Ninilchik and Kenai 7/18/2013

Note:  There are many photos in this post.  If you click on the first one to enlarge it you can click through all of the photos at once.

The alarm went off at 4:15 this morning for Breland’s halibut fishing trip.  We dressed quickly and I dropped him off to join the others going with his charter.  Most of the fishing trips were cancelled yesterday afternoon because of a small craft advisory and we weren’t too sure if he would be able to go out today but the boat pulled out as planned.
I went back to the campground to take photos of his boat launching. The tractor pushed his boat out and return for several others as I took photos of the sunrise over the inlet.
Since I was up so early I went back to the Greek Orthodox church for early morning photos and to the Deep Creek area to photograph eagles.  There were 21 eagles in Deep Creek and several more along the beach in the village of Ninilchik.  They were slow and sleepy looking, as though they were waiting for the sun to warm them before they went in search of food.  The number of immature eagles is astounding.  Three stayed together on a twisted bundle of sticks with two adults nearby.  Others lined the creek and several more were in trees along the bluff.
The gulls were eating salmon in the Ninlchik river and the eagles looked as though they were waiting for salmon to come down the creek.  Much of their food now seems to come from the hundreds of halibut carcasses dumped in the area by the charter boats.
Bre caught two nice halibut, not the “barn door” size he had hoped for but nice 35 and 25 pounders.  He arranged for the charter company to pack and flash freeze his fish and we will pick them up tomorrow before we leave for Homer.
We didn’t let them freeze it all, though.   A nice piece of halibut made a wonderful dinner with chimichurri sauce and green rice, preceded by some clam chowder left over from yesterday’s meal.
Yesterday we drove to Kenai to watch the dip netting.  What a madhouse!  Alaskan residents are allowed to dipnet during certain periods.  The Kenai river was crammed with small fishing boats, each loaded with several people dragging five foot wide dip nets behind them. Each household has a season limit of 55 salmon and 10 flounder for a family of  four.
A small herd of caribou are in the Kenai area and many moose.  We saw only one caribou but a total of five moose.  I wish I had a video of the mom and her twins running flat out across the road in front of us.  They ended up in someone’s front yard, did a hard left turn and ran across the yard and into the woods beyond.
Tomorrow we leave for Homer and will stay on the spit, another scenic spot.