4th of July Haines Alaska

4th of July Parade

Doug’s daughter Marirose is crewing for him for the Coho opener so she and I traded places for the first 3 weeks of July. This means shore leave for me! I am spending most of my time in Haines, AK, where Marirose and her brother live as well as their mom and many other good friends. It’s a small town, population of less than 2000. My first week here has been gloriously sunny and packed with  4th of July fun.
Mud Volleyball

There was a parade, which was small town fun with lots of kids in the parade and all the rest of the towns kids grabbing for the handfuls of candy thrown from every vehicle and float. Next everyone moved to the town park where the games began – tug of war, dunk tank, mud volleyball, and more. There was also a race on the Chilkoot river – where participants had to create their own floatation device (most were made of Styrofoam) and try to control it down the river to the finish line without losing any teammates to the river. The temperature hit 80 degrees – really hot for Alaska – but the root beer float hit the spot : )

Styrofoam "rafts"
The day ended with music outside of the tribal house at the Fort Seward Parade Grounds. There is nothing like dancing outdoors beneath the midnight sun!
Band in front of the Tribal House

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2022 Season Begins and a 2021 Recap

Image
A Good Morning in Haines Alaska  We left our beautiful mountains-to-sea town of Haines, Alaska this morning and headed out for our 20 22  summer fishing season. It was a glorious sunny  morning and the all-day trip to Juneau was smooth and  lovely.  Both Doug and I were looking forward to  getting back out on the water and pulling up those big  King and Coho salmon – especially after the 2021  season we had.  2021 Recap 2021 was a good year for most trollers – there were fish to be caught and a nice price point per pound. Unfortunately, Doug hurt his ribs right before the start of the season so we didn’t fish as hard as we usually do. We started late and had to take a couple weeks off mid-summer for healing. It was a different kind of season for us but still delivered spectacular sights and long days of wilderness fishing. We often spend much of the season fishing in the Gulf of Alaska – from Cross Sound south along Baranof Island. Due to our adjustments for the season we chose to stay
Read more

End of the Summer Season

Image
Coho salmon were not abundant this year. Other stocks did ok, and the local sockeye run was a good one, but coho numbers are what we rely on as trollers, so this was not a good year for us. In fact, Alaska Fish and Game stated that this years' coho run was the third worst in the last 40 years with a harvest 42% below the 20 year average!  We spent our last week of fishing in northern Chatham Strait. We didn't catch many fish but we had some really nice wildlife viewing. Again we had a group of whales bubble net or lunge feeding near us for a couple of days and that is always a spectacular site. There is also a really great sockeye stream in the bay we were anchoring in that draws lots of bears. It’s the classic Alaska photo op. There’s a beautiful waterfall that then streams down into the cove. At high tide the salmon can jump up the waterfall with some amount of effort, at low tide they get stranded in the rocks down below. A feast for the bears! One morning there were four be
Read more

Alaska Homesteading Update #3

Image
Our little guest cabin now has quite a sweet outdoor space with its fire pit, benches, serving counter and cowboy hot tub (heated by the fire pit). It’s very inviting and we spend as much time there as we can.  The house itself got new stain and an arctic entryway, which helped during the cold winters that we spent here during Covid isolation times.  We bought a tractor last fall and a mill this spring so we could use the trees on the property to make our improvements.  Doug dropped a few trees and milled a bunch of lumber while I was recuperating with my broken arm. We are now in the process of building a pole barn for all of our equipment. Next spring we will work on an addition to the house. It’s really fun to watch our little Homestead grow!
Read more