"What do you do all day?"

Wednesday May 30 (by Urs)

We left Hydaburg on Wednesday morning after the gale abated. It blew quite hard all night and the boat heeled over at the dock -- had to lock the drawers shut. As we cruised through a narrow passage with twists and turns, a local Haida fisher on a runabout held up a salmon. What does he mean by that? Oh - he probably wants to sell it. So I turned Raven Song around. Judy was in the engine room hanging up the laundry for drying. The guy wanted $30 plus 5 gallons of gas. I said I had no gas, so he said "I’ll take the money." That was a very nice and quite large (probably 20 lb) spring salmon (king as they call it in Alaska). We had a deal.



Urs with King Salmon



After all the narrow passages, we turned into a good anchorage and then proceeded to process the salmon: cleaning it, filleting it, cutting it, vacuum packing and freezing some of it. We still had the salmon we bought from another guy a day earlier, that Judy had prepared in brine for smoking. So now it was time to convert our BBQ for smoking, by using our heavy gauge steel plate bowl and the wood chips. Unfortunately, the weather was miserable and the wind was howling and the rain pelting. After it blew out the flame a few times, things seemed to work and we ended up with the most delicious meal of BBQ'd salmon cuttings in miso sauce as well as the freshly hot-smoked salmon. Absolutely five star.

And people ask, “What do you do all day?”!

Weather continues to be cold. The thermometer reads 10, 11 or 12 degrees.  If the wind is blowing, it's 4-sweater weather; if not, it's 3-sweater weather.  Though the dandelions don't seem to care:  they are already going to seed!  And a neighbor reported that farther north, there is snow down to the water.

Tomorrow we are going on to Craig, where we plan to go to their dock and stay for a couple of nights.