Homer Post Three

The first thing on our agenda today was lunch with our friend Milli at the Fat Olive in town. We started with a grill platter of reindeer sausage and shrimp. Then we all had the salad, bread, chowder combo. Delicious chowder and homemade bread. We visited for hours with Milli and found out something very interesting. Milli had had a professional story gatherer from the museum tape Albert's stories (William's dad). We never got around to taping Al's stories and were sorry about that. Milli says she will find the tapes and have them put on a cd for us. About 2:30 Milli had to leave and so did we, because we wanted to go to the Pratt Museum walking tour of Homer Spit at 3.

Before the walking tour we saw that the landing boat was upright and being pulled up a bit further on the shore.

The tour started at the Salty Dawg Saloon. We will have to go back and have a drink there. Quite a fascinating place, filled with dollar bills written on and stuck to the wall. The saloon is made of some of the oldest log buildings on Homer Spit, moved to this spot and joined together. It was heavily refurbished a few years ago. We walked down on the docks and got a lesson in commercial fishing. Long line fishing is for halibut. Purse seine is for fish that swarm in schools. Gill nets are for salmon. We watched a commercial boat unloading halibut. Then we went through a processing plant for charter boat fish where the fish are filleted, packaged and boxed for freezing and shipping.

These were smaller than William's halibut

We asked a lot of questions and got a two hour tour instead of an hour and ½ tour for just the two of us for our $5 apiece.

Things have picked up at the landing boat. They are pumping out the rest of the water and many guys are around the back end of the boat. I guess they are calculating how to patch up the hole at least well enough to refloat the boat and get it into the harbor for more work.