one fish, two fish

this past sunday, i had the kind of perfect day i daydream about when i'm staring out at rain on a saturday every other afternoon from my couch. p, his dad, and i took the boat out on north pass for halibut fishing. i mean seriously, look at this picture. it's got sea lions, a glacier, and a bald eagle for chrissakes. it's such an alaskan picture, it's almost kitsch. in fact, the humpback whale was too embarrassed to surface and picked a more original time to breach.

so as i'd never gone halibut fishing before, or fishing in the ocean at all, p was trying to teach me how to let my line out and feel the weights hit. i didn't seem to get the hang of it, he finally just sorta gave up and let me have at it, and i was imagining my poor herring either floating hopelessly 50 feet above the bottom or on the ground with 50 feet of line snagged up around it. cod and crabs were going crazy for p's and his dad's bait, and i joked that nobody liked mine. then, right on comedic timing cue, my rod jerked. the fish and i struggled for what seemed like ages (let me tell you, it was the hardest arm workout i've ever had... my guns are still sore), until finally, we saw that i'd caught a 45-50 lb. halibut from 350 feet!

p and his dad just kept snagging cod, which they kept releasing, and at the end, i hooked this scary looking sole. i am curious about food & wanted to eat everything i caught. we went to lincoln island to fillet the fish, and i learned how to cut up my first fish. so many firsts. a bald eagle couldn't wait for us to leave and besides, we were starving, so we called it a day after 4 hours and went home to do some beer battering.

halibut was definitely the best meat, and that's my final answer reg. the other two weren't so bad; in fact, cod was all i ever knew fish & chips being made of when i was growing up down south. the sole was kind of mushy but still alright, although next time i'll leave it in the ocean rather than try to get it on my plate.

sunshine cove

dive juneau

i tried scuba diving for the first time yesterday at tee harbor. p goes a couple times with his dad almost every weekend, so i was excited to learn and be able to go with them one of these days. they had some amazing footage of sea lions playing with them and the camera the other week, and lots of other great shots of nudebranchs and crabs. the classes at the scuba tank are filled, and they don't know when they're holding the next session, so p just took me out himself and showed me the basics. i took to it naturally & had a blast. we only went down 12 feet max, but we saw a crescent gunnel which let me pet it, and i found an ADF&G Dungeness Area A permit thingy from 2001.

for christmas/new years, we're thinking of taking a 3 week trip to bonaire. p already went this past march and made some local dive buddies, and during winter, you can dive the other side of the island where the sharks and fun things are.

smell the flowers

i bought a new digicam a week ago: a canon630, 8mp, large swivel LCD screen, red-eye reduction, & chock full of features. it sucked. the moment i opened the box and held it, it felt cheap. then last night, a black bear crossed the porch and was hanging out scratching its butt in the yard, so i grabbed my new toy to take pictures, and everything came out black. the powerful zoom was pointless. i tried it on auto, i tried screwing with the ISO and shutter speeds, but everything still came out too dark. so today i exchanged it for a casio exilim, 10mp, 2.6" LCD, 30fps movies. the ISO doesn't go as high so it's not as great with low-light photos, but everything else seems superior, and it was only $20 more. it has a ton of scene options (the best one possibly being a "Food" setting), and it creates different photo layouts like to make calendars or to put multiple snapshots in the same shot. i think this one's for keeps. next up: underwater housing for when i start scuba diving.

what happens in jamaica

doesn't happen at all - so they say - so i don't know how much i oughta divulge on here :o) it goes without saying that the trip was great. when all you wanted to do was relax, sacrifice your body to the sun gods, and try all the tropical drink concoctions they never seemed to run out of, then this was the ticket. if you wanted more athletic endeavors, they also provided all kinds of watersports, land tours, & off-site adventures. activity coordinators prowled the beach area immediately surrounding the central bar to aggressively persuade you into joining their games and contests. my favorite thing was trying the circus clinic. i was addicted to that flying trapeze. after learning the basic move, the knee hang and somersault, and getting that down on the first shot, they let me take a stab at the catch and release. i couldn't quite reach the bar on the way back though, but the attempt was a lot of fun, and i was the only tourist they allowed to even try it. i got some wicked bad bruises on the backs of my knees, but it was worth it.

so my sister and i are part chinese, and she definitely inherited more of that complexion, and i got the poor island peasant working in the fields all day skin tone. i got so dark in jamaica, & over there in the intense sunlight, i looked bronzey red and beautiful. back in alaska with our low hanging cloud cover, i just look like dark gray ash, ick.

i brought back some jamaican jerk marinade, hot sauce, and blue mountain coffee. yummy. if you're interested in getting jamaican products, Red Pepper Mall seems amazing. i haven't actually purchased anything from there yet, but i plan to.