Winter Sets In

Weekly Panoramic

It has been pretty uneventful around here the past couple of weeks. Fishing has really ground to a halt with most of the fishing holes freezing over. Caribou still haven't shown up. I still need to get an auger or spud for me to get serious about ice fishing. I did go to the the school shop this past weekend and manufactured a rough prototype geppu to use.

Geppu

I was able to get out and make an attempt, last weekend to fish the last little bit of remaining water that is left. I was frustrated to find the the main channel was frozen over in a few places (since then we have been able to cross on the Honda). Basically I ended up going for a long walk carrying my fly rod. There wasn't much of anything happening as far as the fishing went. I did find that it is not exactly bold to cross the ice upriver and walk downriver banking that there would be ice for me to cross somewhere downriver. Unfortunately for me there was not any ice for me to walk across. I was to lazy to walk all the way back upriver to cross especially when our house was just across the river. So I took my boots off and waded in barefoot. Bear in mind that the temperature was hovering at a mild 15 degrees F. I stepped into the river I was startled that the water felt very warm. When I thought about it it made sense but at the time of stepping into the water I was pleasantly surprised.

Checking the Dwindling Open Water for Trout

It is starting to get dark early now. The sun rises around 10:30 and is setting around 6:00. It won't be too long before my fishing and hunting adventures will be restricted to the weekends only. Kyle and I have been out hunting/scouting 3 or 4 times in the past couple weeks. So far all that we have seen is a couple foxes. We shot at one but both missed and it ducked under cover. It was kind of funny though because after we shot at it we saw it about a minute later at 500+ yards still running full speed. It is very cool to go out after fresh snow and see all of the animal tracks. There were bear, wolf, rabbit, what we think was otter given the slide tracks, and fox and raven tracks everywhere.

Trying to get the Mountains in the Background

On the bright side trapping season began yesterday. Kyle and I went out and did some scouting and ended up setting only one snare near the dump for fox. I think I might try to get into trapping a little bit, especially if we get a snowmachine. We officially booked our tickets home for Christmas. It is a little bit of a rip off because if we were able to fly to Michigan a week earlier and then back to Alaska a week earlier the tickets would cost less than half of what they did. We were able to get the tickets using the $99 companion fare so that is a pretty sweet deal. We only had to to buy one ticket full price and then the other identical ticket cost only $99.

Boat Harbor