March Madness

I played a little round ball as a kid and at one time I might have been the L.A. Lakers biggest fan.  But I'm over all that now and like most of America and am absolutely taken by the NCAA tournament. It has to be the coolest showcase for amateur sports in the country. So every year I put my brackets together and some years it good, some years it's bad.... I had a coach who used to say, " you win some, you lose some and some you never should have dressed out for. Well this year I'm a crushing them, here's a pic of my brackets, I have 12 of the 'sweet 16'...

I'm guy who runs his life with his heart so sometimes I pick teams based on other reasons that if I think they'll win. Like Duke, ever since Anchorages Trajan Langdon took them to the Championships I've picking them for the final four...well after this years and last years performance I'm semi done with that deal. And how about Iowa State, that game against North Carolina was about as thrilling as it gets. The Cyclones always have a great program and I have them to go to the final 4, I guess we'll see. I guess I'm kind of proud of myself here at Mile 14, guess I do recreation pretty darn well.

Speaking of March Madness, congratulations to this guy who just won the annual Homer Winter King Salmon Derby.

Now I don't begrudge anybody harvesting a few salmon, lord knows I've executed a few of them....but does it seem odd to anybody besides me that while we're experiencing a time of low abundance of King Salmon all over south central and western Alaska these guys are having a derby for them ???? Two hundred and two, that's right 202 of them were killed on Saturday. This fishery is fairly new and growing, it's done 365 days a year and the yearly derby harvests 202 in one day, does that make sense to anybody ???? Of course people will tell you that they're 'feeder' kings and even our local newspaper outdoor writer recently said that they are ' mostly' from Canada. Mmmmmm, well in Jeff's world that miserably fails the common sense test.  Like our local Kings would swim thousands of mile out to sea and ignore all the local food forage that these ' Canadian' Kings seem to be finding. I doubt it. So.....mmm.....ahhh....their Kings come to Alaska and Alaska Kings go to Canada, problem solved.....hows about we'll quit catching yours if you quit catching ours. AND theres another problem, they call this a 'Winter King' Derby. It's not winter at all, it's now officially spring and we're only 4 or 5 weeks away from when King salmon begin to enter the local streams and rivers of this part of Alaska. So if any of you might agree with me feel free to forward this blog on to the Dept. of Fish and Game so they'll have some more common sense to ignore.  Yikes. I feel better now though having spit that one out.... I could go on, but I won't. Done. Finished.

The big news here is the weather. When I opened the paper this morning the forecast had 5 of these babies lined up like ducks in a row. In fact it looked just like the forecast for Mazatlán with just a few, well quite a few degrees of difference.  It's getting up to 40 in the afternoons and the river is running...I guess what I'm saying is that it's just gorgeous here at Mile 14. The other day we had a nice sauna down at the river, then went for a walk where you come across scenes like this...now that's something you don't see every day....Oh, my final four.  Florida, Arizona, Iowa Sate, Louisville...and the winner is Louisville again.