Brief stop at home - Jimmy goes crazy, won't leave me alone for a moment

I stepped into the house at about 1:30 this morning, looked down the hall and saw Jimmy step out of our bedroom. He saw me, and came bounding straight to me. Since then, he has refused to leave me alone, whether I be sleeping, eating, feeding fish, computering or whatever.

He is simply all over me - climbing on my lap, my shoulders, stepping onto my keyboard.

And now I must leave him again.

It is off to Tok I go, where Ahtna Matriarch Katie John, also known as Alaska's Rosa Parks for her long fight to take back her traditional fishing rights after the state tried to take them away, will be honored. On Sunday, she will receive her honorary PhD from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

And congratulations to Saggan crew in Barrow for landing a whale this morning.

I wish it had come while I was still there with you on the ice, but the important thing is that it came and the people of Barrow now have that much more to sustain them.

I know - the picture is a blur. I don't care. Seems appropriate to me. Life's a blur.

Breaking ice to keep this blog alive and hobbling along

Due to the impossibility of truly looking at photos on this malfunctioning laptop, this is a random "grab" from a series of ice-breaking shots that I took either late last night or early this morning, I can't remember for certain. Night and day tend to blend together and become to seem as one, this time of year.

I will explain later, when I can sit down at my home computer with a monitor that works and do it right.

I had planned to fly out of Barrow for Anchorage tonight, and then drive home to Wasilla, so that I would have two days to square things away and maybe get a little rest before getting up early Friday morning to make the six hour drive to Tok.

But I think now that I will stay here, mostly on the ice, until tomorrow night. 

I have just come in after three days on the ice to recharge my camera and phone batteries. I will head back out, shortly.

Today, btw, begins the time when the sun remains above the Barrow horizon 24 hours a day, from now until August 2.

Keeping this blog alive and holding with Marilu Pai, a man from Mangalore, India, who I found at a bowhead whale landing on the Arctic sea ice

This is Marilu Pai, origingally of Mangalore, India, but now of Barrow, Alaska, in a photo that I took somewhere near 2:00 AM this morning. Mr. Pai is a wildlife biologist and a veterinarian who just this past winter landed a job with the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management.

Although on the whole it was a very warm winter for Barrow, Mr. Pai was shocked by the cold when he arrived. Yet, he was thrilled to be here and he has toughed it out and says he is greatly enjoying his job. Come August, his family plans to leave India and join him.

"Nowhere else in the world could I get an apportunity like this," he told me. He said he loves the big, wild, open country of the Arctic Slope and the sea, and all the animals that live thereon and therein, especially the big bowhead whale.

Those ropes behind him are part of a block and tackle system that the Iñupiat whalers are using to hoist a huge bowhead, landed by the Little Kupaaq crew of Harry Brower Jr., ever so slowly out of the water and onto the ice.

Pai came out with a host of other scientists and researchers to make measurements and take samples.

He also spent many, many, very cold hours helping the whalers pull on the ropes. I do not know what the temperature was, but probably right about 0 F (-18 C), which is not too bad but there was a stiff, biting, wind behind it.

It is the whalers and the Iñupiat people of the Arctic Slope, Mr. Pai explained, who he sees himself as working for. So he wants to be low key, never pushy and he wants to help all he can.

As any reader can see, this blog is still in a barely surviving, holding pattern and it will be for a few more days yet.

I will probably wait to make my real series of blog posts from this trip to Point Hope and Barrow until May 17. This coming Friday, I must be in Tok and the Sunday thereafter in Fairbanks. The story that I will be doing in those two places is one that cannot wait until later to be posted, so I will do it immediately upon shooting and then get back to my Arctic work.

I supposed that it is possible that things could suddenly fall into place and I could post this Arctic series before I leave for Tok, but that would really surprise me.

It would be a happy surprise, though.

Keeping this blog alive in a holding pattern with one pic of Chukchi Sea sunset

The wind here in Point Hope has shifted to the west and south and is forecast to stay that way for four days. This brings the pack ice back, closes the lead, and pretty much brings the bowhead hunt to a pause until the wind shifts back to the Northeast.

As I am scheduled to leave here for Barrow Thursday, this means that I am probably done taking pictures at Point Hope whale camp for this year. It also meant that I found myself with a little time to do some blogging and so I decided that I would tough out this malfunctioning laptop computer screen and would put up a full blown post.

But when I tried, I just could not beat the screen. I could not edit the pictures. I simply could not tell enough about what I was looking at, so I gave up and just grabbed this one sunset-through-overcast-and-light-fog picture, which I took two nights ago, right about midnight, Alaska Daylight Savings Time.

Maybe after I get to Barrow, if I find the time, I can borrow a computer and do some serious editing. If not, then, except for "keeping this blog alive" single pic entries such as this, it will just have to wait until I get back to Wasilla in about one week.

Obviously, I need to do something about this screen. I had earlier taken it in to my local Mac store for an estimate and that came out to a bit over $500. I called Mac itself, and they said the odds were good that they would be able to replace it for their standard fee of $300 - which is also their minimum fee - but they could not say for certain until they checked it out.

It seemed to me that it would be better to put the $300 - $500 towards an iPad, which I could then use both as an iPad and as a screen for this laptop, rather than into this old laptop itself, but the full price of the iPad has eluded me so far - although I suspect that I have squandered more than enough money on breakfast, hamburgers, tacos and such since this malfunction began to have covered the full price and then some.

But I've got to do something. This is absurd. It really cripples me in the field.

Right now, this laptop is good for little other than serving as a data transfer and storage device. 

Point Hope: coming home from whale camp

Just to make it clear that this blog is still alive, i am posting just one picture today. And to make it easy to pick that picture on a laptop computer with a malfunctioning screen, I decided that I would choose the very last picture that I have taken so far today.

That was this one, shot about 2:00 AM this morning as we pulled back from the ice, intending to spend three hours in the village and then to head back out.

So I set my iPhone alarm for 4:50 AM as I went to bed at 2:50 AM, then slept very little because I did not want to somehow sleep past the appointed time and miss my ride back to the ice.

As hard as it was, I got up and headed to the house of whaling captain Rex Rock, Sr, where, at 5:00 AM, it was very quiet and no one was stirring. People started moving around about 10: AM and it was then that I learned that the sea had gotten rough and so we would be staying on land for awhile.

I ate a good breakfast with the Rocks, then returned here to the home of Jessie Frankson and Krystle Ahmaogak and their three young boys, Jessie Jr, Kuunnan and Jonathan, napped for a couple of hours, got up and ate another breakfast.

Thanks in large part to the heavy overcast, it still got close to being dark in the wee hours of this morning, but soon the sun will be in the sky 24 hours a day and there will be no more darkness at all.

In Barrow, the final, very brief sunset is May 10. I am not certain what day here - a day or two or three after that, I would guess.