Juneau Report III

KeeWee and I had a bunch of errands to run yesterday, but we still managed to get in some fishing too. Started out down at the Alaska Marine Lines Barge freight terminal to make arrangements to barge my van back to Seattle. In reading the fine print on the paperwork, it says that if you deliver a vehicle to them to be shipped and it has more than 1/4 tank of gas, they will drain it down to 1/4 tank, keep the gas, and charge you for doing it! Talk about a license to steal!

From the barge terminal we drove down the road past the cruise ships towards Thane to take a picture of a cruise ship going up the Gastineau channel towards Juneau. Man, those are big!

From there we went back past the cruise ship docks and by now the cruise ships had started pouring tourists into the tourist end of Juneau. The sidewalks were almost shoulder-to-shoulder with people.

A couple of miles past the docks is the Macaulay Salmon Hatchery. The chum salmon run was now starting to show up along the beach in numbers, so we stopped and fished for a few hours. I wanted to pick up a couple of good sized chums for filleting and smoking when I get back home. I caught four, and had a couple of others on for a while. I kept one nice one about 16 pounds. I filleted it on the beach, and figured I'd skin it and de-bone it when I got back to the house.

After fishing we met up with Charlotte at the electric company office and walked out behind the power company equipment yard to see the eagles that hang around there. Sometimes there will be 40 or 50 of them there, but this time there was only one big one sitting in a tree watching us. Perhaps they too were gone fishing!

I left KeeWee with Charlotte so the two of them could go ride up the Mt. Roberts tram to see the view of the Juneau area from above. I headed back to the house to get the salmon fillets vacuum packed and frozen.

Today's project is to head out the road about 40 miles to Kowee creek to see if the pink salmon run there has increased, since a little rain will bring the fish into the river.