It’s a rare moment during the busy Alaskan summer when the stars align and two friends end up with a day off together. You have to make the most of it. So when it so happened back in June, my buddy Jordan and I commandeered a couple of packrafts from True North Kayak Adventures and hit the trail to the lake at the base of Grewingk Glacier, Alaska.
It might be late April but the snow is still falling here in Homer, Alaska. My wife and I drove 3,000 miles to get here from Newport, Oregon, where I worked on a crab boat for the winter and she worked at a local shop. I thought we’d lucked out and completely missed the Alaskan winter, but here’s it’s frosty grasp reaching up to remind us we’re living near the top of the world.
Moolack Beach just north of Newport, Oregon may be the best place to search for sea glass, agates, and fossils on the entire Oregon Coast. Then again, I haven’t explored every inch of sand just yet, but I can pretty much garuantee that Moolack is a good bet for your next beach foraging trip.
Two great things I love come together in a single photo — film photography and beach life. Of course, light leaks aren’t usually something you’re excited to see when you get a roll of negatives developed, but sometimes they make happy accidents like this that are kind of cool.
Last summer I bought an old Olympus Pen FT half-frame film camera off of eBay and took it on vacation to St. Petersburg, Florida. We went on a half-day fishing trip aboard the Super Queen with Captain Stan and bagged up a bunch of little grunt fish a even a few puffer fish. Even with 94 people on board there was a lot of fishing action. After a ~45 minute boat ride out to the fishing grounds it was all lines in, and all lines down. As soon as my little circle hooked tipped with squid made it to the ocean floor there was a fish nibbling and soon hooked.
After surviving our first Alaskan winter, my wife and I finally found time for some much needed R&R. We packed our bags this past week and flew down to Saint Petersburg, Florida for a few days of fun in the sun before heading up to Georgia to visit family and friends.
Life doesn’t stop at the end of the road in Homer, Alaska.
Across Kachemak Bay several small towns eek out an existence in rural enclaves wedged inbetween steep mountain terrain and tranquil bays.
Go ahead, call me a slacker — it’s true. I only posted one single blog post in 2017, and even that was a link to some freelance work I squeezed in between fishing trips.
I don’t regret it.
I was burned out. I was lazy. I didn’t want to put the time and energy into writing blog posts or editing photos. Hell, I didn’t even feel like carrying around my camera most days, or at all, really. And that’s a new level of lazy, especially when I’ve had the opportunity to explore a beautiful and exotic place like Southcentral Alaska. Screw it, I needed a break.
And now I’m back at it, refreshed and rejuvenated and in between fishing seasons. So here’s an update from a year living in Homer, Alaska:
Fresh off a six-month trek around South America, my wife and I decided to dive into our next “crazy adventure.” We packed up a trailer in Atlanta and hit the road for Homer, AK, a small town quite literally at the end of the road near the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula.
Before we left, we didn’t have a place to live or jobs lined up. But the appeal of life in this outdoor paradise in the summer—which thaws the rugged winter landscape and opens up a wide range of adventures, from hiking to rock climbing, and of course fishing—seemed worth the risk…
