Friday in Soldotna

Friday, July 9 - Tomorrow we get to go halibut fishing with Wendy's brother, Tim!  We are so excited.  We have also decided to try our luck fishing in the Kenai River on Sunday, which is right beside our campground, so we went over today and bought some fishing tackle (hooks, weights, etc.).  We finally decided on 3-day fishing license for now, knowing we might have to buy again if we get a chance to fish again.  The 3-day license is $35 each.  But being right on the Kenai, we thought we just had to give that a try.  We watched someone yesterday across the river pull in a king salmon, and someone on our side of the river brought down a beautiful red salmon to the cleaning station where we were standing.  Here's the walkway from our campground, and the river itself from our walkway.

We will probably try on the other side on Sunday, maybe just down from where these people are fishing.  They don't want you standing on the steps or the bank here at the campground, you are supposed to stand in the water to keep from eroding the bank.  I don't know about that!  My boots are not that tall.

Here's the red salmon from Thursday.  Another lady was cleaning one this morning, she said she caught three pretty quick.  Paul, sorry we don't have one on the end of our poles to show you yet.  Maybe tomorrow with a halibut.  Although they are silver on the outside, the meat itself is quite red.

We drove around some today.  The mountain in the middle of the picture, in the background is Redout, one of Alaska's active volcanos.  Fortunately, it is not spewing forth right now.  The second mountain is Spur Mountain.  These are part of the beautiful Alaska range.

We drove down to the Cook Inlet as well.  They do some quad riding in the loose sand here.  Tomorrow dip-netting season starts, which we hope to go watch sometime this weekend.  It is only open to Alaska residents, though.  Us "foreigners" are not even allowed to help.

Joe was interested is finding where the Kenai River dumped into the Cook Inlet so we drove around Kenai Landing, and then Kenai and finally found access to it.  You can see the mouth here where it goes out into the Inlet.l

We tried to find Tim's house but finally gave up on that and headed back to the campground.  There is a good Brenda rock here at the campground, but we just couldn't figure out how to get it in the box for Brenda.

David grilled steaks for us tonight, so we had a great dinner.  Hopefully, we'll bring home some halibut tomorrow for David to cook for us all, since he seems to be the grill chef.  He's getting the cold that we have all had this week, so he has opted out of our fishing trip tomorrow.

We have added to our traveling zoo so I thought it was time to show them again.  Okie, our lead dog, is our latest addition.

We have also added a musk ox, a baby moose and a reindeer.  We are still in the market for a wolf, beaver, and and a big old grizzly bear to go with the baby grizzly we have.