Day 12: July 2, 2009

We altered our schedule a bit today and slept an extra hour (until 8am), and we awoke to French toast for breakfast.  (Mike, the cook, made it with bread he made onboard, and it was excellent.  We realize, however, that details like these might change your perceptions of our voyage!)  After breakfast, we sailed out of Carry Inlet and headed for Big Bay, which is on the west side of Shuyak Island.  The voyage around the northern edge of the island took about four hours, though we did stop for an hour to do a bit of fishing.  We brought up four more large halibut, so there will be plenty of fresh fish for the next three days.

We arrived in Big Bay by mid-afternoon and went right to work on a nearby beach.  This particular beach was almost a "double" beach -- it faced Big Bay on one side and the Shelikof Strait on the other; Mount Douglas and Fourpeaked Mountain rose in the distance across the strait.  (The Shelikof is named for Grigorii Shelikhov, who in 1784 became the first Russian to defeat the native Alutiiq people.)  Last year's ITN crew cleaned the same beach about a year ago, but it was again littered with debris.  We worked for four hours and collected more plastics and fishing gear, but this particular location had four large sections of netting, webbing, and fishing line that were caught in massive pieces of driftwood.  A team of three of us removed one of the sections, but we saved the other three for tomorrow when we can come back with a reciprocating saw.  It's difficult to cut through the webbing and hawser, and the hawser itself is quite heavy: just a four-foot section weighed between 10 and 15 pounds.  Tangled in the same collection of line was a section of high-seas drift netting, which has been outlawed by a consortium of Pacific Rim nations, including the United States.  Andy took a photo of the precise location and tagged the photo with latitude/longitude coordinates in order to report it to the Marine Conservation Alliance Foundation.  

At about 6pm, we returned to the ship for dinner.  We were joined by the Shuyak State Park rangers, and we shared an excellent chicken dinner.  For dessert -- and Gus's birthday! -- Mike made a delicious chocolate cake.  Gus opened a birthday present from home, and we're all jealous of his custom-made t-shirt.  After dinner, we loaded the skiffs and followed the rangers back to the ranger station.  The station itself was spectacular; Ranger Kevin Murphy, who led our efforts at Abercrombie State Park, custom built the station over a three-year period during the late 1990s.  He and his crew used only timber cut from the site, and you can see in today's photos just how nice it is.  It's also the epitome of a ``green'' building.  The rangers use only  wind and solar power, their water is collected in a cistern from rainwater runoff, and they get hot water by heating a five-gallon container on the wood stove.  (For a high-efficiency shower, they connect a hose and valve to the bucket.)  It hardly seemed like hard living, though, with a banya out back and world-class views out the front door.  

We left the ranger station in the skiffs and cruised to the base of Mountain 508, which is named for its elevation (in feet).  The trail to the summit was narrow and steep, but we made quick work of the hike.  Our reward was a gorgeous sweeping vista of Big Bay and the Shelikof, and most of us took photos from the top.  We traveled back down the mountain and returned in the skiffs to the Island C, where we cleaned up for an hour and then turned in for the night.  Click below for today's photos.

http://tinyurl.com/m2rxsz