Crabbing or is it just big holes in the ice?
I am a tired kid. I got up this morning at the early hour of a quarter to eleven. Made some buttermilk pancakes to prepare myself for the days adventures. Around 12:30 I was layered up to beat the cold. It’s only about 20 below and the wind non-existent. It makes for a pretty nice day. C.O. and I headed out across the frozen ocean to check out crab pot. We arrived at our destination about 7 miles from the village. It had been about 5 days since we had last pulled the pot. In the mean time about 7 inches of ice had formed. C.O. had built an ice saw during the week. So we chiseled out a hole and used the hand saw to cut the hole out. We pulled the pot out, and there were a bunch of starfish, and a tiny crab. 🙂 We threw them all back and dropped the pot back down. We are pretty sure we’ll catch all those starfish again. Since we dropped them down the same place we drop the pot. From there we headed further South. Rumor has it that the people that have gone out in the past went more towards Nome. So that is the direction we headed. We found a spot that looked all right. Another words we were on ice and didn’t feel like driving any more. So we got out the chainsaw and started the lengthy process of cutting such a large hole in the ice.
As you can see there, I am running the chainsaw. Also in the picture are the ice chisel and tongs (to pull the blocks out) that C.O. made. They both work really well. We were pulling out some pretty big blocks of ice with those tongs with a lot less effort than doing it by hand. We did however run into some troubles with the chainsaw. At first it didn’t want to start. I don’t know if 20 below is exactly in its operating range for temperature. We eventually had to poor gas directly into the carburetor to get it started. Unfortunately the pull that got the chainsaw started ripped the pull cord out of the machine. We later found out that the starting mechanism was made of plastic and broke into a bunch of pieces. So we used the chainsaw until it ran out of gas, and without a pull cord, couldn’t get it started again. So we were left with the chisel and the hand saw. Fortunately we had cut most of the cuts needed to get the top layer of ice out. So with much struggling we finally got the first foot and a half out, and then chiseled our way through the next bit and used the hand saw. I found that if we attached a rope to the middle of the hand saw (which by the way is like 6 feet long) and had one person pulling the blades into the ice while the other person moved the saw up and down, it made the process not only faster, but also a little easier. So we cut all the way around the square, and the huge piece of ice floated up to the surface. We used the tongs to get it started coming out of the hole. Then we hooked onto it with a rope and the snowmachine. A combination of the snowmachine pulling and me on the tongs we were able to get it out of the hole. C.O. estimates its weight at about a half a ton. So it wasn’t easy. We then baited our pot with some frozen fox meat, dropped the pot, and headed home. By the time we got home, it was around 7:00 P.M., which made it a pretty long day. I am now sitting here with fatigued muscles, and ready for bed. Hopefully all of this work will pay off next weekend. I’ll keep you posted.
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