Icewind's Ramblings

It has been hard to find time to post lately as many things are happening right now so finding time to sit and let the writing flow has been hard for me.   Not writers block by any means but I just haven’t felt like putting words to paper or in the digital age we live in type or text to some machine. I traveled to a couple of villages last week and seeing them in an unfrozen state with children playing and jumping off the bridges into the water (freezing cold to many of us) and swimming in the river enjoying life in a much simpler way than many in the modern cities. I enjoy my time in the villages and talking with the people and children who always seem to come out to see me when I am there.   I do not know if it is because a ‘stranger’ is in town or they are curious to this dude with Hawaiian shirts and baseball cap riding around on a 4 wheeler.   They come out and want to ride or see if I have anything for them, like kids all over the world have done in my travels. ...

It’s that time again for the annual trek down to the mouth of the Kenai River in Soldotna to fill freezers with nice red salmon for next winter.   It is called the personal subsistence fishery or as Alaskan’s call it . . . Dipnetting. This year we have had a run of reds of biblical proportions with last weekend’s one day sonar count of fish passing the weir 19 miles up river at 230,600 fish in a single day.   The previous biggest one-day total was 218,000 salmon, back on July 21, 1987, according to a newly revised figure from Fish and Game.   The state began compiling its database on Kenai salmon counts in 1978.   The last several years we have been lucky to get over 100,000 fish in a single day. What the Fish and Game try to manage to ensure enough sockeye salmon eggs get spawned into the river for future returning fish is roughly 700,000 to 1,400,000 sockeyes.   The Department is projecting a run size in excess of 2.3 million late-run Kenai River sockeye...