We had a wonderful visit with our good friend, David Spencer. Since fishing has been slow, David took our greenhouse to the next level. The entire greenhouse is made of salvaged materials, and it's turning into a thing of real beauty.

This past weekend, some good friends had a full-day stop in Ketchikan during a five-week cruise they are taking from the West Coast of the US to Japan. The weather conditions on Clarence Strait looked unusually favorable, so we decide to take our C-Dory over to Ketchikan to meet them. It was a wonderful mini-vacation! I forgot just how comfortable the V-berth in the C-Dory is. I slept better than I have in many moons. And the C-Dory is the boat in which we first came to Alaska. Lots of great nostalgia for us as we sat in Bar Harbor, watching the sunset. 

The Fourth of July celebrations here on P.O.W lasted over several days. We started with a nice fireworks show in Craig on the evening of July 3. The fireworks show in Klawock moved to the evening of July 5, due to fog on the night of the 4th. So on the evening of July 5, I rode my bicycle down to Klawock Harbor to enjoy the fireworks show about our C-Dory, Sisu. Shawn and are friend Dave Spencer were already asleep. I laid my bicycle down on the dock, with my little backpack in my bicycle pannier. I had reached inside of pannier to get my cell phone out of backpack, and I took a few photos of the beautiful display. At about 11:30 pm, a boat sped by and rocked the dock. I heard a little "sploosh," but I didn't think much about it, and I continued to watch the fireworks show. When the show ended, I got off the boat, and I lifted up my bicycle and noticed that it felt considerably lighter. I then noticed that my bicycle pannier was empty. Apparently my little backpack had rolled out of the pannier, off the dock, and into  30 feet of water below the dock. In that backpack were my wallet, my bullet journal, my very special pen, my good knife, and my hair fork. All are hard-to-replace items. But there wasn't much I could about the situation at that point. So I rode my bike home, and went to bed. I did not wake Shawn or Dave up, since they were going fishing the following morning. Instead I laid awake, formulating some kind of plan to try to retrieve the backpack during low tide.

The next morning, I tried to call my "go-to" friends to see if I could borrow some kind of grappling hook, or other device to try to drag the bottom below the dock. No one was answering the phone, so I looked around our construction pile to see what I could come up with. I found a good length of line and a heavy-duty milk crate, and I made a sort of basket dredge that looked like this: 

I also put the word out about my predicament on Facebook. Sure enough, my fellow fishermen rallied to my aid in a big way! First, Dave Ryno tried retrieving the pack with his Klawock spinner. He might have even hooked it up on his last attempt, but the line snapped. He also gave my milk crate dredge a try. That might be a good device for bringing up seaweed, but we were not successful in bringing up a backpack. So Dave told me about another fisherman who happens to be a really good free-diver. "This guy is an animal with the that kind of thing," he said. I figured it was worth a try. Next thing I know, I'm on the phone with with Marvin and Wendi, and their son Gabe, who were aboard their boat, Kismet in Craig. I race over to Craig, to pick them all up, before the tide would start coming in too strong. These wonderful folks seemed to think it was no big deal to help me out in this way. Marvin made several dives in the murky, chilly water, 25-30 feet down. He saw a lot of stuff down there. The current is strong, so the backpack could have drifted a bit. Marvin was very persistent. Right when I was ready to give up on the whole thing, he found it! The color of the backpack was the same color as the water, so it was a real challenge. Fortunately, everything was still in there and intact! Even the postage stamps that I kept in my journal still stick to envelopes, once I dried them. And my pen still writes. All the cards in my wallet still works. Best of all, I made some really cool new friends in this whole process!

This mercury retrograde has been a bit of a doozy, but in a yin/yang sort of a way. Crazy stuff happens, leading to more good stuff happening. What a ride!