Thank you, man, I appreciate it and, just get everything you can,
if, if you could dude.
- Good to go? - Yeah.
I am trying to make a go for it here.
Before I ever even visited or been to Alaska.
Sold pretty much every possession besides what I could fit in my truck
and made the move.
I think I kind of romanticized it from books and stuff I'd seen
and it's a lot harder than things look or read.
So it was an eye-opener for sure.
Every day there's a surprise and I still don't know what I don't know.
That makes me nervous when he goes down, like I,
I get a panic attack if I'm in the water over my head, like.
Well, we can't go and tow a log grass with
no prop up barnacles that's for damn sure. No, no.
We almost needed to tow it with like. Yeah.
We needed some diving done on the boat,
we decided to get young Troy to pop down there
with his diving suit and scrape everything off and clean everything up.
Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna owe him now.
We're gonna make sure that Troy gets well paid in whatever he wants, logs,
we might even dig a couple piling holes for him.
In the last two months there's been a huge plankton bloom
and they all attached to the bottom of my boat and
I'm barely going two and a half knots so he's down there
scraping the bottom of my boat trying to make this possible.
Kind of want to take a look down there.
See how many barnacles are falling off. Yeah.
Being able to, to dive and, and
do some favors to have them help go get wood
and start out with my own cabin is vastly important for me.
I had no idea barnacles could grow so fast.
Yeah, no it was two months ago it was cooking, eight knots, and,
I thought I just had some grass on there but when
put it in gear and it blew the,
blew the dust off and I saw all those barnacles I knew there was a problem.
I went underneath my boat one time in a survival suit.
- I was there. - Yeah, right.
I was there. Freaked me out. The rope pulled,
and you know in case I got stuck you guys had the rope you could pull me out.
Yeah, you were down there for a long time
I was about as scared as I'd ever been.
Awesome dude.
- How did it look down there? - Very clean now.
Excellent, man, thank you so much.
Woo! Better than a cup of coffee.
We should, be able to move a little bit now.
Get this show on the road.
Some people are rich by having lots of money,
that was something that I was never really drawn to.
Every time I open my door and go out and do the things that I do you know, I mean,
money can't buy that.
Well, I'm off to go get crab and cockles but first I gotta,
I gotta stop and catch a little bit of bait there.
See if we can find something here.
Hopefully they like this buzz bomb.
I'm going to red bay for the cockles.
There's a lot of fresh water that dumps in there, streams and what have you.
It's also got a lot of crab in the area
so I figure I might as well take a few crab pots with me.
Kill two birds with one stone.
Junior, get back.
What was that?
Damn.
They biting here.
It's a start.
This ain't for you.
At that size I'll probably need at least a half a dozen.
'I was born and raised fishing, you know I, I mean since I was four or five
years old my dad was taking me out.
Well, I got another fish.
I was addicted to that when I was a kid,
and I had a fishing pole stashed on scatter creek.
On a school night I'd even take off for an hour, two hours try not to get caught,
usually by bringing enough home for a meal and that I,
I managed to get out of trouble. So.
That'll make some good crab bait.
That should be enough to fill a couple crab pots.
With plenty of bait, now I guess it's time to go on our next leg of the journey.
I hope the weather don't kick up and all that other happy.
Out here if you don't pull your own weight, you're not gonna last.
For the unambitious or the lay-abouts, chances are this is not the place for you.
All right.
What I have here is a couple of I dock bolts that were a good you know inch thick.
They've definitely seen some wear
so I'm gonna be replacing them with some stainless all thread and
that should keep me in good stead for a while.
Out with the old, in with the new, all ready for winter blowing in blue.
I've got a couple of pretty critical maintenance issues before winter hits.
I really gotta shore up the, stiff leg
which is a rigid pole that goes from the dock to the shore to, keep
the ramp and the float in place.
So yeah, that's not too bad actually.
Gonna be a good, a little bit of fun
fitness trying to get the other one in here.
Okay.
Being prepared for winter isn't so much a matter of pride
as a matter of necessity.
If the mooring point on my stiff leg decides to take off on me,
I could wake up to no dock,
no ramp and a whole big mess of trouble.
Yeah, that'll be close enough for government work.
So, just about to the point where I'm gonna strip away the rest of this line,
unattach it from where it's being held now and reattach it to the,
posts that I just put in here.
So as soon as I cut through this chain it's, it's point of no return.
She's gonna be free flying and I'm gonna
have to get her hooked up to this other side.
Hopefully without anything going terribly awry.
The best laid plans of mice and men, here we go again.
Time for you to say goodnight.
One more adventure with the grinder and then we are in free fall.
She is free. Ouch. Gonna be hot.
Yup, come on.
There we go.
Yay! I'm happy, it's new metal.
I know it's not gonna bust off.
That should keep anything from coming undone.
And it's got enough slack so that at high tide it can bend up this way
and at low tide it can bend down that way. Perfect.
I'll keep an eye on it as it goes but
I think it's about time for me to get in out of this rain and,
start working on the stove pipe before I gotta fire that wood stove up
for the next seven months.
Our float house is our main base and so I mean whether you're you know
on a float, a boat, a house in the middle of nowhere,
you're gonna do anything you can to protect it.
Anytime you know the surge comes in from the
north we feel it like a little earthquake.
Jeez.
That's just part of living on the water but you know.
Maybe we should get a, a log down, a few of them for breakwater.
You can go gather up a couple other things like a log Jack
or something that we can you know go make a mission out of it.
- Okay. - All right.
The breakwater's pretty much just something to break the surge
and break the wake that comes in, in the bay.
You need rope, staples and you need logs,
and you need something heavy that we can use for an anchor.
All right, I think we're just go over here.
And look for something that'll fall right in the water.
- I see a dead one. - I see it.
I think we just saw it at the same time!
There we go.
Woo! It's gonna be a sketchy cut, man, I hope I can get that.
What are you thinking?
I think this is the tree, man.
What I like so much about this tree is that it's fairly girthy
and it doesn't taper too much, that way you can get as much out of the tree
as you can, and if I drop it the right direction it should be fairly easy
to crank off the beach and then rip off with the skiff.
Come on.
Hoo, makes me sweaty.
Hanging on a cliff, man, it's kind of hard to get that face cut in there but,
woo, I got it in.
Start making my back cut.
It's coming.
It's going.
Timber!
- Woop-woop! - Perfect landing.
Good job.
Sweet, man! Well,
get out here and get your saw warmed up, there's work to do!
I'm comin'.
- You made that look easy. - Thanks.
Well, you know, to cut a tree down you just have to be slightly smarter than one.
Still nerve-wracking.
It's a little nerve-wracking.
It'd definitely a pain in the butt to get a log off the beach at any time,
especially with the sun barreling down on you
and you're stumbling over rocks and twigs and everything,
and you kind of are under a time crunch dealing with the tide.
If everything goes according to plan, I'm gonna grab this here log
and rip it right off the beach like it's not even a big deal.
This is an awesome area to come to.
It's beautiful back in here. Very abundant with wildlife.
You know there's deer, there's bear, there's wolves, there's cockles,
there's everything back in here.
Good place to go to gather things for winter.
Before I go get cockles and that, I want to get these pots baited and, and set.
Well, we have arrived at the Anchorage.
We gotta get out of this skiff and do a little bit reconnoitering here.
See if our cove is still full of wood.
Get on in here, come on.
The first thing we do is just go do some beach combing,
Mark every six to eight-inch pole that we can find. Perfect.
Get everything marked out and then we can just go to work.
That's the game plan.
All right, Breanna I'm getting ready to tow this thing out.
Okay, I'm just gonna stay out of the way.
That's awesome! Woo!
All right.
Now we get everything baited up, give them something to chew on.
You got something here, that'll call them in.
Well, this is a good spot to set these crab pots,
I'm gonna set the first one down and then I'm gonna go down about a hundred yards
and set the next one.
I just want a few crab to have a couple different meals out of,
maybe a few crab patties, maybe a crab melt
and maybe even some crab Linguini, you know.
God dang that would be pretty good. You know.
We're probably gonna let them set overnight and
let the bait catch all it can and hopefully the pots will be,
be loaded when we come back.
Time to go get some cockles.
Hang on, junior.
Okay, so, I'm grabbing some straps just in case
we have something we want to pick up
and drag down the beach, but I got the tape.
I'm gonna walk up, high tide line and tie brutus off there just
so he's not chasing deer while we're, chasing logs.
All right, I'm gonna go get flagging
while we can still reach some of these lower logs.
Nothing like finding a big batch of logs to liven you up.
This is bargaining stock, this is, this is value right here.
It's good, nice.
That's perfect.
Been soaked with salt water to actually get a good smell.
Smells like a sour hemlock to me.
One, two, three.
- Perfect. - That's where we want it.
All right that'll float.
Now we're logging.
Just another day shopping at the log mill or log store.
There is no doubt that I am the greenhorn on this journey,
all this stuff is kind of out of my comfort zone.
Maybe built a doghouse before and not
yeah not a lot of experience in the construction.
Biggest thing I need, a roof over my head over there that is, preferably not a tent.
Winter's coming quick. We need to get pilings in,
we need to get a foundation up, get that thing framed.
One, two, three.
This will not be the one and only trip to go get logs, I'm sure.
- Better than I thought. - Better than I expected.
Yeah, we're good over here on this end.
And tide's already creeping up pretty fast I can see.
So, we got our, our work cut out for us.
Perfect.
Well, the main deal is if you're gonna be pulling a log in the water,
it's gotta be in a position where you can get it
and there's some very treacherous coastline,
lots of rocks and pinnacles sticking up
and kelp thicker than you can possibly imagine.
All right.
When I get my buoy established you can just bring them over and attach.
Yeah, I'm just, getting them out of the mess. Okay.
You've gotta think way ahead,
if you know you're gonna have to turn you gotta start turning like a hundred
yards ahead of wherever the hell you need to make the bend.
A lot of in here.
Wonder what that was.
Good save there here, let's, it's that dead head right there.
Why don't you just hook into this one again, Troy.
And we'll, we'll tug it out with the others.
I don't know how well that's in there, but we'll give it a shot.
All right, I'm going to let it go.
Logs, logs everywhere, it makes a person kind of giddy.
We're gonna tow all these logs in one long string,
basically two by two by two.
It's gonna be a long string of logs no doubt.
- Matt! - Yes, sir.
- Are you about done there? - Last one.
Are you ready?
By the look at the pole count in there
with those couple of nice long ones we have down
the beach I think we'll have plenty enough to do, do Troy's foundation.
I think we have everything that Troy's gonna
need to get his house up off the ground.
Essentially, we've taught him how to go to the hardware store out here and,
and which aisle to go down to, to shop.
This is it, find out if this thing behaves,
we just gotta get back to port protection.
This is it. We're here.
We have arrived, junior. Finally.
Boy. Ooh.
Guy could lose a boot in this stuff.
Yeah.
Muck sucks.
Cockles usually stick out, there's one.
Another cockles.
Another one.
Cockles got rough ridges that go all the way across like that, a lot like a scallop.
Right now, as it stands I'm at the bottom of the tide
and its very shallow back in here in these mud flats,
that's kind of what the cockles like but I'm gonna have to get busy because
the tide comes in super, super fast back here and
you can't dig cockles if they're under water.
If only junior would get over and earn his kibbles.
Clam worm, those things they, that's, they eat clams.
That's trippy. Trying to burrow in.
These here I mean I'm gonna test the cockles and make sure they're not
toxic or anything before I even start canning them.
You gotta take and eat a little bit of one and then, you feel your mouth,
lips and tongue start getting numb you know to throw them away.
Otherwise, if you don't then, and then, and if you can go ahead and eat 'em.
Well junior, the tide's coming rapidly, I think we got enough clams.
Hopefully we got some crabs in our pots too.
Any luck at all we'll have, they'll be loaded.
Fire out here, it's a tool we use for survival.
But with it comes inherent dangers.
Is the flue open?
Okay. All right,
man I am looking forward to getting rid of this old,
tired bunch of metalbestos you can see she's well past her retiring date.
Yeah, jeez, that's just nasty.
This is gonna be nice to get rid of.
The creosote on the outside of my stovepipe here is,
carcinogen and it's a fire hazard. Hey kris!
I do have to replace the metalbestos that I have going from my second floor
up through my roof. I really don't want to be
Blaze on in the middle of February and "look my house burns down,
I gotta go hang out with a neighbor for a couple weeks while I throw up
a tent and try to figure out what the hell I'm gonna do
for the next decade trying to rebuild the house."
First hurdle, overcome.
So I'll lift this up, try to get that one out.
Okay. Lift it up?
It's, you're gonna have to spin it out too, it's got a.
It's got a twister thing, too?
Yeah, okay. Okay. There you go.
When it comes maintenance projects like making sure
the fire safety of the wood stove is at top notch.
You're good. You're good. Come down.
Procrastination is not your friend.
Well, let me get it 'cause it bind up.
Here we go.
Good job.
You need to do a little cleanup while I got this out.
Looking very much forward to getting the new rig in here.
All right baby, time to put in the new metalbestos,
see what we can get accomplished here.
Okay, get it under me.
Keep holding it. We have a ring. It's good.
Okay.
That's the problem I've only doing it every fifteen years or so.
Out here we all have to wear a lot of hats.
Need to be able to do your own plumbing, do your own electric,
do your own carpentry, the broader your skill base,
the more likely you're gonna be able to handle anything that comes up.
And trust me, there's a lot of unexpected stuff that comes up
when you're living on the ragged fringe.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. It's, it's sitting in its cradle?
It is. It is.
- Hold the, hold the. - Okay, it's up.
Yeah.
Wow.
New bloody stove pipe.
We did knock quite a bit of stuff out of there.
So, this is the gasket that actually seals the door airtight.
So, you want to make sure that you can close it down when you want to
that way if you're out and about on a long winter day
you can come back, open her up and the fire goes poof instead of having to rebuild.
Man, the wood stove is the, the beating heart of this rig for seven,
eight months out of the year, you know,
we live in a forest with our wood heat it can get pretty uncomfortable.
You know, you don't bring your a game, she's gonna send you home miserable.
Let's use this big stove.
I'm not moving that. I know, right? But it would work good.
So, for this break water one end is definitely gonna need to be anchored
down so that the logs stay in place so we hope that we can find something heavy
that we can use for an anchor.
Wait a minute.
- Wait a minute. Here we go. - What's that?
I don't know; It looks heavy though.
Gotta start hauling this anchor here as soon as we get this hooked up.
- Perfect. - Well done.
Okay. Tell him I just put it in gear.
He wanted me to tell you he just put it in gear.
His motors in gear? Yeah. Okay.
We are hauling logs.
I think I might have found something.
All right. Yeah, nice clove hitch.
Okay. You get the heavy end. No, I'm kidding. I'm like what?
Yeah.
All right, let's hope this pole doesn't snap in half.
That's a nice buck. Three point.
Isn't that something?
Junior you see that?
I don't know why this guy's swimming, you know,
it's a long ways to the next beach unless the
wolves or something pushed him off the, off the island here.
Beautiful little buck though.
There he goes.
He's getting the hell out of dodge man.
Keep going a little bit. Okay?
I'd turn around now and kind of point our bow up.
Okay?
- Bottom. - Wow.
We are definitely anchored right here, right now.
A break water is a fairly simple thing for as far as supplies go.
You just need an anchor, some buoys, line and logs
and pretty much now that we have all the pieces of this puzzle
it's time to start framing it out.
Damn, yeah, butt to butt.
Basically, what we're doing right here is
we're kind of putting these logs butt to butt
and gonna run them up the beach and then the plan is to come back
and put a couple in the gaps and kind of double this thing up.
Guess we're gonna look for a tree.
Now we're definitely gonna go fall a tree. I'm all about it.
And we are definitely gonna need some more logs.
We need another one on that one
and we're gonna need several more on this one here too. So,
we'll see what we can get, we'll see what we can do.
Okay.
I was hoping that the log that we fell was gonna be enough,
but it's looks like we're gonna need a few more,
just to give it a little bit more mass for the waves to have to move.
Breanna's already fallen a tree before,
so I feel like if I help her out a little bit it'll just be,
you know, another member to the team.
That's what I'm thinking right there man, what do you think?
Yeah, that looks like a good one.
Yeah, I think it'll be a great tree.
I dropped a tree about a year ago and it was a little nerve racking.
I definitely had a lot of anxiety, it was the first time with my little saw
and so I just want to go again and see
if I can sharpen my skills a little bit out here.
This is a big tree, Breanna.
It's looking bigger as we get closer. They always do.
You got it though dude, I know you do.
Hoping my saw does.
Ooh, that tree is big, man.
That's good, we need a nice fatty for the break water,
man the small trees don't really work.
Steeper angle babe, you got, hey, hey.
You gotta hold that saw a lot more like that, okay?
There you go.
Okay, Breanna one second here.
I feel like it's gonna fall anytime.
I feel like it's wanting to fall too, but just slowly go, okay?
When you see it start to move, get out of there though.
Get out of there. Go away.
There. Get out of there, it's going.
Sweet dude.
See man, it's hard to fall a tree with a little saw like that.
Man, I mean it's tough, dude.
Yeah, this time, I didn't freak out, so that's good.
That is good, yeah.
- That's improvement for us. - Yeah.
What are you doing, Matt?
Okay, just let go of, they're heading the right direction,
just let go and then we can get in there.
All right, you take off with that.
There you go, you got it? Okay.
Go ahead and pull really hard from where you're at.
There, there you go, that's as good as we can, now take them up to that log.
That's as far as they're gonna go.
All right, so what we're gonna do Troy,
you're just gonna take your shovel and stand it as upright as you can
and you're just gonna step on it you're gonna find the same angle of the shovel,
step on it again, step on it again.
Walk a perfect circle around a Mark and then.
Voila, we have a piling hole.
Look at that, so that's a good baseline and,
that'll be piling hole one, two, three, four, five, six.
Some hard, like, like it owes you money, like kick that.
The plan for the cabin I'm gonna build is
probably gonna change a hundred more times as it has already
but it's gonna be very, very simple, something I can add on to and slowly grow,
just a twelve-by-twelve little box.
You know, I'll just hold it there, you go down and,
and square off that end and I'll let you measure
and make a Mark and I'll just hold it up on here.
It was pretty overwhelming at first when I
first started to break ground to build my house
but I kind of had to figure it out myself,
I just had a chainsaw and I went to town so,
trying to give Troy a leg up basically.
All right, Troy you ready to carry your pilings?
Yeah. I think it's incumbent upon everybody who has,
you know, a working base of knowledge
on how to survive in this part of the world pass it on to the young people,
so they don't have to make every single mistake you made.
You don't want to just be old and, in the way, I want to be old and, and,
you know, help out.
Up, up.
Ok, you go ahead and just hear that thump, that punk, there it is.
Very symbolic moment, the first, first piece of wood for the cabin or shop.
Small start but it's a start.
You know what they said, one small step.
How do you eat an elephant right? A bite at a time.
Well, this is cool guys. Thank you, thank you again.
I'm happy for ya.
All right, we got about nine more of these to do.
First piling is going in;
this is the absolute start of the brand-new cabin for me
that I'll be living in probably the rest of my life.
I can't wait for the day when I'm sitting by my warm fire in my nice cabin
and I will absolutely remember that day when
those, when those first pilings went in.
All right, dude. We got your first row.
Heck yeah. In place. Progress.
It's gonna look like something real shortly dude.
Back doesn't feel as good about it but, that'll heal, maybe.
Here's the first buoy.
Looks like we got a few.
They worked that bait over good, here's a female,
it's got a really white abdomen and that,
you can't keep them they're, you gotta turn them loose.
This one here looks like a female back here too, a big female there.
Not legal.
Darn it, junior.
Now let's move on to the next one.
Well, the first pot, you know, we got crab in them but they're all females.
You gotta throw the females back.
There's my buoy.
By throwing them females back, you know,
that ensures that we're gonna have bigger numbers of crab, you know,
in the future and that.
Only take what you need and that.
Use everything that you take too.
Ooh, what do we got here?
Got some males though.
Here's a male, he's got the real narrow pointy one.
He's a keeper.
Pretty much all these are, these in the bucket.
I Cherish the fact that I'm able to harvest my own food and, the way that I do.
This one's, no doubt six inches.
It's a lot of work to do it but we got just about everything we need
around here, and we got the best there is.
I got another male here, he's a vibrant little guy.
With these cockles and the crab that,
that kind of makes me wonder what the rich people are having because
even the rich people can't afford what I got.
That's not too bad actually.
Take these crab home probably and steam them up and, and,
might make some crab melts and clam chowder, pretty successful I'd say.
I'm thoroughly gonna enjoy it every bit.
All righty, then.
This is probably gonna be the last log of this thing, man.
You want me to push this one, right? Yeah.
Absolutely, I see Breanna growing as a bush woman.
When we first moved out here, she was afraid to go dock the skiff in town,
now she has no problem with that.
And she had to learn from not knowing how to do it
to absolutely falling big trees with her tiny little saw.
That's a huge amount of growth and it's just an amazing thing to see in somebody.
All right. Cool babe, thanks. You're good.
- Okay. - Okay.
About at the end of this project here.
Yeah, it looks like it.
- This'll work good. - Yeah.
All right, come here and hold this for me please.
All right, I don't think we're gonna have to let this sit a couple tides
to maybe adjust it later but as far as it goes for right now, I think it's done.
Dude, what do you think? Yeah, I think so too. Looks good.
It does look good.
It just needs, needs to just adjust with the tide so.
Yeah, work its way around.
Can always adjust everything that's why we left it loose, so.
All right, cool.
Definitely looks like a break water. Doesn't it, though?
Yeah, I think it'll work good.
Here we go.
Make sure she's fired up and doing what she's designed.
Out here we're always building on top of what's gone before, you know,
we never fall short of the to do list.
The reclamation of the rain forest, she takes back things in a,
in a pretty quick timeline,
you gotta be flexible and inventive and if you can do both with a smile,
chances are you're gonna make it here.
Well, here's to getting her done.
Well sweet, should we go see if it works, let's try to wake it or something.
Okay.
Definitely slows it down before it gets to us.
Yeah, and the thing is, is like right here,
these are going right towards the shore,
- not really towards our house. - Yeah.
Yeah, it definitely knocks it down pretty quickly.
The break water looks absolutely great.
It looks just how I've always seen them look,
it's just another little piece of the puzzle
that helps it being a little bit more comfortable to live out here.
Well sweet, man. I'm glad that this is done.
Another chore checked off the list. Hell yeah,
good job, good job with that tree man, you did a killer job.
Thank you.
Let's have a cocktail.
Well, our water is a boiling, she's, boiling like crazy.
Now we just drop these puppies in there.
I really appreciate the life that I've created myself, you know, I mean
all I ever thought about was fishing, and hunting and trapping, here I am, you know,
I'm basically living my dream.
I'm gonna let them bubble for a while.
You know I didn't dream about fancy cars or yachts or anything like that.
That's what the finished product looks like.
I don't think I'd want any other life, you know, I mean this is perfect for me.
Yup, people pay big money for this stuff
and you gonna probably want a crab omelet now.
Good stuff, man.
There is still a lot, a lot of work to do
but this is a day that I will never forget.
All right, I'm gonna leave you to it, man.
Yeah, it's time to load up.
This is a, it's a good head start for you, man.
A long road ahead still that's for sure,
lots of work yet to be done.