Wader Time

When I arrived in Nash Harbor, I noticed the immense beauty that surrounded the place. Since I have been here I have hiked, fished, listened to lectures, set fish traps, eaten, read text for homework, slept, sung songs in the tent, fantasized about the arrival of Martin, caught fish, not caught fish, drank homemade mocha, and steamed. When I first arrived in the village of Mekoryuk, I found out that my bottle of shampoo had exploded inside of my bag, so I spent a good time wiping it out, and cleaning my stuff off. An extremely oceanic boat ride followed, during which I fell asleep more than once . Today, right before we went out to check the fish traps, we all got dressed in our “neck” waders. Posing for one final picture, I finished tying my water shoes and headed out the class tent door. Noticing the rest of the group about 500 feet ahead, I ran into the water and follow my “neck” wader-wearing cohorts, thinking it’d be faster than walking on land. As my legs submersed in the chilling water, the waders scrunched up around my legs as the water transfered its pressure. The waders, a refrigerator, with water as its freon. I noticed the blood freezing in my veins, as circulation slowly ceased in my legs. I slowly walked out of the water, following Douglas. Douglas started running ahead, and I did the same, feeling the rushing feeling of life flowing back into my legs. As we crossed a small stream filled with natural gas, we arrived at our final destination. Dispersing about, everyone pulled their fish trap out of the water to check the amount of fish trapped within. To my dismay, my trap contained no fish, and neither did about half of the other peoples. Two traps contained 1 fish, which we had to identify. The identification process ended up taking about 30 minutes for one fish, which ended up being a plain old Dolly Varden. The other fish was a blackfish, so it was easy identifiable. After about 40 minutes of identifying the only two fish caught out of the 11 fish traps that we had set, the group departed. Ben, T.J. and I stayed behind, fishing. I am proud to declare myself as being the first student to have caught a fish thus far(not the first fish caught, I have to give Ben© that achievement). After about 30 minutes of fishing once the group had departed, Ben declared we should leave, besides my hands were dead cold. Once we had arrived back at the camp, I took off the Size Large Hip Waders that I had been wearing the whole time, and basically stuck my hands into the stove. –Dimitri

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Summer Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.