If you can't tie a knot...tie a lot.

Its been brutally cold here at Mile14. I ran into my friend Pat Cowan who owns the golf course yesterday and he and I were both mooning over the situation, spring is waaaaay late. Only a few years ago I took a boat ride down to mile 8 and back on the last day of April....and....well it did cost me prop, I kinda 'shined' one up as we say in the business. But I did it. Not this year, in fact just today I finally had open water at Fall-in-Hole for one of my favorite things, marine salvage. Here's a pic of fall-in-hole on Thursday and then how it looked a few hours ago today, Sunday.

The last 4 days its been windy and no warmer than 45 degrees and its just been killing me to not be out on the river working and horsing around.  So today I piled on the gore-tex, grabbed the 44 and jet-dog and we're off.  Theres so little running water that the ice shelves are huge and I've never seen it before where they drop right off to deep water making it a bit dangerous. Usually the sun warms the rocks and it kind of peels the ice back, this year its just weird. But we have just enough open water that I'm on the look out and spotting something shiny in the river I head for this...

I get closer and walla...what a great find for my first of 2013 season, a nice danforth anchor wrapped up in an unusable landing net. For me this is the salvagers equivalent of hooking a King Salmon on your first cast. It's a flat out, super duper, moe-joe driven message...we're gonna have a great year.

So then me and Jet-dog get to sizing up the situation, mmmmm.....kinda odd. How do you lose your anchor and your landing net all at the same time??  Well, neither of us is a psychic medium but I'd bet you dollars to donuts it went something like this:   A young couple is out for silver fishing....

He : OK honey throw it out right there.
He: holy @%&&*#$ we're floating free, the @#%&$% knot must have come untied or the line broke...
He: oh wow...listen honey I gotta drive the boat, I'll get us back to where I think we were and you feel
     around on the bottom with this net and maybe we can snag it.
She: Oh! its stuck ....I've got something.....
He: @%&*$ why in the ^%$# did you let go of the net ????
She: but honey the boat was moving and....and .....it was too @#%$ heavy...
He: well congratulation's, that anchor cost 65 bucks and the net 45.00
She: (thinking) its gonna cost you a lot more than that you #$%&^
She: maybe we can snag it with one of your fishing poles...
He: they're called rods, ya know, a pole is what you buy at the lumber yard.
She: oh....honey I forgot....maybe we just ougta go home....

Now I don't know how I know that, intuition I guess. It might be a little bit like the terminology I've heard at the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game. Honest now, they have and acronym they use, 'S.W.A.G.' = simple wild ass guess. But then again, I'm a riverman and know these things....and... actually MP helped solve the mystery and that's no 's.w.a.g'....thanks MP, Jet, Kenai River, Fall-in-hole for another collaboration.

And heres's the time lapse picnic table view of the ol Kenai. I know you've endured an awful lot of icey pictures lately when reading my blog. Sorry if it gets a bit old, that makes about 200 of us. Thanks  for reading.