Things have been bustling here at FRI (that's the Fisheries Research Institute) since I last posted. While the fishing season was still going on, we had all sorts of bigwigs in the fishing industry come to visit, including Alaska's Director of Commercial Fisheries and some execs of one of Bristol Bay's salmon canneries. Now that the fish have mostly moved inland and the fishing season has drawn to a close, we haven't had as many visitors. But that isn't to say that we haven't been busy.
The lake here is bordered in places by impressive mountains. On an off day, we got the chance to climb one of them. It was one of the steeper hikes I've done:
But the view at the top was pretty incredible.
A Fourth of July tradition here is for all the guys to get haircuts -- mohawks, actually. I figured Tanner had already set a precedent and I wasn't about to be left out of this hallowed tradition, so I gamely bared my head for the razor. As one observer noted, what emerged was less reminiscent of a mohawk than an indie rocker hairdo. (Don't worry, we fixed it later.) I was a little perplexed by my new identity, though.
A few days later, I had the pleasure of meeting up with fellow skiers James Crimp (Bowdoin) and Neil Liotta (MSU). James's family is from Anchorage but comes to Dillingham every summer to fish commercially. Though it's difficult and exhausting work (they fish with the tides, so they have to be on call around the clock), his whole family is involved in the process, which seems incrediblyrewarding. I very nearly got to rollerski with them, too, but plans changed and that didn't work out.
Ever since my arrival here, the amount I eat has attracted some attention. It's not just me, though: there's another undergrad here whose extensive appetite had also raised some eyebrows. To settle the matter of appetite once and for all, the grad students here arranged an eating contest: pounds of pasta (with red sauce) in an hour. After my experience finishing a bucket of pasta at Senior Nationals, I couldn't refuse the challenge, and trained extra hard that day to work up my appetite. In the end, I was able to eat 5.26 pounds in the allotted hour. Alas, my opponent was strong and beat me by nearly a pound. Yet we were both dwarfed by the legendary Cookie Jarvis, a competitive eating champion who holds the world pasta eating record of 6.67 pounds of linguini in ten minutes. I suppose I should stick to ski racing, then.
Now that the fish have moved out of the bay and into the inland lakes and streams where they will spawn, the work around here is shifting from run prediction to in-stream monitoring. There is a certain stream that we survey daily, counting live fish and collecting data on carcasses (sex, length, mode of death). Sometimes we would grab live ones too, just for fun:
That's all for now! Keep on bloggin'!
Chris
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