a mad flurry

Jeanne and Steve just left in a crazed flurry back to their home in St. Croix, and unloaded the dump truck on me. It’s all up to me now- everything from cleaning, cooking, managing the boat ramp and buying materials for it, heading up and supervising projects of construction and renovation around the lodge/cabins and boat pull-out, doing all the bookkeeping/finances, dealing with reservations and event planning for guests, and a ton of ‘smaller’ tasks such as hooking up the satellite/cable for all the TVs here… the list goes on. It’s sink or swim at this point. I’m fairly confident that I can not only hold this place together but improve some operations also- we’ll see. It’s definitely an adventure and I’m gaining skills left and right.

I went fishing for salmon finally, was freezing cold the entire time, thought hypothermia was a possibility, was for sure my right big toe was a goner, and didn’t catch a single thing. Hopefully I’ll get to go again when it’s peak salmon fishing time (mid june and end of july) and get myself a 30 pounder.

We had our big open season house party on Saturday night and all of Saturday was mayhem. We had to clean and move furniture into all the cabins (they were completely in disarray from renovation), prep and cook food, and run the boat pull-out (which was the craziest day of fishing so far this season). I haven’t really explained what a boat pull-out is and what exactly I’m doing up here with that; I’ll explain in the next paragraph. Anyway the party was fun and the food was delicious and it was all worth it in the end. I don’t know how Steve and Jeanne do so much in so little time- I’d be way stressed out- I WAS way stressed out. But yea, it was good.

So although I’m running a bed and breakfast, we don’t have a whole lot of reservations this year. The lodge is situated on the Kasilof River and we have a ramp that people use to pull their boats out of the river. We charge them everytime they use our ramp and it’s called a pull-out. There were 3 boat pull-outs on the Kasilof River until this year- one of the ramps shut down and thus we are getting all of their business. This sounds good and dandy, but we didn’t have the space to go from 10 trailers pulling boats out to 50 boats pulling out everyday. I will be calling excavators to clear land this week so we can accommodate 40 more trucks and trailers. The owner of the pull-out that shut down wanted the state to buy his property for a few million. The state owns the land where fishing guides put their boats into the river and this guy wanted the state to buy the pull-out also. Sarah Palin said no, Alaska is not going to spend its money on that. It’s nice for Jeanne and Steve because they’ll be making more money on this gig than just running the cabins alone. However it’s up to me to make sure the pull-out runs smoothly or else- if enough people complain about the river being backed up and not being able to pull their boats out within a reasonable amount of time etc. then the state may have to buy out the other guy and we’ll lose all the revenue from this in the future. It’s kind of a big deal.

Although there hasn’t been much fun and games lately with the timer ticking and so much to do but hopefully it’ll calm down a little bit after the next 2 weeks and I can get back into some Alaskan things