low wages, hard work and a difficult boss....

Yup, that about sums up my part of the deal for spring time here at Mile 14 of the world famous Kenai River. Yesterday we had a sunny wind free day so it was time to trim and burn the trees at the launch. People who know our place know how important these two trees are that sit out on a bit of a point upstream from and help protect the launch. The big alder and the fairly big willow that seems to come and go depending on how many moose and beavers find it are very important to keep the soil together at times of flood and high water.

When we bought the launch years ago we did a 'bank stabilization' project . At the time it was just gravel with little or no root growth to help keep the bank. So we filled and installed coconut logs and planted Berring sea hair grass and a thousand bucks worth of Felt Leaf Willows...every beavers favorite food.  Well those Willows weren't lasting long and at the time it made sense to protect the most important of them with chicken wire, which we did and of course it worked. Then a few years later Chris Fejes, Robbie Carol and Craig Lott convinced us that the best course of action with those destructive beavers was to simply execute them and my trapping career was started, we've held our own against them ever since...but...I never took off the chicken wire and it grew into the cambrian layer of the trees and got to chocking them off.

So yesterday on the nicest day of the year I sweated and snipped and pulled and grunted those two trees away from their chain like prisons. One thing that did grow on the project real nice is all the rose hip thistle  bushes that I seemed to always end up sitting in...but, I offset the unpleasantness of that by listening to airborne Al on KSRM radio's call in show ' Sound Off'...I phrase for this we coined back in my construction days is " that's ugly Howard"....But you know me, determination is one of the keys to the modest success I've enjoyed in life. So with 7 hours into it and my back starting to set up I had all the wire off , the alder tree pruned of all the dead and soon to die limbs and burned in a huge fire in the middle of the parking lot.

I got to thinking about that wire and them pesky ole Beavers as I enjoyed a day ending Heineken. About that same era 20 years ago we realized those ambitious glorified rats were eating and falling the huge Cottonwoods that the Eagles love to sit in down on Stewart's Island. So MP and I took chicken wire down and saved two of them one of which has an eagle nest in it today. I took this picture from the boat launch of one of our survivors and hey buddy.... I promise I'll get down there and make sure we're not choking you to death like were our own trees.

And when I got done raking all the twigs and grass and jetsam and even some flotsam I decided this might just be the best place to memorialize and leave for good ol J.D. Jet-dog. After all this WAS her place. So I took advantage of the pole that was placed there when me and MPeasy won an ' Eagle Award ' for our habitat reconstruction efforts back in 1996.  I never did care about that award Jet but I sure as hell cared about you................

So when ever I get in a funk thinking about the future of this wonderful place or reminiscing about ol J.D. Jet-dog I just go to the river...it works every time. How could you not shake them blues with scenery and treasure like this ???? My arduous research has proven that the Vibrax spinner is by far the most popular lure for silvers and pinks. For some reason the 2014 season coughed up a lot red but my favorite has always been the chartreuse or maybe the tiger stripe...and ya know the bleeding blue is pretty good...and then the gold on pink and can do magic and well....the old stand by, straight silver is good...with a piece of yarn on it and......man I need to go fishin....