It's a record run.....

of mosquito's, and I ain't kidding. Old time Alaskans have this kind of perverse view of their own toughness and it seems everything was  always worse ' back in the day'....you know, the winters were colder, the summers rainier, the hike to school longer...but EVERYONE agrees right now that the mosquito's are by far the worse anybody has ever ever seen them. Yikes, this pic was posted on facebook the other day.

When we ride the bikes you come across these clouds of them and you put your head down and hold your breath. Crazy. This morning as we were turning onto Marydale on our way home I heard MP let out a screech, we stopped the bikes and I picked a dandy out of her eyeball. Then this afternoon we found our way down to Beaver Creek to look at a property that she just sold. We pulled up in the driveway and the sky was moving with them. During a 5 minute inspection tour I got bit 3 times and I think I pulled a muscle in my bi-cep swatting at them. So....enough of that deal, we're off  to the Alaska Industrial Hardware store to arm ourselves for an offensive, we need some ordinance.

And boy were we lucky, this was the last one of these little babies they had. The look on that ladies face sold me. There she is just blissfully weeding her garden as her 'dyna trap' shields her from the hungry  swarm. The machine emits carbon dioxide which the bugs like and it has a black light that attracts them to a fan which blows them into mesh holding cell, so if you're the humane type you can release them somewhere else....maybe take em over and dump em by my neighbors house who's dog bit me. The next pic is my Dyna Trap up and running. The blue light is just mesmerising and it got it's first mosquito in about 3 minutes. Take that.

Our strategy is simple. We come and go through the garage which also acts as my music studio and jeffkingfishing.com world headquarters. We'll intercept them buggers (pardon the pun) by making a skirmish line at the door where they enter the house and in a few days we'll have a mosquito free environment, kind of like that shelter doom in Ray Bradberry's Illustrated Man. I should of gotten a pic of the end aisle display they had this store of Deet products and all varieties of mosquito defense, only in Alaska. I asked a guy if the electronic machine you wear on your belt works and he said that it did...but he applies Deep Woods Off as well, double glove-up kinda deal.  We grabbed another one of these nets for walking the Jet-dog.

We've had 10 days of the very best weather I can remember. Chris called from Nancy Lake and he had 82 degrees, we've been in the 70's everyday. But boy howdy, ya gotta be tough to break out the shorts, sandals and wife beaters. That's life in Alaska I think, you just gotta be tough....or crazy...or both.

The Kenai river is still on Catch and release emergency regulation and I suspect it will be the rest of June. If your charter is later in the month I'll be calling soon. But , the Dept. of  Fish and Game is on top of things. It'd be easy to say they obviously don't have anything to do with managing  mosquito's...but I won't do that...or did I ??? Here's a picture of the weir they installed on Stewart's Island below our house.....mmmmm.... well, it's sitting there high and dry but it's supposed to channel the fish so they can count them. I asked an ADF+G guy about why. Why so big, why there, why???? He said they had to "cover all their bases". Well, that makes perfect sense because there sure ain't going to be any salmon walk around it or jump over it.