This past Friday, Skippy and I were sent across Kachemak Bay by The Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, on assignment. Our task was to photograph and video the 4th grade class from West Homer Elementary as they explored the tide pools of Peterson Bay during a -3.5′ tide (that’s pretty low).

We rode over on a water taxi with Mike Allen, a CACS board member and also, since this a small town, a friend. We spent the first couple of hours carefully making our way around the slippery rocks, shooting photos and video, while listening to the guides talk about what was being found. Take a look:

A sunflower star

A Christmas sea anemone

Sea stars

An Ochre sea star

A nudibranch

How about this classroom, huh?

Another nudibranch

Barnicles and chitons

Even a baby octopus!

Afterwards, we hiked back to the field station where the kids had lunch, and we took a tour with Mike.

Peterson Bay Field Station

The kids reconvened for a final tally of creatures and a short lesson. Then, it was time for clean up. At Mike’s suggestion, we vacated the station and went for a hike on a trail that looped around to a lake and back.

Currently, we’re getting about 15 hours of sunlight a day. However, it is still only hitting the mid-40′s in temperature. In places where there are a lot of trees, that means there is still a good deal of snow.

Roughly half of our journey to the lake involved stepping though knee-deep or deeper snow. This snow was anxious to melt, so we punched through with every step, filling knee-high boots with ice, making the worst sno-cones ever. After a grueling 1.5 miles, we reached the lake. It was pretty. It was still mostly covered in ice.

Lost and Found Lake

On the way back, we hit a bare spot on top of a ridge, and it started raining. Also, the sun was shining. Across the next ridge, it looked like it was snowing. Alaska!

The view from up here.

We returned to the field station in time to help load up the dock with gear, and then hopped on board the Rainbow Connection for our ride back to Homer.

This and the next are going to be picture heavy posts, to prove the thesis of my previous post. I had to wait to display more photos from the halibut tagging trip, as some had yet to be published in the newspaper. Three of them were put on the front page.

So, here are more from our day-long fishing excursion:

We were fishing at 160′ with 3 pound weights to sink the hook and bait, so it took a good 5 minutes of reeling to bring in a fish (or usually, the bait with a chunk missing or an empty hook). There were fewer smiles near the end of the day, so this was definitely a morning shot.

This is a tagged halibut. As of Saturday, if you go fishing and buy a derby ticket, and catch a tagged fish, you win a prize!

I think this is a sculpin, or maybe an irish lord fish. Either way, it wasn’t what we were hoping to pull up.

As requested, here is the best picture I could get of the mountain goats. I only took one lens, a 24mm, so unless I had jumped in the water and hiked up the bluff, this is as good as it could get. Can you make them out?

Here they are, Tenzin, cropped in close. They’re still just whitish blurs. Next time I’ll bring along a bigger lens.

We now have 2 puppies. We still have Cub the giant Great Pyrenees puppy, and now we have a little Corgi puppy named Sasha. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

We currently have 8 dogs in the house. This is down from the high of 10 just a few short hours ago. If you haven’t heard, we took over Tails by the Bay for the winter, and get to live in a nice house and take care of dogs all day. Well, Skippy gets to take care of dogs all day. I still have to work in town, but the tech support business is picking up, so I’ll be doing less of the 7am-5:30pm gig and more of the open schedule gig.

The house has two floors. The main floor has the kitchen, living room, bathroom, and our bedroom. That’s the dog’s floor. Upstairs has a closet, a sitting room/office, and a small hallway that overlooks the kitchen on one side and the living room on the other. That’s the cat’s floor.

Jacques and Cousteau have adapted surprisingly well to their new living situation. They occasionally wander down to the main level and thread themselves through the many many dog legs between the stairwell and the kitchen, where they greet us and remind us to feed them. Most of the time, however, they just sit upstairs in their cuddle cups, snoozing in the amazing amount of warmth generated by the wood stove. They sometimes don’t even muster the energy to look over at the door as I come through to work at my computer.

We will sometime hear them going nuts, running around and attacking their scratching post. Today, we watched as Cousteau flung himself off the edge of the loft and onto the big window frame just below it. And then he jumped back up.

During the day, Skippy and I take turns escaping upstairs to work on the computer. With a house full of dogs, including a 4-month old Great Pyrenees puppy (who gets into everything), the computer/kitty room has become a Fortress of Solitude for us.

We’ve been here just over a week.

Here are some of the dogs we’ve been taking care of:

Tia

Jak

Cub (the GP puppy)

Bubba (Cub’s older, smaller brother)

Kayla (Ms. Sneaks Into The Bedroom For Naps)

Belle, the droopy dog

I always enjoy my visits to the local veterinary clinic. Especially if I’m there doing tech work, and not because our dog shook hands with a porcupine using her face. One week it’s puppies, the next an eagle that was found flopping around on the beach with a broken wing. This week, it was an owl.

A Northern Hawk Owl, to be exact.

It had apparently fared the worse in a contest with a large window. The day before, it was wobbly and couldn’t do much at all, but when I saw it, it had recovered sufficiently enough to sulk in its cage and soundly ignore the pieces of chicken breast and baby hamsters (don’t ask) that were occasionally pushed towards it.

It still couldn’t fly, and seemed to want to protect its left side. It flopped around the room for a minute, then settled in to stare at us staring at it.

It wasn’t very big, especially since everything in Alaska seems to default to Supersized.

Owlbert (no, I didn’t name it that, the vet tech and the doctor did) made its first flight since the accident, though not with its wings, when it took an airplane up to Anchorage to finish out its rehabilitation with wild bird experts on Saturday.

Update 11/11/09: I’ve been informed that the owl is recovering nicely, and is gladly eating whatever tiny and squirming food is placed in its cage.