Dad's Visit: Mid-July 2010

Dad came up in mid July to help with Coal while Paul and I had overlapping field work.

When I got back into town from white-fronted goose banding, dad, Coal, and I headed down to the Kenai River and stayed at my highschool friend, Dave Richardson's, newly acquired 'Serenity Lodge' on Mackey Lake, just outside Soldotna. Dave was at work up on the slope, but his wife Katie and their daughters (below) were home and overwhelmed up with their hospitality. Super nice to see them.

The evening we arrived, Dad watched Coal while I dipnetted from shore on the rising tide, then the next day I got up at 4am to fish the morning tide from a boat with friends Bill and Suzy Larned.The red salmon were running hard and I ended up with 34 in just a few hours (combined with the previous days catch) - plenty for our family the year (the Alaska-resident family quota for us (3 people) was 45 fish).

After a rainy day of processing all those salmon (Dad was a good hand on the filet knife!), we headed down to Homer for a day of halibut fishing.

A few days after we returned from the Kenai, Paul came home from fieldwork and we took advantage of the only sunny day in a week-long string of rain, and headed down the west side of Cook Inlet to fish for silver salmon.

Dad and Paul caught a few on the Kustatan River.

Later I took dad on a short side-trip into Lake Clark Pass for some glacier viewing in my plane, while Coal and Paul scouted more fishing holes.

Lake Clark Pass and surrounding area.

After glaciers, we met Coal and Paul at our favorite hole on the McArthur River.
...but it was still too full of (non-biting) red salmon.
...beautiful spot though.

On one of dad's last days in town, we all headed down to the aviation museum to check out the cool planes.

Coal thought all those planes were pretty neat, but seemed happiest behind the stick of one of our cubs.He sure did enjoy his grandpa's visit. As did we. Thanks for all your help dad!