Getting Settled

Well, we've been in Alaska for a bit over a week now, and we're still getting our bearings! The strangest thing is the sun not going down until after 11:00 pm, so it never really gets dark before the sun is coming up again. It's been difficult for the kids to adjust because they don't want to get in bed when the sun is shining in the windows!

Levi and I have been working a lot getting the boats ready for the season. This means everything from mending nets, to welding, to framing, to plumbing, to cleaning, to painting, to siphoning old fuel from last season, and on and on. We thought Mehari was a lot of work! These fishing boats are MUCH larger, and have way more systems than we have on our little sailboat. 

The main boat we'll be fishing on, called 'Stardust', is 58', sleeps 10 and has a 550hp diesel motor (Mehari has 2 motors that total only 36hp!!) 

It also has a sea water chiller, for keeping the salmon we catch and store in the fish hold down to 33 degrees (chilled seawater.......fascinating) and two separate diesel generators as well. It has an engine room as big as the saloon on our boat, and it's nice to be able to walk around everything instead of trying to turn a wrench.....crammed into a "phone booth". The boat also has 1/4 mile long fish net that we use which weighs over 5000 pounds.....without fish! So, as you can imagine, everything on the boat is BIG!

Two large piles of fish nets to mend. 

The "fish hold" is below decks and can hold about 60,000 pounds of fish and we hope to fill it as often as possible! Well see. We're still about two weeks from fishing, and everything is totally new for us. If we get our projects finished, we hope to go out for some practice 'sets' before the official opening of the season so we can at least LOOK like we know what we're doing. 

Rachel and the kids have been settling in as well. The have been into Homer a few times, poking around town and are already set up with a library card and have been there a couple of times. It's a great way to have a free outing and the kids like getting a new stash of books for home. Emma is into craft books and readers, Lily has just started getting into readers, Zoe likes picture books, and Miles is happy with any books with cars. Maggie if course, just gets a pile and devours them quickly. She's just happy for some more variety than the books that get passed between cruisers.