The Bears are getting FAT!!!!!!

I'm so fat I can't reach the fish anymore..

"I don't wanna move...awhh"

Porky, go to hibernate. You really shouldn't eat anymore.

So this is basically just pictures that Scott gave me of the bears in Alaska from a few weeks ago ( seriously, what would I do without him sending me pictures of all the awesome Alaskan creatures?). This is going to be how I look and feel in about 24 days on Thanksgiving- lethargic, fat, and tired.

Want A Good Workout? Try picking up an 80 pound tuna.

Have you ever seen Shark Wranglers? URI used this boat!

Transferring a yellowfin from the truck to the tank

Poor guy didn't make it, but it was pretty successful otherwise!

So when my colleges do cool things, I just have to get involved. Whether that includes ripping out moose teeth, or sticking my hands up a deer's butt (see my previous blog posts), I always am up for something new and exciting. So, when I found out URI was trying to raise false albacore, bluefin, and yellowfin tuna for spawning and egg rearing, I just had to get involved. After talking to my teacher, a niche was found for me on the URI "Tuna Team". I'm more of an assistant: I clean filters, vacuum the tuna tank, and prepare food for tuna feeding. I do other random things too, but the coolest of all assignments I've had on the team happened on Columbus Day weekend. I had a great weekend visiting friends and family and on Sunday night, I was pretty tired and ready to have Monday morning to sleep in! Around 7:45, I decided it would be a good idea to figure out where the heck my cell phone was at, only to find a text from my friend Chelsea saying "Hey, we are transporting tuna tonight! The boat will be in around 7:30". Instantly, I threw on some rain clothes and boots and headed down to the tank. Prior to Columbus Day weekend, URI's tuna tank held a suite of false albacore and four bluefins. All the fish were no more than 30-40 pounds. The fish that they were transporting were big yellowfin tuna, all between 60-90 pounds! When I arrived at the boat, we instantly got into transporting these tuna. So since the purpose of the research project is to keep the tuna alive, they had to transport them in the least-damaging way possible. So, one of the students was in a wetsuit swimming in the tanks below the boat trying to scoop the tuna up in a bag. These bags are the same bags you see on Animal Planet when people are moving whales, manatees, dolphins, etc. Once they scooped the yellowfins into the bag, the clock was ticking! We got the first tuna, around 85 pounds, and rushed him into the back of the truck on the dock. The truck had a tub in the bed full of water to keep the tuna moist. We drove the truck up to the tank (pretty close to the dock but time was of essence!) and run the bag and the tuna into the tank. After the first tuna was successfully transported, we had four more to go. When we were about to start with the second tuna, our teacher looked at Chelsea and I. "We need to keep an eye on that first tuna!" He told us. That tuna had just basically committed suicide in the boat tank by impinging himself in a corner. Tuna need to have a constant water flow moving across their gills for them to survive, so one of the divers in the tank had to "swim" the tuna to keep him alive. Chelsea and I rushed up the hill to the tank! When we got there, he was laying belly-up on the bottom of the tank. CRAP! We rushed to get a net to try to poke him to get him to move. He was motionless. We then tried to flip him over. Finally, after some serious effort, Chelsea flipped him over and just like that, he started swimming again! So you know how cats have 9 lives? I'm pretty sure tuna have about 60. For the next three hours, Chelsea and I moved ladders around the sides of the tank, moving up and down the ladders flipping this guy over to get him back to life! At midnight though, we decided he probably wasn't going to make it (I mean, we weren't planning on staying there all night to flip the poor guy over). But, the other four tuna were doing wonderful! I got home around 1 AM, soaking wet, and totally exhausted from ladder sprints and tuna flips, but it was such a cool time.

So, We Caught A WHOLE Lotta Trout

This fantastic (horrible) hurricane has allowed me to catch up on some things I have been slacking on aka writing on my blog (well, in my defense, homework and grad school apps came first.) So Saturday morning we woke up to pouring rain on Lake Francis- figures. No rain was going to pull us away from the fishing though, well especially me since I drove so long! So we got in the boat around 6:30 and started trolling some live shiners, needlefish and mooselooks on top. I was DYING to try my orange Kodiak Custom spinner that I picked up in town in Kodiak in August. We left the shore and within 2 minutes of trolling my spinner I hooked up a nice rainbow trout!!! I was so excited. It not only hooked one, but hooked up about five more as the day went on. The rain continued pouring down, but the bite was on, so really fishing > staying inside in the rain! The lake was like glass in the rain, so we decided to go into the inlet where Cedar Steam comes into Lake Francis. Our usual goal when fishing Lake Francis is to "get into Cedar". We try almost every time, but my dad's old 14ft aluminum boat cannot handle the whitecaps from the wind blowing across the lake! Cedar is a place where we always can catch fish. When I was in high school, my dad and I went up to Lake Francis for a weekend and slipped into Cedar. In an hour, we had caught 17 salmon, all of which were keeper size. I remember I was trying to reel in 2 poles at once as was he! This time in Cedar, we had pretty good results! We caught rainbow after rainbow. The rainbow trout were beautifully colored, as was the foliage surrounding Cedar. We fished all day Saturday and most of the day Sunday catching  a total of 27 rainbow trout and 5 small landlocked salmon between my dad, mom, and myself. Not bad at all! We released most of them, but kept just enough for a good fish fry! I would say it was a successful trip!

Nice landlocked salmon I caught! No, it's not orange, that was my mom's rain gear!

Dinner!

We Laugh At All Those Changing Trees; Autumn is Falling Down Again

Driving through Franconia Notch on the way to Pittsburg always gets me thinking deeply about something. Sometimes it's, "Gosh, how the hell am I going to hike up that mountain today without rolling over dead", other times it's "Yes!! I cannot WAIT to ski, even though the wind is whipping 8000mph, I'm probably going to complain the whole time and fall down the entire Gary's trail". This time was different though. So I had been stuck in traffic for like oh 3 hours- absolute nightmare if you know anything about my relationship with traffic, it's not a friendly one by any means. I'm coming up on the beautiful part of 93, around exit 32 and this MASSIVE bank of fog completely engulfed the entire mountain range. The fogs billowing belly swept up the roads, and everything that I was so looking forward to looking at. Greattt. I'm like blind driving at night (my friend Jason learned this about 2 weeks ago when we were driving at night and I didn't have my glasses on: our light was red but dang the red was so bright on my poor little eyeballs that I just focused on the green facing the other direction. Jason was like Molly, red. Molly, red. Molly, red. huh? Red light! Oh, yuh can I have my glasses?). So on top of the blindness from glares, there are moose and deer everywhere. AND It was only like 5pm at this time- totally unfair to take away an hour of my vision from me with the fog. Anyways, I'm royally pissed off at this point- thanks a lot traffic and fog. Then like out of the blue, the fog totally cleared. It was the most incredible thing ever because this fog was so thick I could barely see in front of me. But right when I got to Cannon Mountain, it just completely cleared and all the gorgeous colors just took shape. So then this is when the deep thinking came into play (mainly thanks to Bon Iver, Gregory Alan Isakov, and Mumford and Sons playing on my ipod). I started thinking about my school (oh god, right?) and a lot of the girls that go there. They spend all this time in the morning caking so much makeup on their faces that they look like plastic dolls to be this view of what is "beautiful". But is that really beautiful? I'm sorry, but beautiful to me can't be found in a bottle of foundation (granted, I like wearing makeup on occasion because it's like painting your face and since I suck at painting paintings, at least I can kind of paint my face nicely). Anyways, that's besides the point. The point is, beautiful was the fall leaves taking their color. Beautiful to me is how alive you feel when you breathe in the smell of wet leaves, fresh snow, spring flowers, and summer tides. It's exploring the world around you. Feeling alive isn't when you finally wake up from a 3 day hangover (sorry UJS), it's having a grizzly bear within 10 feet of you. It's sitting on a rock with your finger shaking on your trigger as you hear that stick break and see a deer ear coming up the ridge towards you, only to find out it's a doe and her two fawns (if you're me, you drop your gun and grab your camera!). It's finally getting to the top of a 4000+ foot mountain and scanning the landscape. If you can find satisfaction in that, you will be happy and feel beautiful and satisfied everyday, whether or not you look like a plastic face. I just recently read the book "Wild Men, Wild Alaska" and there was this great Henry David Thoreau quote in it (which is not the one I'm going to use because I found one better) BUT it got me looking into more and here we go this was basically my life decision as I was driving the rest of my way up to Pittsburg for a weekend of fishing: "We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because they are unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature". Anyways, I made it through the fog up to camp, and I'll write more about fishing soon (it was frickin awesome). "Many men go fishing their whole lives without knowing that it is not fish that they are after"