charter boat fishing//

the place we work is so great. we work for a company made up of 3 different fishing lodges, and we work on the dock of one of them. people come stay at our lodge and go fishing with charters, and they bring in a TON of fish. the captains of these charter boats are top notch for sure. they've been skippers for 20+ years and they are GOOD. we see it everyday; the customers hopping off their boat and dropping off their fish for us to process, most of the time capping out on their limits of salmon and halibut for the day. there are two guys who park their boats on our dock, so we've gotten to see them every day this summer, consistently bringing in tons of fish. and this past week we were lucky enough to get to go out with one of these skippers to fish! so we left bright and early and he took us out on the water about 2 hours away to his secret spot. he dropped the lines and we waited, but not long. almost instantly there were fish hitting our lines and he would say "fish! grab that one! oh another one! grab that one over there!" and it was crazy! such chaotic fun. we would reel in the fish, he would unhook it, throw it into the ice bucket, and set up the line again just like that. ha! everything was just going so fast that we could hardly even have time to register that we just caught a huge fish! then we'd wait again for a few minutes and chaos all over again! but not really chaos, the skippers are so good at what they do, they're just so quick that in the blink of an eye you've reeled in your fish, he kicks it into the ice bucket, and you look up and he already has the pole all set up waiting to catch another one! its pretty amazing. it was such a nice warm day, and we loved the excitement of the whole thing. just catching so many fish. for the first few hours we were trolling for salmon, and then a little later we went jigging for halibut. halibut fishing was a lot different than i pictured it. these funny fish live on the bottom of the ocean so you have to drop your line with a weight hundreds of feet down, so once you have one hooked it takes quite a while to pull it all the way up to the boat. pretty exhausting, really. but super fun! a couple of times josh even had two halibut on his line! so he kept thinking he was reeling in a huge one, and we'd pull it up and there were two on there! oh my it was so much fun. we ended up catching like 30 or so fish in all, and i even caught the biggest one of the day! a 20lb king salmon! the best kind of salmon you can get :) this was definitely one of the funnest things we've done since being here. this was our number one thing that we wanted to do while we were here, and we absolutely loved every second of it! especially josh. he's wanted to go out with a charter forever! so he had such a good time. so alas, here's more fish pictures, but this time they are all fish that we caught!

ziplining+totems//

if you haven't already noticed, we love living here. there's just something about living on an island covered in endless amounts of lush green rainforest surrounded by ocean water and breathing in salty air that resonates with your soul, ya know? we just feel so in our element here. the alaska life, man. it's the life for us. every week we only get one day off, so you better believe that our day off gets jam packed with every exciting alaskan activity that we can squeeze in. on this particular day, we went on a zip lining tour that was made up of 10 or so different zip lines through the rainforest! the whole thing was so cool, we would zip from one tree to the next, and land on a wooden platform, and on to the next zipline, and so on. the platforms were high enough that we could see the view of the foggy ocean and surrounding islands through the trees, and even went over a river where bears are sometimes feeding on salmon! i'm telling ya, this place is unreal. after zip lining we wandered over to totem bight state park. something cool about ketchikan, is that there are still a lot of natives that live here, so with that, comes a lot of native culture and history. there are totems scattered all throughout ketchikan, but this specific park has the biggest collection of them. we had the whole place to ourselves since all the cruise ships were gone for the day and it was a bit rainy. it's the prettiest when it rains. so we don't mind being outside in it ;)