B & D's USA Hideout: Summer Re-cap

I’m going to start right off with bragging about how awesome my summer was. I spent June and half of July posing as a total Cali-hippy-dip-yogini-beachbum with all the perks. The best part was living a few blocks from my sister, Val and her husband, Rick. It was a blessing to have that time to get reacquainted with my only sibling again and really get to know my new bro-in-law. They both work a ton but we’d hang out in the evening and on weekends. We covered a lot of San Diego ground, including brewery tours, the San Diego County Fair, Cabrillo National Monument and just hanging at their piece of turf four blocks from the beach. Otherwise, I kept myself occupied by volunteering two days a week at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Reserve, biking, practicing yoga at IB Yoga everyday, boogie boarding and living the life of leisure at Bernardo Shores Adult RV Park.

On July 16th, I flew from San Diego to Sitka, Alaska to start yet another adventure in the Last Frontier. I worked for the Sitka Sound Science Center as Fisheries Technician collecting data for the Hatchery/Wild Chum Project. I lived on a cushy bay boat, Bear, with two crew members, Ashley and Aaryn, we called ourselves the Chum Wenches. We also had our Captain and bear guide, Brad, deck hand and assistant bear guide, Thierry, and our fabulous cook, Debbie. It was only a six week job but we worked our butts off. Everyday we’d take skiffs ashore and hike creeks and streams in central southeast Alaska. Our goal was to count live and dead Chum salmon as well as pick up the already spawned and/or deceased carcasses to scalp them and take their otoliths or “fish ear bones”. The otoliths tell us how old the fish is and whether or not it came from a hatchery or if it is a wild fish. The whole point of knowing whether the fish came from a hatchery is because they are not built with the hardy genes that wild fish are and ultimately will not be able to reproduce successfully eventually leading to low stocks and mixed gene fish.

We saw bears almost everyday, as well as whales, seals, sea otters and deer. One day we even saw a pack of wolves, that was a first for me. It was a really cool job because we lived on the ocean yet spent our days on land wading in freshwater streams. It was diverse, difficult, demanding but most definitely divine.

So enough about me, Brian worked most of the summer away but did take a trip home the last two weeks in August to visit with friends and family and take a required coast guard course at Mass Maritime. He also made another pit stop in Vegas with some high school buddies and then carried on to San Diego, which leads us to the present. The camper was supposed to be repaired during the six weeks we were both gone but we were delayed waiting on the part and spent the last week and half back at Bernardo. I wont get into the nitty gritty but it was a pain in the ass. As always, there were good and bad things to go with our situation. For one, we had more time with Val and Rick but now have less time to get up the coast, as Brian is going back to work in mid October. But we are on the road now as I type, heading north to Oxnard, CA. We are getting on a ferry tomorrow morning to take us the Channel Islands National Park. We are kicking off our first night on the road in style by bumming it in a Walmart parking lot. We’re really excited for things to come so stay tuned with B&D, Star and our Hideout as we take on the west coast!

Below are a few of my favorite Alaska pictures from the summer