A buddy Chad, with his awesome catch of the day.
A buddy Chad, with his awesome catch of the day.
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This is the confluence of the Talkeetna and Sheep rivers. The Talkeetna goes hard left, the sheep on the right. This is about 4 miles down from the cabin.
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This is about 2 miles below the cabin, and the most difficult part of the run. The river branches off into 3 different channels, leaving not much water to navigate. The correct one is the right channel, and it's pretty skinny water... but if you choose either of the other two, you'll "rock out", meaning you hit bottom and suck a bunch of gravel through the jet unit and severely damage it.
I'll see if I can upload a video to youtube showing the run through the right channel... it's pretty cool and challenging.
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And this, my friends, is how to properly unload a boat. Wheeler is fully loaded, complete with a girlfriend that never had to get her feet wet.
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Tried a Panorama shot on my phone... kind of cool. Clearly I was rotating a little too fast and got the boat twice.
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So my brother bought a bunch of fireworks, and since I had about 10 gallons of diesel I needed to get rid of and and old broken wheelbarrow, why not?
We all started lobbing Roman Candles at the wheelbarrow and I got the lucky shot & ignited it.
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Exploring a side slough off the river on the 3 wheeler... taken last Saturday.
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Frost tried to bring her New Favorite Stick inside the cabin... seems it was a little too long. She was perplexed.
The grated door on the right is our Bear Door, we got it from a bank that was being remodeled in Anchorage back in the early '90s - it was their vault door.
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This is our neighbor a mile upriver that bought the cabin that I grew up in. He stopped in last Saturday in his new boat that he's testing. It's basically an aluminum jetski, has 165 HP and a 10' hull. It really moves.
These are getting very popular because they're incredibly light and powerful, and can go in water impossible to go through with a normal jet boat. The downside it's a cold, cold ride, especially a couple of feet off the glacial water at 50 MPH.
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...and off they went, at a high rate of speed.
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Here's a clip running that right channel. Towards the end you can hear me hammer the throttle and we start moving. Sorry for the shaky camera, Sharon was holding it up above the windshield and all the ripples in the water will do that.
I set youtube to help the shaky-camera thing, it's still processing. Probably be modified in a half hour or so.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/Aq6BwTfwQ20" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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Cool. How long is the ride to get to the cabin from civilization?
"when socialism fails, blame capitalism and demand more socialism." - A friend
"You know the difference between libs and right-wingers? Libs STFU when evidence refutes their false beliefs." - Another friend
“Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.” - Paulo Coelho
Anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, depending on how heavily loaded I am and how hard I'm running her. If I run at 3500 RPMs, we're really skipping along and it takes a half hour... but I don't like running her that hard. The 302 Redline is limited at 4000 RPMs and I only do that when I'm getting her on step or if I'm about to run over some shallow water like the last part of the video above - we went over water that was about 4" deep, and the faster you go, the higher the boat rides in the water.
I usually run at 3200 RPMs (then the 4-barrels aren't kicked in and the fuel economy goes way up) and it's a leisurely ride. The current is about 16 to 17 MPH, so you're bucking that on the way up.
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That's not bad. It would take me a lot longer than that to get to any cabin worth having around here.
"when socialism fails, blame capitalism and demand more socialism." - A friend
"You know the difference between libs and right-wingers? Libs STFU when evidence refutes their false beliefs." - Another friend
“Don't waste your time with explanations: people only hear what they want to hear.” - Paulo Coelho
Well... Talkeetna is about 80 miles North from Wasilla. So it'll take an hour to drive to Talkeetna, a half hour to load, launch and warm up the boat, then another 40 mins or so running the river.
So figure about 2 hours or so to get from my house to the cabin if everything goes smoothly, which it almost always does.
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