Puppies and Fish
/WELCOME DRACULA PUPPIES!
That’s right Dracula (a new recruit who joined the team this spring from Sven Haltmann) gave birth to a very large litter of TEN healthy puppies. With six girls and four boys, the Ryno team grew substantially on June 23rd when the pups were born. A handful of these pups will join other teams or homes, so most likely 5-6 puppies will stay here at the kennel. Their father is a dog named Crunch from Riley Dyche’s kennel. Originally, Crunch was born at Turning Heads Kennel owned by Travis Beals and Sarah Stokey. He was trained with Noah Pereira and has raced the Iditarod a couple times (last year with Riley and previously with Noah). Crunch’s entire litter is made up of leaders, so combined with Dracula’s leading skills, we’re hoping for a bunch of future leaders! In the meantime, they look like adorable little hamsters.
Below is a video of Dracula giving birth to one of her puppies. The miracle of life is beautiful but also graphic! Just a fair warning :)
A couple days ago, I took part in a favorite Alaska past time: dipnetting. Many Alaskans harvest a year’s worth of fish during a salmon run by holding a large net in the water and waiting for the fish to swim up river into their net. Sound silly? It kind of is. After growing up in Colorado where the art of fly fishing is highly prized (I even took a high school class called Flyfishing and Literature), dipnetting seems rather raw. That being said, the skill comes in knowing where and when to put your net. Since I’ve only been dipnetting on the Copper River a couple times, I hired the help of a local charter company. They dropped me off on a little rock at the base of a massive cliff, pointed at some boils swirling around in the fast moving Copper River, and said “put your net there.” I did, and 12 hours of dipnetting later I had stringers packed with 19 fish. Many people hope to catch their limit of 25 fish for a head of household and 10 fish per member (so for Derek and I our limit is 35), but I was ecstatic with 19. After filleted, 19 salmon still fill an entire 48 quart cooler!
Along with the sockeye, I also caught one king salmon and one jack king. Neither are legal to keep, so I tossed them back into the raging Copper River. Interestingly, the king had a yellow tracker secured to its back- can you spot it?
With such a whirlwind trip (leave at 5:00 PM Tuesday, arrive at 10:30 PM in Chitina, sleep in the truck for a few hours, hop on the charter at 4:45 AM Wednesday, get picked up by the charter at 6:00 PM, fillet fish and drive home at 7:00 PM, hope to be home by 1:00 AM Thursday morning), I knew that odds are, something will disrupt the schedule. And sure enough, the truck had other plans than returning home. About 1.5 hours from home, the truck broke down and Derek had to come to the rescue. He’s in the middle of his firefighting season during which he has one day off every 21 days. So after driving out to pick me up at 5:00 AM, he managed to still make it to work on time that morning. The truck was towed to a shop in town, and I still made it home in time for half of the morning dog chores (thank you to Liz for watching the team while I was away)! Overall, it was a wonderful trip with beautiful weather and fish, fish, fish!
