More of the fishin!

On Friday, Tyler and I both had the day off. Since Thursday had provided such a bounty of fishy herring, we of course were spending the day pickling and canning the herring. Mid-way through the process, surrounded by fish and vinegar, a friend stopped by to ask if we wanted to hop on a buddy's charter boat and go trolling for salmon. We of course jumped on the opportunity of a virtually FREE boat ride around the bay, especially considering it was one of the warmest, calmest, nicest days we've seen in the year we've been in Seward! So, we quickly wrapped up the herring project and ran towards the harbor. 

While waiting for the boat to get ready to leave, we watched sea otter swimming around the docks eating kelp covered with the herring roe we'd seen deposited the day before. I managed to capture his quite adorable little tongue.  When the boat was finally ready, we headed out to fish. It was a little 6-person boat, and we had four lines in the water, but no fish bit! Salmon trolling is about the unluckiest type of fishing you can do in Seward, you're lucky if you fish the bay all day long and get one sea bright salmon. I think it's mostly just an excuse for the guys to go fish, smoke and drink beers on the bay, and it was quite the perfect day to be on the water. So calm and sunny!

We passed a pretty nifty little cave hole around the south end of Fox Island, which is right at the end of Resurrection Bay (the bay we live on). If you were to look at the other side of the boat, you would be met with nothing but deep, vast blue water--the Gulf of Alaska. As soon as you cross the line between the bay and the gulf, the waves suddenly become much bigger, and almost every fishing charter or sight seeing cruise ship that ventures out of the bay comes back with at least one sea-sick vomiter on board. We were lucky to have the water be as calm as it possibly could be. I even ended up with a sun burn! The sun set before we came back to Seward, so it was actually blue sky behind the mountain, but I snapped this shot from the boat. Our apartment is the brown 4-plex right in the middle of the picture, across from the RV campers, next to the bright blue house. Seward is about 8 streets wide before the town stops and Mt. Marathon, the big mountain behind us, begins, which is too steep to easily build on. Consequently, the town is long and skinny. If you kept going left in this picture, to the very end of the road, you would get to the SeaLife Center, where I work. If you go to the right, that will take you North, past Tyler's workplace and eventually towards Anchorage. Seward is quite literally the 'end of the road'. We have one 2-lane highway between us and Anchorage that takes about 3 hours to drive. They did road work on it about a week ago, so we couldn't leave Seward for 4 days, and couldn't get things like mail, either!  After a long day of pickling and fishing, we decided to head to a newly opened-for-the-season restaurant next to the docks for some fancy cocktails, something we don't do very often. I really wanted some cherries, so I asked the waitress for an Adult Shirley Temple. After the initial look of 'is this lady seriously crazy, or playing a joke', she decided I really was that crazy and put the request in to the bartender. Mmmm....sweet and tastey.