Three windmills were put up in the last couple weeks on top of Pillar Mountain, which sits right behind the center of town. Kodiak Electric Assoc (KEA) is in charge, and they plan to produce 95% of energy sales with renewable power by 2020! The primary renewable power source is the Terror Lake Hydroelectricity project. Rumor has it that the windmills will provide 25% of the power.

Cool beans.

while james was here...

I was lucky enough to have James come and visit for almost 3 weeks! We saw a horned puffin down in Gibson Cove and humpbacks off Miller Point. A bunch of us made a bonfire down at White Sands beach, Chad made us dinner one night with Sockeye salmon he caught, we ate brunch at Mill Bay twice because it was so good, hiked Barometer Mt, went to the VFW beach where there is an old and rusty shipwreck in the sand...we were busy! BUT, we also had time to watch a couple John Wayne and Clint Eastwood flicks-gotta love old westerns.

poo

Yes, that is bear poo.


I'm getting closer.

summer solstice :)

We had a little over 18 hours of daylight yesterday. The sunrise was at 5:07 and did not set until 11:14! Carla made us "Kickass Halibut" for dinner to celebrate (she caught it herself just a few feet from her cabin in Homer). She got the recipe from a 90 year old woman who has been in Alaska for over 50 years. It was hot! Carla is a ferry naturalist as part of her job, so she rides the ferry from Homer to Kodiak twice a month and talks to people about the wildlife and natural history of Alaska.

Happy Trails

So, as part of my job I started a family nature club called Happy Trails. It's sweet because it is open to everyone and it's free! We meet every Saturday at a trail head or beach on the road system for some fun outside. Today, I organized a flower scavenger hunt and then we used some watercolors and made paintings of flowers. Next week, the kids are going to become Spruce scientists at Near Island. The Sitka Spruce is the only evergreen on Kodiak Island and it's the Alaska state tree!

beer and mexican food

We stopped by the brewery down on cannery row by the harbor for some brewskis last night, which we quickly chased with some Mexican food from Martha's. My favorite so far is their malty North Pacific Ale. They recently came out with a new lager called Sarah Pale, ha!

Martha's is an interesting place. She runs her business out of a mobile-home-ish vehicle and serves homemade, fresh mexican food at 2 different places in town, one for lunch, another for dinner. We got a 1/2 order of nachos, took it in the car and devoured it. So good. An extra bonus: for lunch she parks right next to where I work (I have vowed to only eat there once a week).

Fiddlehead quiche

James is in town! We made dinner for everyone at the bunkhouse last night and included some local edibles. I made quiche with fiddleheads (picture) that James and I picked on Near Island. Maybe we’ll make a yummy beach green and sea lovage salad tonight.

Fiddleheads are the young, tightly coiled fern fronds, so named because they look like the scroll of a violin- just a little tidbit for ya.

AK

Everything is bigger than average here...the moose, the mountains, the bears, mosquitoes and even some vegetables.

__________________________

Check out the latest from the Anchorage Daily News:

http://www.adn.com/life/story/807240.html

got crabs?

Crab Fest!

some highlights:

-Hobo Jim @ The Rendevous

-King crab legs

-Survival suit race

-riding the "Tornado," an amusement park ride set up on the spit, with Margo in the rain and cold

-Blackened butt wrap

-Kodiak Island Drummers show and workshop

-Balalaika Players @ the Baranov Museum (Russian folk songs)

-Erica's reading of her dirty fishergirl poem "I wanna get you in a bunk" at the Fisherman's Poet gathering

feel the burn

We went on a great hike up Pyramid Mountain yesterday. There was nothing but sunshine and blue skies so we ate lunch at the top (a little over 2,000ft). Shelly spotted some mountain goats along the top ridge and we saw a couple Rock Ptarmigans on our way down. Ryan impressed/entertained us with his sledding attempts-one good way of using plastic bags. Yes! There is still snow, and quite a bit of it on the mountains-people were skiing on Pyramid all day.

The last two nights a few of us have driven to Abercrombie Park to watch the sun go down off Miller Point. It has been setting at about 10:30 and getting later every day! I am loving the long days.

hot butt

Jone hooked us up with some fresh butt- caught this morning! It was delicious. I just put some butter and garlic on a warm skillet and slapped the fish on there and voila!

Hopefully I'll be catching my own fish soon. The Dolly Vardens are here! I put in a picture below of one in spawning colors. The name "Dolly Varden" comes from a character in the Charles Dickens novel, Barnaby Rudge. Dolly V. was a young girl with a rosy complexion and around 1860, a popular fabric with red polka dots was marketed under the name Dolly Varden. It was actually then a young girl who is credited with connecting the name with the fish, and it stuck.

potluck cookout birthday

What a sweet group of people I have met here. Margo & Roger invited us all over for a potluck cookout at their house on Saturday. There were sweet and sour meatballs, salmon dip & crackers, burgers & bratwursts, fruit salad, beer, and of course, butt. To top it off, Margo made two "bombs," a homemade type of ice cream cake, only 10x better than any you've ever had. I put on a poor performance of blowing out candles on one of them and we gobbled it up.

ps. I feel lucky to be here with some really cool, adventurous, and down to earth people.

pps. I'm really just sucking up because they got me some awesome presents, but they're alright I guess.

the tuffs...xtra tuffs that is

You might be wondering where you can get a pair of the sweet boots I'm wearing...

They're called Xtra Tuffs and they are like the Alaskan sneaker. I feel like I fit in much more now that I can wear these around town. They came with the job and are really rather comfortable!

(I was told by the pilot to hold onto the plane until he jumped in and got it turned on)

Flying the Beaver

We went out on a float plane today! We took the Beaver (that's the model of the plane) to Karluk Lake where Fish & Wildlife has a cabin. It took us about ~45mins each way, taking off from Trident Basin, which is on the other side of Near Island from town. I mapped out where we went on the map as best as I could. The black square is Karluk Lake.

I was sitting shotgun for the ride out and was pretty sure I was going to lose my cookies before we touched down in Karluk, but managed to hold on. On the way there, we took the coastal route, saw some whales and a couple Native villages (Port Lions and Larsen Bay) and it was a bit bumpy. I thought it was cool that we could see the mainland too! Going home was smooth sailing, we took the mountainous route over the "spine" of the island and saw some bear tracks in the snow, no bear though.

So, Kevin was our fearless leader- he's a native Alaskan who grew up flying with his dad in Fairbanks, now he flies for Fish&Wildlife. He happened to have open seats and Margo, Chad and I all had the day off, so we got to hitch a ride :)

The sun has been out all weekend with blue skies ta boot! Doesn't happen much around here I'm told, so I've been soaking it up.

fish here, fish there

Mama bought me a fishing license for my bday! I've been learning some lingo, ha...so there are
chinook salmon=you call them kings, they're the big guys
chum=dog
sockeye=reds
coho=silvers
pink=pinks, right? nope, you call them humpies because of this huge hump on their backs


What did the fish say when it hit the wall?

DAM.

butt

I had some Halibut the other night at the Powerhouse, which is right on the channel between Kodiak and Near Island. I was told that some people call it butt- so, now I do. I had some butt and chips for dinner. There was an eagle out on their deck looking in at us all eating.

Did you know that butts here can weigh up to 700 lbs? That's a big butt! The largest ever caught was something like 450, but I have heard that it's the small ones that are the tastiest.

They are the flat fish that hang out on the ocean floor and have both of their eyes on one side. A weird factoid: Shelly told me that they are born with eyes on both sides of their head, but then one migrates around to the other side-freaky!

Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge

The refuge includes 2 million acres of the Kodiak Archipelago.  You can't actually get to it from town unless you're in a plane or boat.

So, I work for US Fish and Wildlife at the Refuge Visitor Center right in the middle of "downtown" next to one of the harbors.  My job includes running an educational program for local kids 1x week, starting a nature club and hiking 1x week with them, and staffing the center when cruise ships (27 scheduled) come to town and giving interpretive talks.  An extra bonus: I have awesome co-workers :)

Road system map

Close up: This is the only extensive road system on Kodiak, about 7,000 people live here.  My house is near the Buskin River, about 5 miles SW of town.  You can see Narrow Cape at the bottom- that's the best spot to see Gray whales.  Each bay has great birding opportunities, lots of water fowl and shorebirds.    

Where in the world...

So, I thought this could be helpful to see where I actually am.  The Island is circled, and the city of Kodiak is where the black dot is- that's me!

The weather is nothing like how brutal the interior can be- people compare it to Seattle.  Average temps in the summer are 50-60.  We're going to have over 18 hours of daylight by June!

tide pooling, whaling & birding

Yesterday 5 of us went out to one of the ends of the road around here to Narrow Cape (took about an hour). We ate lunch on the cliffs and watched the Gray whales go by, on their way north to their arctic summer feeding grounds. My first whale sightings! I saw some flukes and got some through a scope, which was cool. We also took a look down on Fossil Beach for some treasures. I had fun breaking open concretions to see what was inside. On our way back, we had to stop for Bison to cross the road. There is a guy out there that farms with Bison because they stand up to the bears more than cattle do. I also had some Buffalo jerky, not as good as moose but it was alright.

We saw lots of birds- Emperor Geese, Black Brants, some Oystercatchers are fairly normal and easy to see around here, but there are only 15,000 in the world and they have really cool red beaks and circles around their eyes. We stopped many times along the road to check the slopes for mountain goats and bears, and found 3 goats in a ravine and one on top of a ridge. Didn't see any bears, but found bear tracks down a mountain leading to a deer carcass, or I should say where a deer carcass used to be because only fur was left.

I went down to Abercrombie Park to find some tide pools this morning. Lowest tide of the month- we saw some sweet sea stars, sunflower stars, anemones, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and varied shelled critters. It was neat to turn rocks over and see a little community of these guys.

work work work

So, yesterday for work we had a 2 hour boat tour of the water just outside of Kodiak which turned into a 6 hour cruise around Spruce Island and all the way to Whale Pass and Afognak Island.  We didn't see any whales, but lots of sea otters showed up!  They would be on their backs floating along, maybe kicking a bit, being all cute and eating on their bellies and rolling over to wash the crumbs away, then back to eating.  We were also lucky the sun was out AND I didn't puke :)

first week highlights

I got here a week ago Saturday and what a week it has been!  After flying all day, we were approaching Kodiak and things got interesting because the runway starts in water and ends at the bottom of Barometer Mountain- I'm told that often a couple tries are needed to get just the right approach, luckily we landed on the first try.  My boss, Tina, was there to meet me and explained how the airport is more like a bus stop because everyone knows each other.  It seemed like everyone on the plane was a fisherman.  People say that everyone fishes here, whether they are out in a boat or in town, everyone's work is connected to fish- mostly because they are so abundant.

So, on Sunday I met Tina who got me my car (I get my own car AND they pay for gas) and oriented me to the road system.  It's funny that they call it the road system, but I think they do that just to distinguish it from the rest of the island which doesn't have any roads.  On our way into town, I noticed eagles perching in the trees.  I guess Bald Eagles hang out in town until the snow clears- they are everywhere!  All over the harbor on boats, trees, buildings, it's cool to see these guys flying all over town.

It was lonely here the first night and day, but then I got some roommates on Sunday- Chad and James and got to work on Monday and felt more at home.  My coworkers are great and everyone I have met thus far has been super friendly and welcoming :)

this week's adventures:

• Hike along Monashka Bay- saw a river otter, seal, black-tailed deer, sea otters and lots of birds- cormorants, harlequin ducks, pine grosbeak, grebes and a couple from home- mallards and chickadees!  The deer are coming to the beaches (black sand) to eat kelp that has washed ashore because there is still a good amount of snow on the ground.
  
• Moose steak and homefries for dinner!  One of my roommates brought moose from SE Alaska that his boss had killed- it was tasty!  He was working as a dog handler for a big-time musher who has won the Yukon Quest a couple times, which is a race just like the Iditarod.
  
• Went for a walk in one of the harbors downtown to check out the sea lions that hang out there- they were all taking naps, except for one who was stretching his flippers.  I met a retired fisherman who had fished the Bering Sea for 22 years!  
  
• I had a Sarah Pale beer from the local Brewery, ha! and cod & chips at Henry's (a restaurant downtown).
• WWII remnants in Fort Abercrombie State Park and moss like I have never seen on the trees- apparently you can find a layer of ash from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta under the moss.  
• Met Larry Van Daele- a wildlife biologist for the warm and fuzzy critters on Kodiak, he told us about the bears in particular.  When they stand on their back legs, they can put their heads through a basketball hoop and the males can weigh up to 1500lbs.  There is one bear per square mile of the island.  The males are just starting to wake up from hibernation, there was one sighted not far from the bunkhouse near one of the popular salmon runs around here.
• It is Whale Fest here this week, so there are lots of activities centered around whales and celebrating the migration of the Gray Whale past the island.  I went to a talk about how the Native people of the island, the Alutiiqs, used to hunt whales 2,000 years ago.  The hunters were shaman-type members of the village and would dig up bodies of people that used to be important in the village and use the rendered fat from them on their spears...ewww

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