The Fishin' Academicians

Fairbanks is sinking.

As with many places in Northern Alaska, the city of Fairbanks is built upon a massive bed of permafrost: a subterranean layer of permanently frozen earth. The permafrost is melting. As the earth gets warmer, the layer of permafrost under the foundations of many buildings in Fairbanks is thawing causing buildings to list unevenly. Several large sinkholes have opened around the city and so far little has been done to offset this trend.

I learned these facts while fishing for Silver salmon on the Little Susitna River near Wasilla, Alaska. I traveled to Alaska to work with the Instructional Technology Department in the Matanuska-Susitna, or Mat-Su Borough School District in Palmer, Alaska. They invited me for a return trip to the lovely Wasilla Valley to assist in their back-to-school technology integration program.

Mat-Su’s Instructional Technology Specialist Brett Hill introduced me to his friend Greg Gioaque, a Mat-Su teacher who offered to guide my first salmon fishing trip in Alaska. I arrive at the dock later than the 6:30 am meeting time and apologize to the group sitting in the aluminum flat bottom river boat. The moss colored water contrasts slightly with the dull grey sky. Greg cheerfully explains that while salmon are most active during first light, the cloud cover will prolong their activity into the late morning.

Along with us is Greg’s former English teacher Dave and his wife Judith, also a former teacher. Both are now retired and fish with Greg often. We strike up easy conversation about our mutual love of teaching, the unique challenges today’s educators, and, of course, fishing stories – though theirs are more numerous than mine.

We make our way up the shallow Little Su with Greg’s steady hand on the till. Greg has been fishing the river since the age of five and he describes each section as aging friend whose best days are now the stuff of memory.

Greg anchors the boat at a particular bend and we begin to drift cast using baited hooks. Greg expertly rigs each rod with a floater and neon pink salmon eggs on a two hook rig. He positions each of us so that our lines won’t cross. After several unsuccessful casts, he picks up the leaded anchor and takes us to a section he calls “The Promised Land.”

As we make our way upriver Greg shares that in years past the Little Su would be choked with salmon: forty pound Kings, silvers, pinks, chum and the elusive scarlet sockeye swimming towards their native spawning grounds by the tens of thousands.

It’s a sight I have trouble imagining and may never actually witness.

We finally case out the Promised Land. Greg points out numerous signs of what appear to be an abundance of fish. He says that spawning salmon aren’t eating and so we’re not baiting them with food as much as irritating them causing them to attack the lure by biting it.

We once again let our bait drift back with the current and almost immediately both Dave gets a fish on. I begin reeling my rig in so as not to interfere with Dave’s fish when my rod jerks downward and I feel the unmistakable pull of a big fish struggling.

Dave and I move to opposite sides of the boat to minimize the chance of crossing our lines and losing one or both fish. I keep my tip up and reel as quickly and smoothly as I can when I see my fish jump clear out of the water. It is an awesome sight. Greg reminds me to keep the pressure on because a fish that breaks the water could be a fish that breaks the line. I continue to reel in, maneuvering the fish close to the boat. He tries to swim underneath, but I somehow manage to steer him towards Greg’s outstretched net and just like that I’ve caught my first Alaskan Silver salmon.

After a valiant fight, Dave’s fish proves to be a huge chum salmon and so he is released and we continue fishing the Promised Land. Judith quickly pulls in two good sized silvers and I follow with my second silver caught on a spinner. Greg casts expertly into a hole and immediately reels in another. Not five minutes pass when he casts into the hole and we see another silver swim up and take the lure.

Dave has yet to catch his limit of two and we relax on the boat chairs while Dave plies the waters with expert casts.

Earlier we swung past a deep hole that Greg said once held four or five thousand fish. Now estimated it contained count of four or five hundred.

I ask him if the pressures on salmon in Puget Sound watersheds – development, commercial fishing, habitat loss, and over fishing – are also reducing the salmon runs in Alaska.

His answer surprised me. Greg opined that in addition to possible over-fishing, the run strength may be more compromised by uncharacteristic flooding during Fall spawning or Spring hatching cycles along with unseasonably warm waters delaying the run. He’s says he’s optimistic that the run is just late this year and that the salmon will come back.

So what, I asked, is causing the unseasonably warm waters?

That’s when Judith told me that due to global warming Fairbanks is sinking, Polar bears are drowning, and Native Alaskan Elders can no longer safely predict the weather as they watch their ancestral homes engulfed by a rising ocean.

“Global warming,” she said assuredly, adding, “And some people still think it’s a lie.”

I couldn’t help but think, “What hope is there for man if salmon are lost?”

Not long ago President George W. Bush said, “I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

On this count, at least, I hope he is right.

Blog Crabbin'

Washington is my favorite state. The San Juan Islands are my favorite part of Washington. Lopez Island is my favorite of the San Juans.

It was in this favorite of favorite places where I learned several things, the most important of which was this: A Rock crab can pinch a man's finger off clean.

I learned this important lesson while on a small skiff with my friend Gary. I was staying with Gary and his lovely wife Leora at their beautiful house on Mackay Bay on Lopez. We were picking up crab pots - not pots so much as traps - and hoping to collect enough fresh Dungeness crabs for dinner. My job was to haul the crab pots onto the skiff while Gary sorted the crabs into two crab buckets: one for desirable Dungeness and one for the troublesome Rocks.

While the ruby colored Rock crab are edible, they are smaller than Dungeness, contain less meat, yet are infinitely more aggressive. Clearly suffering from some inferiority complex, they swarm crab pots like wolf packs, fighting off their larger cousins while eating all the bait.

Gary has begun the first Rock crab relocation program on Lopez. Hailing from New Jersey, I am intimately familiar with the witness relocation program and have had several childhood friends "disappear," presumably taking on new identities in another part of the country. Gary was transplanting the Rocks from his favorite crabbing spot on the North end of the Bay to the South end - rather like relocating Wiseguys from New Jersey to South Florida.

As I hauled up the first of several pots, I saw fiesty little Gumba crabs were swarming around the bait angrily and several of them fell through the trap landing in a scramble by my bare feet.

With a look that said, "You want a piece of me?" a particularly maladjusted Rock crab opened an impressive left claw and aimed a stiff pinch at my little toe. Luckily I juked to the right, grabbed one his back legs and tossed Rocky overboard. That was when Gary taught me the most important lesson of the trip: evidently, there are a number of crabbers on Lopez with missing appendages.

My digits intact and the Rock exodus complete, we discovered that we had caught just enough of the sweet Dungeness for a lovely dinner. We steamed the crabs in fresh sea water and served them with drawn butter, corn on the cob, pasta salad and summer's bountiful blueberries all grown on an organic farm on Lopez.

As Bruce Springsteen, the "Jersey Bard" said, "Summer's long, but I guess it ain't very sweet around here anymore."

I'm sure the Rocks would have agreed.

Issaquah Teacher Project 2.0

Nestled in the majestic Cascade Mountains in Central Washington is the Sleeping Lady Conference Center where I'm participating in the newly revamped Issaquah Teacher Project: ITP 2.0. ITP is without question one of the most innovative professional development initiatives in which I've ever had the pleasure to participate.

Chief among the objectives of ITP is building technology and curriculum integration capacity among the entire teaching staff in the Issaquah school district. Promethean's Activclassrooms are Issaquah's District Standard, and this year ITP 2.0 has been modified to integrate the Activclassroom into the content and context of this extraordinary program.

The Issaquah learning community is quite fortunate to have the leadership team of Colleen Dixon, Eric Ensey, Leslie Lederman, Rich Butler and Josh Moore. These outstanding educators were themselves involved in the Washington State Teacher Leadership Project (TLP) funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation nearly ten years ago. This project was so successful that the team decided to replicate the initiative in-house - which, incidentally, was the original intent of TLP, though few districts in Washington took on this charge.

I've known Colleen, Eric and Leslie for a number of years as I was part of the team that developed and supported both the Gates Foundation-funded Teacher Leadership Project and the Smart Tools Academy for Washington Principals and Superintendents.

Rather than learning technology tools in a "just-in-case" mode, ITP teachers are learning about the theoretical underpinnings of constructivism in general and the work of the Russian Psychologist Lev Vygotksy and his conceptual Zone of Proximal Development in particular. It is within this new cognitive framework that teachers are honing their curriculum and instructional design skills by collaboratively building digital learning scaffolds to help organize, support and extend student thinking, creativity, conceptual understanding and knowledge construction.

When teachers build digital learning scaffolds they judge the potential benefits by using the following guiding questions:

*Is any NEW, DEEPER or CREATIVE LEARNING taking place?
*Is it developing a Core Thinking Skill?
*Would it be better suited for paper and pencil?
*What value did technology add to the lesson?"
Core Thinking Skills

The Core Thinking are skills are deemed essential to using information in the learning process and include:

*Improving communication
* Locating and harvesting information
*Organizing information into new formats
*Analyzing information
*Producing reports and new products
*Evaluating throughout the learning process

The overarching understanding for ITP is, "Throughout life, our students will understand and apply current and emerging technologies to extend their personal abilities and productivity. Based on this key assumption, how can digital immigrants best teach so that digital natives can best learn?" This imperative came from the Issaquah School Boards' Learning Ends for Students: http://www.issaquah.wednet.edu/board/new_ends.asp.

This is an essential question that faces all of today's educators and will continue to challenge new and emerging generations of educators to come. The teachers enrolled in the ITP project are boldly facing this challenge head on. Now equipped with 21st Century learning environments, Issaquah teachers are more prepared than ever to meet the learning needs of the digital natives they'll see in September.

For more information about ITP, please contact Issaquah Director of Educational Technology Collen Dixon, or Instructional Technology Specialists Eric Ensey or Leslie Lederman.

Three Wild Kings Revisited

King, or Chinook, Salmon numbers had been dwindling in Puget, due to a variety of reasons, for many years. So much in fact, that in 1994 the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife indefinitely closed a highly sensitive region, Area 9, to fishing for King Salmon.

Anglers lamented the closure but recognized that over time it would serve the greater good as over-fishing and habitat loss due to rampant development, logging and agricultural run off put too many pressures on the once abundant salmon.

Salmon hatcheries were charged with rearing and releasing millions of "hatchery-raised" Chinook Salmon to improve the depleted stocks. Fish reared in hatcheries have a small adipose fin clipped off in order to differentiate them from native or wild King Salmon.

In the thirteen years since the closure, department officials learned from professional fish counters - an actual job! - determined that the King Salmon were sufficient to open Region 9. While the region was open for both wild and hatchery-raised salmon, only the non-native hatchery fish (the ones without the tiny adipose fin) could be kept. The Wild Kings still had to be released. This is precisely where my friend Rick motored to on my first ever salmon fishing trip last week.

We made our way towards the southwest bank of an undersea horseshoe formation south of Whidbey Island. There we used down-riggers to lower our lines to about 120 feet and began a slow troll up and down the bank. We were using flashers on a forty inch leader culminating in a Red-Striped Coyote Flasher.

Within a short time the tip my rod danced. I reeled up cautiously then whipped the rod upwards in an attempt to set the hook. Sadly, I jerked the hook completely out of the fish's mouth and I reeled up a pathetically empty line.

Although Rick was a patient teacher, the next attempt went little better, as did the third, fourth, fifth and sixth. On the seventh try, however, I didn't lose the fish until it was reeled almost half way to the boat. This was somewhat discouraging since, after four hours on troll patrol, I hadn't yet actually seen a salmon. I'd felt seven of them, but we never made eye contact.

Fishermen tell a lot of stories. This explains a good part of the appeal of fishing for me because I like stories. Rick, as it turned out, also liked stories - particularly telling them. This actually worked out fine for me because I was fishing, not catching, and apparently had a lot of time on my hands.

Rick told some great fishing and hunting stories and kept me entertained for the better part of the next four hours.

We were evidently waiting until the tide changed - twelve hours from when we started fishing. I was hoping that Rick didn't run out of stories.

Luckily, sometime around the tenth hour my rod dipped in that telltale way I'd come to hope for during the better part of the day. I gingerly lifted my rod from the down-rigger, reeled in until I felt some pressure, and then jerked the rod up, but not too vigorously. As I reeled in, the fish gave surprising resistance as I pulled it in close to the boat. Sure enough, it was a beautiful King Salmon. With the fish still in the water next to the boat, Rick estimated its weight to be about 12 pounds. However, we saw the adipose fin clearly and so we released this first Wild King.

A short while later, I caught another fish, this time an estimated 14 pounder. Sadly, it too was a Wild King and so we released it back to the ocean. The "bite," however, was definitely on!

The next fish nearly ripped the rod out of my hands as it fought valiantly to swim away. I paid out more than I ever had trying to catch a fish. I felt as though I was hauling in a lead weight. By the time I had the fish up to the boat both of my wrists were aching as I steered the fish towards the port side. An enormous twenty five pound king stared up at me. Sure enough, it was another Wild King - and clearly the largest fish I had ever caught - and released.

Not more than ten minutes later I caught and landed another King, but this lacked an adipose fin and could be kept. While dropping my line in the water, I caught a small Silver of Coho Salmon and had two nice fish for nearly fourteen hours on the water (see image at right).

That Friday night I relived my childhood memories of a fish dinner, only this time I had caught the fish. I grilled both the King and Coho filets on an open flame and served them to good friends with a lemon caper white wine sauce, wild rice, fresh corn on the cob, and a delightful La Crema Pinot Noir - a new ritual in the making.

There is a Chinese proverb which states, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."

My newest proverb goes something like this, "Give a man a salmon and you'll have a friend for a day. Teach a man to fish for salmon, and you'll have a friend for life."

Thanks for being such a good teacher, Rick.

Three Wild Kings

Last week I was the lucky recipient of three fishy visitations.

As I was raised in a Roman Catholic household, I am familiar with the mythic relevance of fish. Due to certain commonly held theological musings, on Friday nights devout Roman Catholics refused to dine on anything that didn’t once swim...regularly. For me that meant that Friday evenings brought the sight of fish sticks, fried cod, dried cod, or baked cod, served with the obligatory side of Puerto Rican rice and beans.

For me, fish on Fridays meant more than just a healthy meal: it was the story behind the dinner that made it meaningful. My brother and sisters and I felt a certain piety as we picked small bones from our teeth. My older, holier-than-thou sister always had the biggest pile of bones.

When my friend Rick asked if I’d like to go salmon fishing with him a few days ago, I accepted his offer without hesitation. I’ve lived in Seattle for the past seventeen years and thought it high time that I try catching a salmon.

- Internal Vocalization Alert -

At this point, please internalize the voice of David Attenborough, noted BBC wildlife narrator, reading the following passage:

Seattle is built upon the foundations of a salmon-centric culture that dates back thousands of years. The Native Peoples of the Puget Sound basin have long revered the migratory salmon, the king of the fishes.

An anadromous fish, salmon are born and reared in the numerous rivers and lakes of Washington State in North America (which should have been ours). At some point at the dawn of their life cycle, an ancient switch is engaged and the fish move en masse from their fresh water environment to the open sea where they undergo a dramatic physiological transformation.

The salmon collect in Puget Sound, then speed through channels deep in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and out into the wild expanse of the Pacific Ocean. There they will live for three to five years, swimming tens of thousands of miles, eating, avoiding being eaten, and encountering untold stories of their own.

Near the final stage of their lives, another switch deep inside the brains of surviving adults is ultimately engaged and the salmon gather for an epic journey back to the very spot from where they themselves were hatched. It is here, in their ancestral river beds, that the surviving members of the hatch come to lay and fertilize eggs of their own. Succumbing to the rigors of their final journey home, the exhausted salmon take their final respite alongside the newly laid eggs they’ve carried for so far for so long. And thus the salmon saga begins anew.

- End Narration -

To be continued...