6/5/07                                                                                                               We continue to run boatloads of supplies from town like drug smugglers with second mortgages.  We have not reached the point of running both high tides in a day but it has been discussed.  We all resemble extras from the original Night of the Living Dead; dirty, bedraggled and wild eyed but we're managing to stay on schedule to have most of our leg work done before the clients arrive. This is a massive improvement from last season when we were building a house for the boss and his family into July.  Few things make one a less effective fishing guide than coming off the river and building for eight hours after guiding from eight to five.  Then there were the fuel runs...

Our load capacity tripled with the addition of the new boat.  Last July, when the fuel barge pulled into the lower river we made a mad dash to get all our gas upriver in one night because they were leaving in the morning. Every boat, down to the smallest little jon was called into service running fifty miles down to the barge. At two am I was driving a ninety horse outboard up through the braids in the dark, bouncing off rocks and hoping I didn't run up a gravel bar (okay, I did hit one gravel bar but I was able to extricate the boat without any assistance so that barely qualifies). I had a three hundred gallon plastic tank that I was using to transport the fuel but the weight capacity of the boat only allowed me to take one hundred. Three miles from camp I ran out of gas in the engine tank and pulled over to a mid river island to refuel. At that point I discovered a minor hiccup, my siphon hose was not long enough to reach the fuel level in the largely empty plastic tank, so despite my hundred gallons of gas, I was dry where it counted. As I was in the process of unhooking the hose from the bilge pump to extent my siphon, a thought occurred to me. "Maybe I should keep an eye out for bears". Lifting my head and turning my attention to my surroundings, I realized that I could see the outline of a large, fuzzy head swimming across the river in the twilight. He was coming directly at me. A shot of adrenaline raced through my system as  this was my first season and had limited experience with bears; that and I had no shotgun in the boat. Immediately I began yelling at the bear and banging a wrench on the aluminum boat. He changed direction slightly but still swam to the island on which I was stranded. He never made any attempt to board my vessel but I could hear him rustling in the grass near me. For the next forty five minutes (until after three am) I stood my ground, yelled myself hoarse and banged until the next boat came behind me.  The boss himself was driving that vessel and found me, wrench in hand, panting on the bow of the boat from fear and effort.  He handed me a full five gallon tank and a few comments about my choice of weapon.

I still get an occasional ration of shit for that and I would handle the situation differently now but I would prefer not to be in that position at all.  I'm happy to put in the extra effort pre-season to avoid spending the wee hours of the morning stranded on a mid-river island with a curious brown bear.