You gotta be kidding me!

I'm on the ALCAN, but I'm not moving an inch.  Of all the bummers, when traveling, breaking down is right up there at the top of the list.  I didn't even get 250 miles into British Columbia and the Ford's engine spun a rod bearing.  I wish I could say it was just a bad car, but I picked it out after weeks of searching. I'm a victim of my own thoroughness.  I picked a car that had lived on Vashon Island it's whole life.  Evidently a car which only does short trips to the store and whatnot can have a problem when put under a pretty good load like a long haul to Alaska.  It seems they build up a lot of junk in the oil ways and internal parts of the engine from being a short distance personal vehicle.  After years of easy driving and maybe stretching it's oil changes a bit, I buy the car, have it checked out by my mechanic, load up the old Ford Explorer and head for Alaska.  The short of it is, all the junk breaks loose and drops into the oil screen and plugs it up.  The engine doesn't get quite enough lubrication and bingo, you get a spun rod bearing!  I checked all my options and concluded I will be better off putting a "slightly" used engine in it and continuing my trek north.  It will take two and a half days to get it done and be on my way again.  I really really didn't need this!!!        PS: This is the view from the hotel room

The Halibut industry in disarray.

The international commission which manages Halibut from the lower 48 to the Bering Sea passed down its verdict on the catch limits for 2011 this week.  They aren't very pretty.  2A is up 12% - 2B is up 2% - 2C is lowered a whopping 47% - 3A is lowered 28% - 3B is lowered 24% - 4A,B,C,D all up a little bit.  The reason for the big downward adjustments in several area catch limits, we are led to believe, is smaller fish.  The scientists would have us believe that fish which used to be 100 lbs. at 12 to 15 years of age are now only 35 lbs.  They cite competition for food by Arrow tooth flounder as the culprit.  I don't know about you, but I doubt very much a 2 lb. flounder can out muscle a 35 lb. Halibut or almost any sized Halibut for that matter.  Where did all the Arrow Tooth, that are competing with the Halibut for food, come from? Are there really that many flounder in area 2C? Of course not, but they do have a problem or two. So do areas 3A & 3B.   There are several 800 lb. gorillas in the room here which have to be dealt with, once and for all, or Halibut will continue to be unmanageable.  The charter fleet must be brought into Federal and State compliance and there has to be 100% observer coverage in the trawl fleet.
To start with, you have to designate what sport and charter really are.  If it's sport, it's catch and release.  If the fish are harvested it's a commercial fishing enterprise and should be managed according to the State and Federal laws, already in place, for these "fully utilized" species of fish.  Only when you can account for every lb. of fish removed from the ocean, can you have a good enough data-set to manage a resource from.

40 Days and Counting

In all the years I've spent in Alaska I have never driven the Al-Can Highway.  This year it's time for a change.  No getting on an airplane in Bellingham and getting off in Anchorage.  No driving a boat up the "Inside Passage", although, it's a beautiful trip (except for the Gulf of Alaska part).  I'm going to drive a car all the way from Bellingham Washington to Homer Alaska, take pictures, meet people, then take the ferry to Kodiak.  Should be a fun experience.  The only uncertain part, at this time, is where am I going to spend the nights?  Camping out for the duration of the trip doesn't appeal to me.  Especially since I'm starting out the last week of February.  A little research on hotels and cafes should come in handy. LOL, I'm too old to sleep on the ground any more.  It's just not as soft as it used to be. More later.

Holy Cow! Somebody read my Nobeltec blog!

Of all the unexpected things, comments on my last blog entry.  I guess putting your thoughts online is a bit like having sex in a public place.  Sooner or later, someone is going to see you and say something.
Anonymous's comment made me go back and reread my last entry to make sure I was being accurate. Yep, it pretty much correctly describes the red night light function in vns 9.3, when your using vector charts.
I haven't called Joel Haney yet, (head of Nobeltec's quality assurance) but I did go buy the Nobeltec upgrade to version 10.7 ($350.00).  Once installed, all the vector charts I had purchased and updated no longer worked (why?).  I had to buy the Max-Pro charts unless I was willing to accept the inferior Raster charts which came with the upgrade, which I don't care about since I already own them all anyway.  (This is where the "cynical" part from my tag-line comes in) Why did I have to move from one chart company to another?  Who owns the first chart company and who owns Max-Pro?  Wait a minute, I think Boeing/Jeppesen owns Max-Pro, I mean C-Map.  I had previously paid for vector charts which were supposed to work with any and all versions of Nobeltec, so, no joy here.
And the most significant observation and /or question is: Why are we having to pay for an "upgrade" to fix an existing programing error/incompatibility in the nav system? So far I haven't seen anything significantly new in the 10.7 release to warrant the $350 dollars.
Here is an analogy which pretty much explains my annoyance with Nobeltec...  When Microsoft releases a new operating system they know there will be problems and issues.  When they learn about these issues they find the solution and send the fixes out for downloading but, they don't charge you to fix their programing mistakes.
I'm staying with Nobeltec for now, because of the significant investment in time and money over the years.  But I'm not happy about being used in this fashion.
Good value for the money you spend.  That's what its all about and I don't see much value for the money spent this time.

D@#n Nobeltec !!

Nobeltec navigational software:  I have been a faithful purchaser, regular updater, and user of this program since it first came out.  Oh, the money I've spent on almost every bell and whistle they have offered.  Then a few years ago the honeymoon ended.  I noticed when I went from twilight to evening mode, the red color they used wasn't very good.  It was too bright and not very scalable, so you couldn't really see outside effectively. It simply doesn't allow you to see anything outside the bridge windows unless you turn down the brightness of the monitor.  Then you can't view the nav program.  A true no win scenario.  Somewhere along this time-line Nobeltec came out with a new chart group called Vector charts.  Infinitely scalable with no pixilation.  There was one drawback I discovered after the fact.  You could not turn on the night view mode of the nav program, because it didn't support vector charts.  Vector charts only worked in day and twilight modes!  I travel around the clock and I travel from Washington State to the Bering Sea. So spending all this money for charts that are only good half the time was a real ripoff.  Last year Nobeltec came out with version 10 and everyone told us not to buy it as it was real "buggy".  Then I find out Nobeltec had been sold to The biggest Navigational software company in Europe, "MaxSea".  Rumors were rampant that Nobeltec wouldn't be around much longer.  I figured, this explains all the crumby updates and I'm wondering, what is going to happen? I call the new owners to get an answer.  Is the company going to close down and am I going to lose the thousands of dollars I've spent?  The new owners would not give me a satisfactory answer. They claimed, they didn't know what was going to happen.  Are you kidding me?  Time to start shopping for a new brand of nav software. Oh pooh!  There are many brands to choose from.  I have finally whittled it down to 2 of them.  Olex and ECC Globe.  Both of them start at about 5 or 6 thousand dollars for their "basic package" and top out at around 15 to 20 thousand for all the bells and whistles.  Whew, this just keeps getting better and better.  Now what do I do?  More to follow!

Better late than Never ?

The summer is over and I haven't done much of anything this year. Oh, I went cod jigging for a little while and enjoyed it, however, I wasn't able to really work. It is amazing what a simple act, like a tree falling over can do to your life. I guess I have to tell the whole story, so that it makes sense.  I was driving home one evening during a local windstorm, which we have all the time, when a big old dead tree fell on the truck I was driving. I went from about 35 mph to 0 mph, was thrown clear up completely off the road and dumped in a ditch.  I woke up laying on a stretcher with a young paramedic telling me I was the luckiest guy on the face of the earth. A trip to the emergency room, cat scans, MRI's,and a bunch of X rays.  They said they couldn't see any thing, so I was sent home to recover. Little by little, my back started to feel different.  I'd go numb in the left foot, then it would feel like someone had stuck a needle all the way down the leg.  Then my back started to hurt all the time.
Off to see a specialist, who had an MRI with dye done and showed me the results.  See right here Mr. Mann, your disc is torn and leaking.  I don't know how they didn't see this in the emergency room.  You have very few options at this point. You can do nothing and hope it heals on its own or you can operate and cut off the torn tissue and seal the disc.  Well, they ended up having to do that operation twice in two years.  I never did recover to the point where I felt I could really do my job, so I let the little maintenance things wait. Sanding , painting, that kind of stuff.  The engineering maintenance had to be done, but it took a long time with long breaks in between projects to let the back settle down. Well now we're at the end of the narrative.  I have just had spinal fusion, because there was no disc left between the vertebrae.  At this point the prognosis looks hopeful. If everything heals as it should and I'm able to rehab once the bone has set up.  I might just be able to fish again next year.  Any way, that's why I haven't been very good at keeping up with events.  I'll try to do better as time progresses.  Man, I am so lucky. That stupid tree would have killed me, had I been going 1/2 a mile an hour slower!

Man, it's cold outside!

I'm stuck in Anchorage, because the weather is just absolutely crappy in Kodiak.  No planes have been allowed in today.  Not even one.  It's not too bad here in Anchorage.  I'm trying to use my phone for this blog update, but so far I can't get it to work.  I have taken a few pictures, but of course I didn't bring my usb to phone connector with me, so I can't upload them to the blog.  I should be in Kodiak in the morning 3/9/2010 @ about 7:30 am if I'm lucky.  My good friend Thor Olsen is going to pick me up, so I'd better take him out for breakfast and catch up.  Here we go with another season and I'm not sure I'm up for this.