Snettisham 2009-1

Snettisham 2009 - 5: The Week
June 20 - 27

Humpback, looking toward Sweetheart Flats

Day 1

It was a pretty hectic week leading up to THE week. There was shopping for all the miscellaneous items I needed for all the potential projects (paint, lumber, etc.), packing, grocery shopping, logistics to work out, gas to buy, and on top of that I was scrambling at work trying to get through a mound of tasks before the end of the month. Saturday finally came, everything was more or less ready, and Nigel was glued to me to make sure I didn't leave without him. Chris and I went to the store to buy bread for the week and then took a load of gear to the harbor, enough to fill two cart loads down to the boat. It was mercifully high tide for once, so the ramp was at a low grade. I finished packing at home and made some cookie dough while Chris took off to the airport to meet his friend Gabe who was on leave for a few days between leading tour groups around Alaska. We all met up at the harbor and the rest of the gear made it down in one cart with Gabe while Chris and I carried the lumber (stair stringers and 2x6s for treads). With all the gas, groceries, ice, and lumber the boat was sitting a little low in the water. Gabe climbed into the survival suit and I took a leaving-the-harbor shot before we left a little after 1:00 pm. At first I thought there was too much weight in the bow, so I handed off two gas jugs for Chris to stow in the back. Shortly out of the harbor I had trouble getting up on step, so I returned the gas to the bow, tilted the engine down a little, and off we went. It was partly cloudy and the water was only a little choppy down the channel and crossing Taku Inlet. Gabe and I chatted a bit while Chris sat in the back with Nigel. Around Grave Point we saw a striking change in the water ahead of us like a tide rip. Like magic we passed over the line and went from choppy water to glass calm water and none of us could account for the change; it stayed that way most of the way to Snettisham. We passed a whale at Arden and a whale at Grand Island, and we saw another in Gilbert Bay. As we pulled into the river inlet and in sight of the homestead, we came across a whale lunge feeding at the edge of the

sandbars. We stopped and watched for a while, getting some glimpses of the pink skin between the pleats in its throat pouch. I finally pulled myself away and we cruised up to the beach and unloaded. It took long enough that the falling tide stranded the boat, so I anchored it there for the night. After we took everything up to the new deck, we gave Gabe the grand tour, then found ourselves back at the lodge a little hungry. We brought out some snacks, then Chris and I set about making Philly cheese sandwiches exactly as Rory had prepared them in May. The veggies may have burnt a little bit on top of the wood stove (and the tin foil failed a little) but they turned out pretty well. We played a round of Cranium--Gabe won. While we played, a huge brace of common mergansers floated down the river; I counted 80, the pearly white males shining against the gray water. We also watched the resident eagles and witnessed one swimming to shore, humping its wings up and down. We saw this at least twice more that week (it looks like a dolphin fin from a distance and tends to catch my attention). It happened so much I got to thinking it was a deliberate tactic and not just an unfortunate accident. Eagles also landed in the shallows quite a bit and we saw them pass by the front of the lodge with flounder and uncertain items in their talons, landing just out of sight in their nest on the nearest point downriver.

Day 2
The next morning I got up around 9:00, washed the dishes, cleaned up from the night before, and reanchored the boat in deeper water. Gabe came over and we had delicious pancakes for breakfast (I'm getting better at making them). The first thing I wanted to do was hook up the gray water treatment system, as I was pretty tired of carrying buckets of kitchen water to empty in the river. I'd left it incomplete up to that point in the hopes of further building up the bottom of the olive barrel so it needed less water to reach the outlet holes in the pipe. In the past two trips I'd sprayed expanding foam, but the expansion had been disappointing and it hadn't been nearly enough. I had a plan to make it more efficient this time by spraying foam around pink insulation blocks, but couldn't find the last bottle of foam (I found it later in the week). So, frustrated but determined to have a sink drain, I maneuvered the olive barrel back to its spot in the bear proof box, inserted the inlet pipe, attached the filter bag to it (which I'd cleaned and bleached the week before in Juneau), and hooked up the through-hull fitting to the outlet hose. Back inside I screwed together all the sink fittings and tightened them until there were no leaks. I could hear the water trickling into the olive barrel outside and let it run quite a bit to build up the water level inside. Chris came over shortly thereafter, just as I was getting ready to pound nails on the deck. Gabe took a nap on the couch while Chris and I started nailing the decking to each of the joists (they were only tacked in on the ends). There were a lot of joists and this was a pretty exhausting task. When we were less than half way through, I switched gears and started working on the front of the deck where I wanted to put up 2x10s along the front of the joists, which I'd cut but not installed on the previous trip. By that time my wrists were troubling me--they didn't so much as hurt as they were increasingly jelly-like and functionless (I'm developing repetitive stress problems in my wrists from working down at Snettisham). Unfortunately, despite my attempts at uniformity, there were a few joists that stuck out farther than the others and needed to be trimmed before I could put on the facing board. I drug out the generator and tried to trim one with the sawzall (the skill saw couldn't access it), but wound up mutilating it instead. Chris suggested a hand saw and that's how I wound up trimming them--slow, but neat, and then we tacked on the 2x10s. Chris also helped me snap a chalk line along the left edge of the deck where the decking ran long (which was pretty fun) and I used the skill saw to tidily trim the edge off. Now that all the cut ends were exposed, I broke out the Jabsco and painted all the cut ends I could access (Jabsco treats wood to prevent decay). Then I returned to pounding nails and eventually Chris and I finished up and stood on a stable, solid deck.

Meanwhile, Gabe had emerged with the ax and set to work chopping firewood from the stack of rounds the boys had created during the work party. He used the largest round as a base and set to work chopping in the little clearing where it's stacked. It looked like fun and he made a nice neat stack of firewood, piling it under the tarp with the rest of the small rounds. I think we all drank Alaskan whites when we were finished. It was a beautiful, sunny day and we took off in kayaks after a lunch of quesadillas and fresh cookies. One of the single kayaks was still tied to a tree down the beach at deep water from our previous low tide departure, so I climbed on the front of Chris's kayak and we very slowly made our way down there to pick it up. There weren't very many seals in the river, so we kayaked down to River Point, turned the corner, then spotted whales in Gilbert Bay. We leisurely headed in that direction, then drifted around for a quite a while looking for elusive blows. I'd brought the hydrophone along, but quickly put it away when I heard nothing but our own splashes. A seal or two showed up and checked us out. Mostly we saw the intermittent blows of at least two whales, but they seemed to be at the far end of Gilbert Bay near Sweetheart Creek. I was getting ready to turn around when we saw a huge splash--a breach maybe--and it became clear that there were three. Gabe took off after them. Chris and I drifted around a little more, then started to head back, figuring we could come back and pick Gabe up in the skiff. During this time the river current had carried us well out into Gilbert Bay and we fought against it on the way home. By the time we came abreast of River Point I was more than ready to be done paddling--not so much tired, just ready to stop arduously paddling. It was along way from there back to the boat so I told Chris he might as well hang out and I would come get them both; I could see that Gabe was on his way back. I counted the strokes back to the Ronquil--308 on each side. At the boat I scooted the kayak toward shore, relying on the falling tide to strand it nearby. I was in such shallow water by this time that I had to push in the mud for some distance before I could lower the motor. Then I zoomed out to meet the guys (Gabe had met up with Chris by then) and drove in fast figure eights around them to create a cluster of big overlapping wakes for them to play in. Then they came over and we hauled both kayaks onto the boat and balanced them across the back. Chris hung onto them while we made our way back to the homestead.

We had halibut and zucchini for dinner, then decided to build a bonfire outside for solstice. I had a three-year-old fire pit still sitting near the corner of the deck, but we thought it was a bit too close. Gabe cleared away the vegetation near the benches with the machete, then worked on clearing the brush that had grown up around the boardwalk trail and the path to the lodge outhouse while Chris and I moved the benches farther back and constructed a new fire pit a safer distance from our masterpiece. We also put a few more nails on the 2x10s, which were hanging pretty precariously. I gathered up a bunch of wood that was too big for the wood stove inside and Chris built a fire. The evening was mild and the river flat calm in the slowly diminishing light. Suddenly, where there had been no seals during our kayak, an armada of seals showed up, and they all seemed to be heading in our direction. The river was so calm that we could clearly see v-shaped wakes in the water as they swam toward us, dozens of seals, clearly watching. I don't think we were doing anything particularly interesting, so I'm a little puzzled by their behavior. I hate to anthropomorphize, but it was a bit like they'd just returned from foraging all day in the greater Snettisham area and were now looking for a little entertainment and we were the best they had. Gabe and I walked down to the edge of the water and looked back at all the seals, all of them watching us, occasionally splashing in unison. I imagine it would have been a fantastic kayaking experience, but it was getting late and we soon reconvened around the bonfire and ate rhubarb dumplings (with rhubarb that I'd picked from my garden the week before). We also broke out Connect 4; Gabe beat me in a brutal, lingering game, then played against Chris a few times, Chris winning. When Gabe went to bed, Chris and I played several more times, the checkers getting difficult to differentiate in the dark.

Nailing in the deck	Lumberjack Gabe	Kayking in Gilbert Bay
Chris and Gabe kayaking	Armada of seals	Solstice bonfire/Connect 4

Day 3
This was going to be Gabe's last day with us. He had to be back in Skagway Tuesday morning to meet up with his next tour group and we'd arranged a charter at 3:30 to get him back in time for his flight north. I'd originally planned to take Gabe back by boat and immediately return to the homestead the same day, but the more I thought about the time and effort that would take (at least five or six hours round trip) and the variability of the weather, the more I thought that chartering sounded pretty good. But, the only airline with decent charter rates was booked on Monday and the best I could come up with for less than $460 was a Ward Air backhaul for $350, but that was at 10:30 am. Finally I called Air Excursions and they offered a Cherokee for $340 whenever I wanted it, IF I could get to the hydroelectric plant. This sounded like a great idea--a good deal, and an adventure to boot (I hadn't been to the plant since I was a kid picking up my wayward geese). We'd decided the night before to spend the morning exploring Doc Fouchet's place and looking for the road to the Crystal Mine, then play it by ear until departure time, maybe doing a little fishing. We ate French toast for breakfast (possibly the first French toast I've ever made), then loaded up and took off for the entrance to Port Snettisham. There was a whale close to the opposite shore and Gabe wanted to drop the hydrophone to see what we could hear. At first the only consistent sounds we heard were two clicks followed by two more organic sounding sounds. It didn't sound like an animal, but it happened pretty often and I don't have another explanation. We did finally hear the whale with a rushing, whooshing sound just a split second before it came up to breathe. We all agreed that we were hearing the very beginning of the exhale slightly before we saw or heard it above water. Perhaps we heard it earlier because sound travels faster through water than through air, or because we heard the beginning of the internal exhale before anything happened above the surface. Either way, we all agreed it was pretty cool.

From there we headed to Doc Fouchet's cove, as my dad always calls it, which is a scenic little bay right around the point from my dad's other Snettisham property on the south side of the entrance to the Port. We pulled up to a grassy beach and immediately saw the rusty roof of an old building just inside the trees. We pulled the boat up onto a more or less sandy beach at the edge of the grass, getting hung up on random rocks sticking up, and I pulled the anchor up under the alders and wedged it in a rock. We climbed through the bushes at the top of the beach and up onto what turned out to be the center of a large, mostly collapsed building. One side of the slumping roof was rusting sheets of metal, the other was rotting boards. We couldn't see inside very well, but lying around on the weathered wood were parts to an old stove, bottles, and various iron objects. My dad had told me that Doc Fouchet was a dentist and lived in this cove until he died there some time in the 60s. A friend of his found him and buried him nearby--his grave was supposed to be easily recognizable on a nearby point. We left the building and tromped into the forest looking for the road to the mine. My dad had also told me that the road was just behind Doc's house. I'd made a futile attempt to follow the road from its starting point closer to Sentinel Point last summer, but to no avail. Instead of a road we quickly found another building, an A-frame, also slumped, but much more intact. We could look in on the attic, filled with sundry items including a metal bed frame, life jackets, buckets, boots, and a deep fat fryer basket. From there we tromped deeper into the woods in search of the road. I thought it might be more inland from the cabin, so we headed toward the mountain, and then up the side of it. The going was pretty rough, trudging through devil's club and blueberries, over rotten logs, and sinking into the holes between mossy roots. There were downed trees everywhere and we used many of them to escape from the dense underbrush on the forest floor. A lot of standing trees were dead, split down the middle, leaving jagged ends pointing toward the sky. At one point the boys climbed up to a high log fallen parallel to the steep slope, and I lingered behind. We walked separately for a while, moving east along the mountainside until we came to small creek in a dense gully. They came down and met me there and we trudged our way back to the buildings in defeat. Having no idea which of the several points nearby Doc was buried on, and being tired of fighting the underbrush and the vicious noseeums, we decided to get back on the water and start making our way to Speel Arm.

My dad had told me that Mallard Cove was a good place to fish for trout, so I had that in mind for a destination (I'd borrowed a pole from a friend). The water in Snettisham was glassy calm and we soon left our insect pests behind. Just as we rounded Sharp Point (across from Sentinel Point), a whale surfaced, then a pair of whales farther out, and another toward Fanny Island. We decided to stop there for a bit, in the middle of where they seemed to be feeding. We shut down and dropped the hydrophone. This time we couldn't hear them before they breathed (perhaps because they were closer), but we did hear other whooshing and groaning sounds that might have originated from the whales. As we sat there, the solo whale came pretty close to the boat as he fed back and forth and I got a slightly blurry photo of his solid black tail. The pair of whales was joined by a third who came up and dove slightly out of sync and behind the others. One of them blew like a fog horn and all their blows echoed off the mountainside. The pair both had solid white tails. I have to say that I was pretty delighted by being able to stumble on such a scene--just the idea that I could turn a corner and come across a bunch of feeding whales, especially in Snettisham. I'm not sure what makes Snettisham so interesting, but I love the fact that, while Stephen's Passage practically dries up of whales in the summer time, Snettisham seems to be attract them, and sometimes in significant numbers. We had a snack and watched until we couldn't take the noseeums anymore, then made our way toward Mallard Cove, getting a surprise look at the trio as we did so and one good ID fluke shot (see photo below). Mallard Cove turned out to be very picturesque with brilliant green water and a lovely valley with a creek flowing out. We drifted around for a while while Chris and I futzed with assembling the fishing pole, proving ourselves quite incompetent. I haven't fished since I was about ten and probably didn't know much about it at the time. There were two small, completely charming seals in the cove who came quite close and observed us with adorable scrutiny for long periods of time (see photo). The bugs finally drove us away, plus it was getting close to departure time for Gabe, so we left the cove and headed out toward Fanny Island, stopping long enough to figure out the fishing pole before we really needed to head to the hydroelectric plant. We passed two more whales, bringing the minimum for the area to six.

Thankfully we were just past a high tide, so I didn't need to worry about the sandbars, (the whole area at the end of Speel Arm is the outlet of the Speel River and gets shallow). I followed the marker buoys on the left side of the runway, which juts into the bay, passing what I guessed were hatchery pens inside. We could see a huge, triangular hole in the mountain where rushing water was exiting, presumably bound for the channel we were in. There was a small dock near the end of the runway, so we tied up there and walked to the top of the ramp. Some men were up there who asked us if we were with the bird people (probably referring to the marbled murrelet folks), then waved us on when we told them our business. The whole area was pretty pleasant, a wide flat, sandy strip of land that smelled of summer. It reminded me of the lodge. Our timing was perfect. As we reached the top of the ramp, a small wheel plane circled and landed on the runway and we walked out to meet it. The pilot got out and introduced himself as Cable--one of the pilots we used to hire to fly 57Z before my parents sold it a few years ago. I'm pretty sure I employed him to take me to Snettisham once, or possibly the Taku. Gabe took off with him, and Chris and I meandered back to the boat. All morning the clouds had gathered in and stolen the sun; the light drizzle that started up as we reached the plant turned into dense rain by the time we were underway again. I told Chris that I was looking forward to getting back to a fire in the lodge and figured we'd go straight back--unless, of course, those white-tailed whales showed up and tantalized me with potential ID shots.

Well, a whale came up in the pouring rain pretty close to us as we left Speel Arm and were crossing the entrance to the Port. I had to stop. After a few breaths I was able to snap a picturesque photo of his white spotted tail. As we were watching him, a pair of whales came up close to shore, revealing their solid white tails as they dove. It was perfect timing. At the end of the next breathing cycle I managed to get a nice photo of the first one; I was cold and tired and ready to give up, but they came up again, dead ahead, and I managed to snap a photo of the second one. Naturally I was curious if that pair of whales was the same as the two in the trio we'd seen earlier a couple of miles away. When I got home I compared the photos and the ID was positive--they were the same whales, minus the hanger-on. We slowly left the area, then picked up speed and headed home. As we passed by the eagle's nest I could see one of the parents sitting in it and tried to take a picture, but the drenching rain made it difficult. I put Chris ashore and grabbed a kayak; he had a fire going by the time I came back and we spent the rest of the evening inside.

Doc Fouchet's house	Gabe crossing a log	Root wad of a falled tree
Chris and Gabe in the gorge	Solid black flukes	Marbled murrelet
Mallard Cove	Snettisham hydroelectric plant	Gabe heading to the Cherokee
The big avalanche in Snettisham--the one that took out the power (twice)	Spotted flukes scenic shot	White tail 1
White tail 2 (the same tail as the photo within the text)	Eagles's nest with parent	Nigel waiting for me to anchor the boat

Day 4
We slept in a bit the next day and had a leisurely morning. In the early afternoon we made our way outside and starting moving the hemlock siding from the lodge porch onto the deck below; thankfully it had stopped raining and the sun was back out, so the wood didn't get wet. We organized the piles according to size--mostly 8' lengths with fewer (but still quite a few) 10' and 12' boards, more than I expected. Once the top porch was free of lumber again we moved to working on the stairs to the deck. First we determined where they should be and, although I'd imagined them in the center of the deck, we wound up offsetting them to line them up with the existing path from the beach and to avoid the trenches, and I think they look better there, occupying one quarter of the width of the deck. Chris evened out the ground at the bottom while I measured and marked where the stringers should meet the 2x10s. We also cut the 2x6s that we'd brought down with us as well as two existing 2x6s into four foot lengths and cut a four foot length of 4x4, nailing this onto the bottoms of the stringers to connect them and to rest on the ground. We nailed in the stringers to the deck at the top, then tacked in the treads, pounding the nails in when we were satisfied we'd made no mistakes. They looked great, and suddenly the deck was far more accessible. We tromped up and down them in triumph a few times.

With the stairs complete, I wanted to return to the ceiling panels. I moved the saw horses to the deck and drug out a dozen or so boards, measuring them to fit the back wall and the middle sections of the ceiling. I'd had a revelation earlier in the week that caused me to ditch all previous ceiling panel patterns. I'm baffled at how I failed to consider this before, but with ceiling joists 16" on center, I was limited to lengths in multiples of four. No 6' boards, no 10' boards, they would all be 4', 8', or 12'. That simplified things quite a lot and I'm embarrassed at how much time I spent calculating and composing the ceiling layout without considering this. Of course, I could use other lengths, but wouldn't be able to nail the ends into a joist. So I cut a handful of boards to try them out, avoiding cutting pieces for the front section of the lodge after the disappointing results the previous try. When cutting these boards I also tried to square the ends if they were badly crooked and adjusted the tilt on the skill saw so the board ended in a point instead of a square end. My dad told me that this would help the board ends meet flush. It was a bit chaotic, but eventually all boards were cut and placed on the upper porch for use later in the weekend.

At that point we took a little break, then decided to try fishing from shore. We walked down the beach to some large rocks past the eagle's nest point and, with some struggling, managed to adjust the reel so we could effectively cast into the water. I cast about 15 times, then let Chris give it a try. After a few casts, a large glob of fishing line came off the reel and nothing we could do would replace it and make it functional again. Discouraged, we walked back to the lodge for dinner. It turns out that I'd forgotten a rather key element of casting--apparently you have to lift the bale up every time you cast. You'd think I'd remember this from my childhood, but I did not, and we didn't try fishing again. On the way back, we passed under the eagle nest and heard the still-quiet screeches of an eaglet inside. That night we played two rounds of Cranium.

Chris building the stairs

Fishing (or trying to)

Cyclops

Day 5
It was the day I'd been waiting for all week. In the middle of the night I got up and saw a solid fog bank outside, which boded well for good weather. By six it was flawlessly sunny. We took advantage of this to go on an adventure I've been promising myself for years--a trek to the top of the mountain behind the lodge. I'd done some elementary scoping from the water, and figured that heading up the creek was the best bet, eventually veering to the left to make it

to the alpine. Tree line didn't look very far away and I was pretty confident of having sweeping views of Port Snettisham in the not-too-distant future. We walked up the trail to the olive barrel, then began making our way up the creek bed. After the first ten minutes, Nigel was struggling so much with the steep, difficult terrain that I walked him back to the lodge and left him there. Chris stayed in the creek and watched a vole run below him on another log. The terrain around the creek was steep and rough and thick with crazy deadfalls and devil's club, so as difficult as the stream was to navigate at times, we stayed in it almost exclusively. The creek itself was pretty rigorous too, the bottom a mess of loose rocks held precariously in place by fallen branches and downed trees. Many times I felt like I was "floating" over the real creek bed on debris and rocks. We scrambled over logs, under logs, walked along logs, hauled ourselves up short waterfalls, and slid around on the slimy, wet shale. The sun made its way through the canopy and illuminated sections of the creek in dappled warmth, and I had a blast. Well, for a while anyway. Then it got pretty tedious, ever steeper, and each tantalizing glimpse of the forest opening in the distance turned out to be misleading. Points of interest during the hike up included a big snow bank not far above the olive barrel and a steep tributary creek to the left that I considered going up. The creek narrowed and grew steeper the farther we went until it felt a bit like a gentle waterfall. In a dense section of forest we saw a black (except for its quills) porcupine traipse across a log over the creek and continue its way up the steep mountainside. Eventually the forest opened a little and thick groves of alders and devil's club lined the edge of the creek, but it didn't last. Finally, the creek flattened out briefly in a truly beautiful meander through a semi-meadow between widely spaced trees. In this clearing I noticed that the dominant tree was suddenly mountain hemlock (associated with tree line in Southeast Alaska) interspersed with modest cedars. That, at least, was pretty exciting. From there the creek disappeared under snow. We tromped through it for 50 yards, following bear tracks, until we found a dry rock protruding above the snow and decided to concede defeat. The mountainside rose steeply to the left and there was no end in sight, and we were utterly exhausted. We had a snack and a beer, rested a bit in the sunshine, then headed back down. It was faster going down, but my legs were tired and I slipped around more than usual, sometimes ending up in less-than-graceful positions. Thankfully neither of us was injured. I was sore for days.

The evening was mild and we finally took the seals up on their apparent invitation to join them. Chris and I kayaked out into the river and were mutually entertained by them, coming up unpredictably all around us. We both had seals come and look at us from about five feet away, so close we could hear them breathe and watch their noses open for breaths. They often followed close behind the kayaks, something we could observe happening for the other person but rarely caught ourselves. They are exceedingly difficult to photograph, but I tried anyway.

Creek hike	Taking a break	Black porcupine
Mountain hemlock and cedars	Meandering creek	Chris and a seal

Day 6
We slept in a bit after the rigorous hike the day before, and started out the day making a COASST survey. The weather was partly cloudy and the walk was pleasant, but didn't yield any dead seabirds. The tide was low (I try to take surveys at low tide so there's more beach to peruse), so the creek cut its way through the sandbars to reach deeper water. We found a school of fry in the shallow water, darting around chaotically as Nigel waded in. It was impressive to see those fish so exposed and far from protection and I thought how great it would be to be a heron right there. I often see schools of fry in shallow water along shore and in this creek at low tide; I should try to identify them.

I also took some photos of young hummingbirds that day around the lodge. All spring we'd seen one male consistently that made dramatic aerial displays, peeped aggressively at a level disproportionate to his size, and harassing a female brutally to the point that I wondered if he was capable of being a parent at all (we named him Clint). There was at least one female that came often, despite the abuse, and possibly more (it was pretty difficult to tell). On this day the nestlings apparently fledged, and a few more hummingbirds showed up, rather inexperienced and completely at ease with our company. They were rather poor at figuring how to feed at the feeder and explored everything that was pink,

red, or orange, perching on all kinds of objects to rest. This made for some rather fun photography, including the photo at the bottom of this report.

In the afternoon I decided to take the plunge and cut a bunch more boards for the ceiling. I drug them out and measured them, putting them in neat stacks for cutting the next day. Now that the porch was free of lumber I also nailed in the rough cut cedar 1x6s around the left porch post to match the other one and screwed the hook back in for the hammock.

In the afternoon I decided to start getting the cabin floors ready for painting. The week before I'd purchased a bag of mixture for filling in the cracks between the plywood floorboards and a second box of garage floor paint (I had one left from the previous summer). I wasn't going to have time to actually paint the floors, but I could at least get them ready. I brought a bottle of water, a plastic knife for mixing, a paper cup, and a putty knife to the first cabin and set to work. The five pound bag of mix didn't have very helpful instructions (the measurements were all in weight rather than volume), but I made my best guess as to the appropriate proportions and set to work. Cottonwood Cabin needed very little filling except for the edge of the wall where the plywood floor met the 2x10 nailed alongside (the result of a mishap in its construction involving the company that supplied the cabin kits assuring me of the wrong dimensions). The mixture was like concrete--hopefully it's suited to extreme temperature fluctuations. Mink Cabin needed only a few gaps between boards filled, as did Harbor Seal/Murrelet Cabin (I haven't settled on the name yet). My cabin (Hermit Thrush) was a different story, as the plywood had weathered an extra winter and warped somewhat (also the reason that the lodge floor had so many gaps). It got a bit wearying and hard on the back crouching over the floor to press the mixture into the gaps and I might have been sloppier than I should have been and counted on cleaning it up later.

In the evening I decided to go for a kayak. Whales had been a near constant presence in the inlet all week, one to three whales moving in and out and cruising beyond the dropoff. I saw one

whale out there and thought I'd see if it would stay in one place long enough for me to have a look. Whiting Inlet whales are really difficult to watch; they tend to take few breaths between dives (often just one) and rarely linger in one place, often moving back and forth along the dropoff or the beaches or making large circles. I headed out in the general direction of a whale that was on my side of the inlet. When I was about 3/4 of the way to River Point (the corner of the inlet) the whale came up toward the middle of the river. I wasn't interested in pursuing it, so I decided to hang out closer to shore in case it turned around. Just then a second whale came up, also toward the middle, but behind me. I pulled a little away from shore and decided to hang out there and see what happened. The first whale promptly disappeared toward the other shore, but the second whale turned around and started moving back in my direction, taking one to three breaths per dive. I tried to take photos of him with the front of the kayak in the picture. As I drifted, this whale moved about as close to shore as I was and dove in my direction. A few minutes later, the water erupted about 20 feet away and the whale came up, heading toward the kayak. It was terribly exciting! I managed to snap a quick picture (I can't believe it turned out) and the whale filled most of the frame with no zoom (see photo above), then I watched it roll its great black back, getting a clear look at the bumps along its caudal area as it slipped beneath the surface in a terminal dive. It would have run into me if it had taken another breath. I was delighted and exhilarated. I could see a huge flock of gulls gathering just outside the inlet, so I turned and kayaked in that direction, figuring that was where the action would be. Apparently I kayaked right over the top of the whale, as it came up behind me a few minutes later heading in the same direction. I made it to the birds along with the whale and got a close look at a surprised murrelet that popped to the surface about five feet away. Just as I reached the flock, a rain squall that I'd seen on the other side of Gilbert Bay reached me and it started to pour. As I turned around to head home, two-foot seas rolled in from behind and followed me some distance into the inlet. The rain hovered overhead all the way to the lodge and then passed just as I pulled the kayak onto the beach. Chris had watched the squall come in and had hot water ready for tea.

Day 7

It was out last full day at the homestead. As my productivity had been rather slow that week, I was determined to at least cut the boards I'd measured for the ceiling panels. Before that, however, Chris and I spent some time completely entertained by hummingbirds. The modest few that had fledged the day before had been joined in the night by many others; Chris had counted ten at once vying for the feeder and the porch was abuzz with the wings of all these young fledglings trying to feed. We began to recognize one rather pathetic individual who must have left the nest too soon. It spent most of its time perched on the wooden benches or on the ground or the nearby bushes peeping woefully. When it did approach the feeders it tried everything except putting its beak down the feeding tube; it may have managed to drink some nectar where it pooled at the bottom of the plastic flower, but the only time I saw it successfully feed was when it was sharing a flower with another young hummer. There was constant tussling among the hummers. Most of them flew away when chased, but this bird (and some of the others), just kind of collapsed, hanging upsidedown. It seemed to be a fairly successful tactic.

I'd cleared the deck of ceiling panels and hung up the hammock that day to enjoy the breezy sunshine. Chris laid down and I pulled one of the plastic flowers off the feeder to see if I could entice hummers closer. I placed it on his shoulder and before I even let go a young hummer buzzed in, tried to feed, and perched on his shoulder almost long enough for me to grab my camera and take a photo. There were so many of them perching everywhere. They never came back to Chris's shoulder, but they perched all around him on the hammock. We had nachos for lunch outside on the deck and afterwards Chris took down the second feeder to try to feed the little peeping one on the ground. It wasn't interested, so he went back onto the porch and held out the feeder underneath where it usually hangs. Amazingly, hummers came and fed there, right in front of him. I tried it too--it was pretty cool (see photos). Once I had one start to feed when I was holding it near my feel and stay with it as I raised it up to eye level. The original feeder (on the left if facing the porch) was the clear favorite; the second feeder, which I'd put up on the previous trip, didn't get nearly as much attention, but seemed to have its own resident male defending it. The buzz was intense when they came through to feed; we counted 13 at one feeder that afternoon.

The cutting went smoothly. I'd realized that some of the boards I'd cut earlier in the week were cut with the bevel side pointing in the wrong direction (a problem of not picturing the bottom of the board being the side that is viewed from below once it's on the ceiling) and after much consternation and a lot of shuffling I gave up on the idea of cutting the bevel altogether. It went much better after that. In the afternoon I continued prepping the cabin floors for paint by mopping them with a kitchen mop. For the first three cabins I hauled water in a bucket from the river (about two buckets each), shifting the furniture from side to side to access the whole floor. I don't think they've ever been so clean and it was fairly satisfying work, although I could have used several more buckets each to get them really clean. In my cabin I hauled water from the creek, but with my bed fully clothed I couldn't do the whole floor. I left the bed in the middle of the floor and mopped around it, leaving a bucket of fresh water and the mop on the porch for the next day. That night we played gin in front of the wood stove before bed.

Low tide

Chris and hummers

Nigel helping Chris play gin

Day 9

Saturday morning we went for a walk at low tide upriver, then put a ceiling panel up just to see how difficult it was going to be. With two people and two ladders it went acceptably well, especially when Chris used one of the poles with the flat board on the end to hold up the panel while I pounded the tongue into the groove. Nails in each end and in the middle of the board seemed to work. We installed one 12' board in the back (it took two tries to pick the one that was the right length), then tried to put the other side in. It was several inches too long (I must have grabbed the wrong one again, or else my calculations were off) and I wasn't inspired enough to continue. I bopped around the place cleaning up, hauling some items from the cabins to the lodge, locking up, sweeping the outhouses, and mopping the rest of my cabin floor. (I knew I had a few sets of guests coming so I wanted to get ready.) Chris and I also continued clearing trails, he with the machete and me following with clippers. We cleared the path between Harbor Seal/Murrelet Cabin and Hermit Thrush Cabin and he cleared the path to the first outhouse. After that we finished cleaning up the lodge and packed our gear down to the water to head back to town. Two good friends were leaving town the next day, so we headed back in the early afternoon to catch their going away party. The ride back was wonderfully smooth for the most part, overcast and relatively calm. We passed more whales as we left Snettisham.

PBR, the choice for underage drinkers