Mitzvot in Hoonah - and Progress

Warm greetings to all of you who are following our adventure! 

Three important things happened this week:

1.) We caught some fish.

Ok, not real fish, at least not yet. (More about fishing below.) You will recall that last week I hung a sign out behind the boat welcoming cruise ship visitors to Hoonah, in Hebrew & English, from the the "Hooner Rov", inviting people to stop by and say hello. Several people did , in fact, stop, point, smile and snap pics. Well, Wednesday evening two lovely Israeli couples actually dropped in: Gaby & Diana and Alex & Claudia. (I am omitting their surnames out of respect for their privacy.) 

We were delighted to offer them coffee on the Sephina. We shmoozed, chatted about how all all these Jews ended up in this most unlikely of places, gave them a tour of the boat, and made new friends. Hachnasat Orchim (we fulfilled the mitzvah of inviting guests to your home) in Hoonah, Alaska. You can find mitzvot anywhere if you look hard enough. Big shout out to Alex, Claudia, Gaby and Diana if you're reading this - great meeting you all!

2.) I spun the engine.

This week I hand cranked the main engine, a Caterpillar 3304 turbo-diesel, for the first time. I'm delighted to report that she spun just fine, no indications of problems. The motor oil looks good as well. I was also able to hand spin the propeller at the shaft, also bodes well.

3.) Bottom painting.

The bulk of our efforts this week went to grinding, scraping, and sanding the hull, and applying the anti-rust primer to the hull. Even with only the bottom painted, it looks like a different boat. And with the bottom looking def, one begins to feel that we're making real progress. 

It takes a full day just to paint one side of the boat, so Sunday and Monday (weather permitting) we will apply the ablative anti-fouling topcoat to the bottom, install new sacrificial anodes (13 of them) and then proceed to phase three: getting the mechanicals ready for sea. After that, I hope to put the Sephina in the water, sometime during the second week of September. 

I also did a little more asking around about Jews of Hoonah. One of the locals said that yes, at one point, there were a handful of Jews who lived here. Were they merchants, trappers, tradesmen? Apparently, most of them were in the smoked salmon business. DUH - all they catch here is salmon (five kinds). OK they also catch rockfish & halibut - but a lot of salmon. In fact, they had a salmon cannery here until the 1960s or so.

I'm told that the winter king salmon they harvest here have the perfect fat content for making great lox, and so the Yidden were here, making lox to sell back east and ship to Europe. Go figure.

Shabbat Shalom and Chodesh Tov from the last frontier - Hoonah, Alaska.