A bit of sun today

After a very stormy Thursday, today arrived fairly dry and by mid-morning the skies broke up enough to let some sunshine through.

It’s well into Fall now and I figured there probably wouldn’t be much fish in the Narrows, but I went out with pole in hand anyway, just to enjoy some time outside and watch the scenery.

There were quite a number of dead and dying silver salmon in the waters. I even caught one that still gave a little bit of a fight. It wasn’t worth keeping so I took the hook out and let it go to feed whatever critters might eventually come upon it.

This is all about the ecological system in this area. Last night I attended a lecture, part of this year’s Tongass Rainforest Festival, by a  biologist from the University of Alaska. He described how salmon are critical to the ecology. They feed in the ocean, become nutrient rich, and then bring all this back upstream where they die and release their nutrients back into the system. Terrestrial Southeast Alaska is generally nutrient poor, so these salmon provide a necessary infusion of nutrients back into the soil as they are consumed by mammals, fish, and insects.

It was interesting to experience firsthand a bit of the lecture from the night before.