Good data, bad run — Kenai sonar technology improves, documents paltry return of kings

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Data from the DIDSON sonar technology used to count king salmon in the Kenai River is displayed in videolike imagery onscreen, allowing biologists to count fish, measure them and observe their behavior. This image shows several fish swimming past the DIDSON king sonar site at mile 8.6 of the Kenai River.

Redoubt Reporter

The Kenai River sonar program tasked with counting king salmon is an evolving science not unlike the Kenai River itself, with twists, turns, snags and murkiness along the way to better clarity. The good news is that, with continued biological research, data analysis and the implementation of improved technology, sonar scientists with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game are confident they now have the best data ever produced on Kenai River king salmon abundance. The bad news, however, is the new-and-improved data shows that chinook abundance is and has been lower than previously thought.

The estimate of late-run kings coming into the river — 9,082 as of July 26 — is so far below the minimum escapement goal of 17,800 fish that fishery managers decided to enact drastic, unprecedented measures as of July 19. Those

A seal is seen passing the sonar beam.

measures are closing the river to all sportfishing for kings, banning retention of kings in the dip-net fishery, and closing down the commercial set-net fishery for sockeye along the east side of Cook Inlet to prevent Kenai- and Kasilof-bound kings from getting caught in the gillnets targeting the large run of sockeyes which also is heading into the rivers.

The management decisions spawned from the king-return estimate, shaping up to be the worst return on record, are having a disastrous effect locally, particularly economically — to tackle shops, outfitters and other fishing-related merchants, to sportfishing guides who would be taking clients to fish for kings in July, to other businesses that would get a boost from that tourism, and to the set-netters who have lost their chance at earning their livelihood this summer. With so many repercussions from the shutdown of both sportfishing for kings and east side set netting for sockeye, it’s little wonder people are voicing concerns about the efficacy of the management decisions and the validity of the sonar numbers on which they are based.

But sonar scientists firmly support the accuracy of the counts produced with the new, advanced technology in use at the king sonar site. Just because there has been a change in the king sonar program this year doesn’t mean the run estimate is flawed, said Steve Fleischman, a fishery scientist who analyzes the sonar data.

“I think there’s this impression out there that we’re kind of running by the seat of our pants, when in fact we know far more than we ever did before. We have far more information about what’s really going on out there. And it gets better every day because we learn more and more as we collect more data and as we make comparisons. The unfortunate part is that this is all happening during a downturn in the stock,” Fleischman said. “You could look at both sides of the coin there, it’s a good thing that we’re getting very good information at this point, because now is a very important time to have good information. We don’t want to be making the wrong decisions at this point. We don’t want to be incorrectly liberalizing or allowing the fishery to continue when the runs are very small like this.”

Bear cub saved from river — Fisherman pushes cub out of eddy, back to mama

By Joseph Robertia

Photo by Joseph Robertia, Redoubt Reporter. A brown bear sow fishes for salmon on the upper Kenai River. This weekend, a sow with two cubs nearly lost one of her offspring in a whirlpool in the upper river, but Mike Polocz, of Soldotna, intervened to save the young bear’s life.

Redoubt Reporter

Mike Polocz, of Soldotna, was hoping to commune with nature when he made the decision to float the upper Kenai River last weekend. He never expected his commune to be such an intense experience.

“I’ve been on many fishing and hunting trips in my life and I’ve never experienced anything like this,” he said.

Polocz, owner of Alaska H20s Pros, was hoping for a fun weekend away from work, but with the bag limit for sockeye salmon being liberalized to double the normal harvest, he wasn’t interested in being among the big crowds of combat fishermen that had come to catch them. He wanted to do something a little less stressful and more serene, so he decided to target trout with his son and a family friend.

“We had put in at Jim’s Landing, and had just gotten through the final set of rapids when we noticed a brown bear sow and her cubs fishing for reds,” Polocz said. “As we got a closer look, though, one of the cubs wasn’t fishing. It was stuck in a whirlpool and drowning.”

Time flies when you’re having bunions

By Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter

Happy birthday to the Redoubt Reporter, which this week celebrates the anniversary of its inaugural printing — the first Wednesday in August 2008. With this edition, the paper turns the big 0-4. (Oy, those measles and tetanus immunizations.) In start-up business years, that’s about 60. (Oy, those bunions and acid-reflux episodes.)

I sometimes wonder, in the spirit of introspective naval-gazing that birthdays and anniversaries tend to inspire, where has the time gone? I’m afraid to know the answer. I suspect a distressingly large percentage has gone to tasks I never anticipating spending much time on:

• Paperwork.
• Compiling calendars, formatting photos, considering ways to shave a few words/bucks off classified ads and re-typing submitted content that came in with the journalistically verboten sins of ALL CAPS LETTERING and extraneous, pompous (;) or overly enthusiastic (!) punctuation.
• Looking up, for the 100th time, the difference between lie, lay, lying and laying. (Seriously, English, why so difficult?)
• Printing subscription labels, affixing stamps and standing in line at the post office.
• Driving around in the wee hours of Wednesday mornings, scheming shortcuts through parking lots to shave fractions of seconds off a paper delivery route that unavoidably takes at least eight hours, a tank of gas and an espresso sludge cup to complete.
• Bandaging paper cuts and massaging carpal-tunnel claw hands (hazard of the trade).
• Scrubbing newsprint ink off my skin, clothes, furniture, car upholstery (a lost cause) and even my hair (on the bright side — I won’t need hair dye for a good, long while).
• Rebooting computer programs when, in a time-crunched frenzy or brain-dead lethargy, I hit the keyboard shortcut for “quit” instead of “save.”
• Screaming and crying in a fit befitting a 4-year-old, usually after a “command-quit” episode.
• Slugging terrible coffee.
• Doing my ritual Tuesday afternoon press deadline “load-please-load-please-load-please-load” chant and frustrated/frantic dance while watching the online file transfer site sloooooowly transmit the paper to the printer. (It looks a little like a “gotta pee” jig, which might be partially true. See preceding bullet.)

Eagle eye gets new gull — Rare bird spotted on Kenai River flats

By Jenny Neyman

Photo courtesy of Ken Tarbox. A lesser black-backed gull, center, is an unusual visitor to the Kenai flats, seen hanging out with our more-normal population of herring and glaucous-winged gulls.

Redoubt Reporter

Needle in a haystack? Try finding one particular gull amid the nesting colony spending their summer on the Kenai River flats.

From a numbers standpoint — with tens of thousands of gulls drawn to the quality nesting habitat of the river mouth estuary, plus the abundant food in the hooligan and salmon runs pulsing up the river from spring to fall — it’s a feather’s breadth away from impossible.

But to a trained birder’s eye, noticing one particular gull among the many isn’t all that difficult when the one in question sticks out like, in this case, a black back amid the sea of otherwise white and light gray.

That dark spot against a wash of white was what caught the attention of Rich MacIntosh, a birder from Kodiak who took a day trip to Kenai on July 19 on his way to Anchorage in order to do some birding on the Kenai flats.

While scanning the topography near the Warren Ames Memorial Bridge, to take stock of the variety of migratory birds that call Kenai home in the summer, he couldn’t help but notice a large flock of glaucous-winged and herring gulls, with their orange legs and white-and-light-gray plumage. Harkening to the “Sesame Street” song, he noticed that one of those things was not like the others.

“There was a flock of several hundred gulls, and you can see a flock of several hundred gulls from a mile away, and you go there and you set up a telescope and you scan through the birds until you see something that looks different,” he said.

There, amid the gray and white, was white and black.

“It’s very, very different from any gull that regularly occurs down there, in that it has a very, very dark back. All the other large gulls you would find in the Kenai area have pale gray backs,” MacIntosh said.

Going Dutch — Teamwork propels chefs to success in cast-iron cooking competition

By Jenny Neyman

Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. Stephanie Ferguson whips up a batch of “NeeNee’s rolls” while Jamie Doremire prepares coals to heat a Dutch oven during the cook-off Saturday. The team, with Molly Noyes, called itself Buns in the Oven, a play on their shared interest in cooking and their jobs as nurses in the obstetrics department at Central Peninsula Hospital.

Redoubt Reporter

In their home lives, Stephanie Ferguson, Molly Noyes and Jamie Doremire all enjoy cooking. In their professional lives as nurses in the obstetrics department at Central Peninsula Hospital, they’re used to working together, shouldering a lot of responsibility, staying calm under pressure and performing complex, detailed tasks with care, compassion, efficiency and — where appropriate — a good dose of humor.

When those two realms come together, as they did in a cooking competition over the weekend, the results are success, though through some unorthodox means.

“Molly massaged the chicken,” Ferguson joked in explaining how their roasted chicken won the highest score of entrees in the Alaska State Dutch Oven Cooking Competition, held Saturday as part of Soldotna’s Progress Days festival.

Saturday was the third annual Dutch oven cook-off, though it was the nurses’ first time entering, much less even cooking in the cast-iron pots, which were a staple of wagon trains and cowboy camps in the era of Western migration. They’ve lived on in family traditions and Boy Scout camping skills and have seen a resurgence in popularity across the country in recent years.

Longtime Scout leader Dr. Nels Anderson and his wife, Carla, of Soldotna, founded the Last Frontier chapter of the International

Dr. Nels Anderson and Lane Kreiger won first place in the adult division. The win entitles them to compete in the International Dutch Oven Society’s World Championship Cook-off, held in Utah.

Dutch Oven Society and organized the first Alaska Dutch Oven State Championship in 2010 as part of Soldotna’s Progress Days celebration. They were looking to spark interest in a style of camp cooking that is perfectly suited to the hunting expeditions, road trips, boating journeys and myriad other types of camping outings in Alaska, for those who want more than the standard hot dogs and warmed-up cans of beans for dinner. Anderson, an OBGYN, sparked the interest in the nurses, as well.

“We’ve never done it before. But Dr. Anderson, who delivers the most babies at the hospital, comes and hangs out sometimes and chats and he talked us into it,” Ferguson said. “So he’s responsible for this. We decided, we cook in a kitchen, we’ve cooked over a campfire, we’ve cooked on grills, how different can it be?”

Vastly, yet not much, as it turns out. The nurses were surprised to discover that Dutch ovens can cook absolutely anything a kitchen oven can — stews, roasts, baked goods, etc. — and even has some skillet capabilities, for browning meats, crisping bacon or frying up potatoes.

“We realized it was a lot more versatile than we thought, and it’s something I decided that I would do again in the future whenever we go camping, because then we’re not restricted to just cooking over a campfire, when sometimes you don’t want to get ashes in your food,” Ferguson said.

From a Trail Called Life: Battle of the bonk

SourceURL:file://localhost/%2008012012/stories%2008012012/dp%20battle%20of%20the%20bonk%20ride%2007252012.doc

 

By Dante Petri, for the Redoubt Reporter

Photo courtesy of Dante Petri. Resurrection Pass is in full bloom this time of year, and the trail is ripe for riding.

This is my favorite part of the ride.
It’s raining, barely 50 degrees out, 8 p.m., and I’ve been on this bike for the last 9 hours and 30 minutes. Yup. Been here a few times, all right.

My co-adventurer today, Brian, and I started this morning in Hope, and rode up and over Resurrection Pass to Cooper Landing. The trip south to Cooper saw the skies break apart, the sun come out and the mercury rise to 65. On the south-facing benches above Swan Lake, wildflowers bloomed vibrantly and the trail was in the best shape I believe I have ever seen it. Lots of people were out, doing different legs of Resurrection and Devil’s Pass trails or various out-and-backs. It felt social, in the most remote sense.

Sometime on the way back to Hope, though, high stratus clouds moved in, and with surprising speed, a thick and angry bank of clouds rolled over Russian Mountain by the time we left the northerly shores of Juneau Lake. As we began to climb the benches above Swan Lake, the first spitting raindrops started to fall and as they came down with more intensity, so did the temperature.

To compound the gloom, the long distances and a mechanical glitch had caught up with Brian, who soldiered upward nonetheless. Knowing conditions were going to get worse, but not knowing exactly what that meant, I nervously told Brian I had to keep moving as we entered the alpine, or I risked getting hypothermic. Leaving a buddy behind in the backcountry is never good, but the cold was catching up with me every time I stopped. Brian understood, as he devoured a sandwich. I think. Either way, he found a second gear and a remedy for a derailing rear derailleur, as every time I looked over my shoulder and back into the enveloping fog, he was never far behind.

Almanac: Long lives well-lived — MacInnes couple all about getting out and about

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part story about the life and philosophy of Charlie MacInnes and his wife, Kit, two Alaskans who embraced a life of outdoor activities. Last week, Part One detailed some of their many accomplishments. This week, Part Two provides more of their personal background and examines their philosophies on life.

By Clark Fair

Photos courtesy of Scott MacInnes and Ann (MacInnes) Mize. Charlie and Kit MacInnes embark on a mountain biking trip in July 1989.

Redoubt Reporter

When they first arrived in Anchorage in 1946, Charlie and Kit MacInnes lived inside a large packing crate in the Mountain View area. Charlie constructed a wooden yoke for Kit so that she could carry two buckets and haul fresh water to their home each day.
Such living wasn’t easy, but fortunately for the MacInneses, it was brief.

Soon, they were in the undeveloped Tudor area, building their first house together on a 20-acre homesite in the woods. Their new place, a wood-frame, two-story building with a chimney and fireplace handmade from boulders hauled in from distant Granite Creek, would be their home for nearly the next 30 years.

There — before moving to the Kenai Peninsula for their retirement years — they would raise their daughter, Ann, and son, Scott, and firmly entrench themselves in the outdoor-based, active lifestyle that would

Charlie MacInnes in 1941.

become their trademark.

Charles Ernest MacInnes was born in 1913 and raised in Philadelphia. He attended college to earn a business degree, and he entered the Navy in 1941, serving until just after the end of World War II. Catherine (“Kit”) Chambers MacInnes was born in 1919 and also raised in Philadelphia. She, too, attended college, earning a degree in physical therapy.

Charlie and Kit, who were enjoying running and other outdoor activities in their 20s, well after many of their contemporaries were settling into more sedentary lifestyles, married in 1946 and headed for a honeymoon in Alaska, fulfilling a long-held dream of Charlie’s to visit the north country.

They never looked back.

In Anchorage, Charlie found employment behind the ticket counter at Pacific Northern Airlines. PNA would eventually merge with Western Airlines, which would later merge with Delta Airlines, and during all that time Charlie would work behind the counter, despite having the intellect and the acumen to enter into a management position, according to his friend, Alan Boraas.

Drinking on the Last Frontier: Welcome to the Pour House

Bill Howell, for the Redoubt Reporter

Photos courtesy of Elaine Howell. The Pour House is the new iteration of BJ’s in Soldotna. The interior and exterior received a face-lift before opening earlier this month.

I’ve got a couple of items of news this month, one good, one not so good. Let’s start with the good news first.
If you’ve driven through Soldotna lately, you’ve probably noticed that the former BJ’s bar on the corner of Kobuk Street and the Sterling Highway has been enjoying a bit of a makeover, with a new color scheme and some metallic siding. On Tuesday, July 24, it re-opened for business under the name The Pour House.

The Pour House is the brainchild of owner Molly Poland, also of Hooligan’s Saloon, and general manager Dee Roddis. They have transformed the old Soldotna landmark into a bright, new sports bar, serving beer and wine.

The interior of the bar has received a thorough makeover, with the old, rather dark (and thoroughly nicotine-stained) interior giving way to a much more modern look, boasting bright colors, metal trim and numerous flat-screens tuned to various sporting events. You can even sit at a pingpong table and enjoy a game while waiting on your order, or plant yourself at one of the truck tailgates attached to one wall.

A dozen beer taps stand ready to pour, with the standard beer offerings like Stella Artois and Pacifico being supplemented with more local offerings from Alaskan Brewing Co. and Kenai River Brewing Co.

Art Seen: Shootingfor the unexpected — Focus on composition, contrast when capturing summer scenes

By Zirrus VanDevere, for the Redoubt Reporter

Photo by Zirrus Vandevere. Look for interesting compositions when framing photos.

I took a photo recently of a dock. The metal holding the wood together had obviously been painted numerous times, creating almost an abstract painting, and the lake was calm enough to get a crystal-clear reflection of the three-story house on the hill, with its myriad of windows that created an amazing design on the water.

I was in a paddleboat on Daniel’s Lake, and all I had with me at the time was a camera phone. But I was so enamored with the shot I took, I swear I was wishing I could enter it into a Redoubt Reporter photo contest. It got me thinking about the criteria that we use as judges. They are not arbitrary criteria. In fact, they are born of a long education and even longer consideration about image-making.

Every good photograph does not have to fit inside of tidy rules about composition, execution and style, but there is an underlying truth about what makes a good photograph. One of the first rules is that it should be something “new,” something that has not been overdone, and in some way surprises the viewer. Fortunately, the world is a kind of found object just waiting to be discovered, and there are innumerable new ways to look at it.

Plugged In: Don’t let bright sun outshine your photos

By Joe Kashi, for the Redoubt Reporter

The bright summer weather of this year’s Soldotna’s Progress Days produced not only a lot of photo opportunities, but opportunities for me to observe people attempting to take photos under clear skies and intense sunshine.

I was surprised by the relatively large number of people using bulky, expensive, full-frame digital SLR cameras. Full-frame cameras typically produce excellent images but may seem like overkill for a community parade on a sunny summer day under a cloudless sky. Many other people were using more common dSLR cameras built around slightly smaller APS-C sensors, which will make comparably good images under Saturday’s near-perfect conditions. It’s evident that many members of our community take their photography seriously enough to acquire top-end equipment.

At the other end of the spectrum, I observed people using their cellphone cameras in a manner that’s almost guaranteed to produce unusable photos. Photographing people on a brilliantly sunny day with their backs to the sun and bright sunlight shining directly on the camera lens inevitably results in very dark faces when a camera is used in any autoexposure mode. That’s because most autoexposure modes average the brightness of all central areas of the photograph’s frame, thus rendering the much-brighter sunny sky as a medium gray. The shaded areas thus have much lower luminance and register much darker, often to the point of unusability. A fully shaded face will be very difficult to adequately correct later with PhotoShop or Lightroom.

Cellphone cameras are particularly prone to this problem for several reasons. The tiny sensors used in cellphone-camera functions have a very limited dynamic range and, hence, a very limited capacity for compensating improperly exposed areas that fall outside their limited dynamic range. Either faces will be very dark or skies will be so overexposed that they lose good color and detail. Neither is acceptable. Cellphone camera functions are basically fixed and usually cannot be readily controlled and tweaked in the same way as more traditional cameras.