{"id":427,"date":"2005-02-05T18:56:46","date_gmt":"2005-02-06T03:56:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/crabbing-or-is-it-just-big-holes-in-the-ice\/"},"modified":"2005-02-05T18:56:46","modified_gmt":"2005-02-06T03:56:46","slug":"crabbing-or-is-it-just-big-holes-in-the-ice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/2005\/02\/05\/crabbing-or-is-it-just-big-holes-in-the-ice\/","title":{"rendered":"Crabbing or is it just big holes in the ice?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a tired kid.\u00a0 I got up this morning at the early hour of a quarter to eleven.\u00a0 Made some buttermilk pancakes to prepare myself for the days adventures.\u00a0 Around 12:30 I was layered up to beat the cold.\u00a0 It\u2019s only about 20 below and the wind non-existent.\u00a0 It makes for a pretty nice day.\u00a0 C.O. and I headed out across the frozen ocean to check out crab pot.\u00a0 We arrived at our destination about 7 miles from the village.\u00a0 It had been about 5 days since we had last pulled the pot.\u00a0 In the mean time about 7 inches of ice had formed.\u00a0 C.O. had built an ice saw during the week.\u00a0 So we chiseled out a hole and used the hand saw to cut the hole out.\u00a0 We pulled the pot out, and there were a bunch of starfish, and a tiny crab.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 We threw them all back and dropped the pot back down.\u00a0 We are pretty sure we’ll catch all those starfish again.\u00a0 Since we dropped them down the same place we drop the pot.\u00a0 From there we headed further South.\u00a0 Rumor has it that the people that have gone out in the past went more towards Nome.\u00a0 So that is the direction we headed.\u00a0 We found a spot that looked all right.\u00a0 Another words we were on ice and didn’t feel like driving any more.\u00a0 So we got out the chainsaw and started the lengthy process of cutting such a large hole in the ice.<\/font><\/p>\n

\"Chainsawing\"Strait<\/p>\n

As you can see there, I am running the chainsaw.\u00a0 Also in the picture are the ice chisel and tongs (to pull the blocks out) that C.O. made.\u00a0 They both work really well.\u00a0 We were pulling out some pretty big blocks of ice with those tongs with a lot less effort than doing it by hand.\u00a0 We did however run into some troubles with the chainsaw.\u00a0 At first it didn\u2019t want to start.\u00a0 I don’t know if 20 below is exactly in its operating range for temperature.\u00a0 We eventually had to poor gas directly into the carburetor to get it started.\u00a0 Unfortunately the pull that got the chainsaw started ripped the pull cord out of the machine.\u00a0 We later found out that the starting mechanism was made of plastic and broke into a bunch of pieces.\u00a0 So we used the chainsaw until it ran out of gas, and without a pull cord, couldn’t get it started again.\u00a0 So we were left with the chisel and the hand saw.\u00a0 Fortunately we had cut most of the cuts needed to get the top layer of ice out.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So we cut all the way around the square, and the huge piece of ice floated up to the surface.\u00a0 We used the tongs to get it started coming out of the hole.\u00a0 Then we hooked onto it with a rope and the snowmachine.\u00a0 A combination of the snowmachine pulling and me on the tongs we were able to get it out of the hole.\u00a0 C.O. estimates its weight at about a half a ton.\u00a0 So it wasn’t easy.\u00a0 We then baited our pot with some frozen fox meat, dropped the pot, and headed home.\u00a0 By the time we got home, it was around 7:00 P.M., which made it a pretty long day.\u00a0 I am now sitting here with fatigued muscles, and ready for bed.\u00a0 Hopefully all of this work will pay off next weekend.\u00a0 I’ll keep you posted.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a tired kid.\u00a0 I got up this morning at the early hour of a quarter to eleven.\u00a0 Made some buttermilk pancakes to prepare myself for the days adventures.\u00a0 Around 12:30 I was layered up to beat the cold.\u00a0 It\u2019s only about 20 below and the wind non-existent.\u00a0 It makes for a pretty nice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-old-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bbryson.com\/bill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}