5/27/07
I'm a fishing guide, not a carpenter.
This fact was excruciatingly obvious today.
We spent the morning assembling and erecting our communal eating/ relaxing quarters. A Yurt to be exact, or in this case, a large round tent with a clear plexiglass nipple on top. An engineering degree would be recommending for the construction of this edifice and since all we have are fishing guides...well you get the picture. The wind was blowing a steady twenty miles per hour which didn't help us while trying to erect our frame. This process required a stepladder set atop a picknick table with Paul sliding fifteen foot 2X4s into small slots above his head. The other ends of these 2X4s got screwed into different ten foot 2X4s that were standing strait up on brackets. The theory here is that once you get enough wood applying opposite pressure, it creates structural stability. Until that stability is created you simply have lots of heavy beams placed precariously at high alititudes. I was the lucky one and took a falling beam in the shoulder. It really could have been worse, it could have been five inches to the left and bludgeoned my noggin. The wind also made stretching the rubberized canvas a very special experience.
I spent the afternoon building a table. One might question why it takes a person an entire afternoon to build one small table. Firstly, as I said I am fishing guide not a carpenter, second, you must consider the source materials. In this case wood that has been left to sit on the ground uncovered for an entire winter through sixty below temperatures and then thaw into the mud. In case you're wondering this causes plywood to curve like a question mark. Thirdly I was building this table into a round wall with nothing but a skillsaw to make my cuts. Given the circumstances I think I did allright.
the front door of the yurt.
the table I spent all afternoon building
5/28/07
A break in the weather...and my luck.
Woke today to a strange sound. Actually it was the absence of a particular sound that has been constant recently. There was no pattering on the roof this morning, just scattered clouds and a bright object that looked suspiciously like the sun.
After breakfast we began working on the new guide housing. This year we have been moved up the hill, a solid three hundred yards from where the clients sleep. This may have had something to do with our consistent evening urinations out the doors of our weatherports, or perhaps our drunken bets on who could do the best Survivor impression at three am(Eye of the Tiger for those who don't follow classic 80's).
Around ten we get a call that the boss is on his way from town with the new boat. The water has come up and the thinks he can make it through the braids, but just to be sure he sends a team of us down river to dig out the shallowest channels with shovels and rakes. If you've never stood there scratching at the river bottom with a garden rake trying to divert the flow, you've never experienced true futility. The new boat for which we are preparing is a monstrosity. A twenty eight foot dual 350 inboard jet with a dropgate on the front. That's right baby, we got a landing craft. Just in case we want to storm some beaches, or, in actuality, carry seven thousand pounds up braids less than eight inches deep. At three thirty we can hear the roar of the monster raging upriver. Chris barrels into the boat slough and drops the gate carrying all the supplies I have been missing, plus all the beer I left in town. He's like an short, balding, overweight fairy***mother in neoprene waders drivng a V hull aluminum chariot from hell.
In the evening, I skip out on dishes and sneak away to fish for an hour. The weather is perfect, cool with scattered clouds and hardly a breath of wind. I hook four fish and land one in an hour, including one absolute hog (twenty seven plus) that I jump and lose. Trying to ignore the incessent babbling of my temporary roommate (*** I can't wait for those weatherports to be finished) I reflect on a day that is appreciated for being truly maginificent, we got the boat to camp, we got our houses halfway built and I even got to fish. It doesn't get much better.
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