Sept. 6 was a momentous day for members of the Smith River Kiwanis Club and local residents, as earth-moving began on the first pond of the proposed fish hatchery.

Although the hatchery has been in the talking and planning stage for over a year, actual basic work has only just begun. The chairman of the hatchery program, Art Lawn, has spent many hours with officials in setting up plans for the erecting of the necessary buildings, troughs and ponds.

The first pond will be 50 feet long, 50 feet wide and 12 feet deep, but will only be filled with seven feet of water and is circulated counter-clockwise.  This will give the fish the effect of being in the motion of swimming at all times. A fish ladder is also part of the first construction.

Plans are under way to erect signs showing the gifts of time, money and equipment from residents and businesses of both Smith River and Crescent City that have made this hatchery project possible in such a short period of time.

Locals turn movie stars

You can spend your time crafting alternatives in the stakeholder meetings. You can comment at the science committee meetings. You can talk for one minute to the Blue Ribbon Task force. Then that task force will cut up all of your carefully crafted alternatives, and forward any closures it wants to the Fish and Game Commission, which will rubber-stamp it into law. Here are a couple of examples of how this process has worked.

In the North Central Area, all of the fishermen, local businesses, environmental groups and elected officials supported a fishermen’s alternative. This alternative was produced with outside funding controlled by the fishing community, and had local support as a good balance between harm and protection.  It was painfully crafted to meet all science team requirements.

Even with this level of support and compliance, the Blue Ribbon Task Force would not adopt it. It had to be submitted to the commission as an outside alternative.

In the weeks leading up to that commission meeting, the commissioners were on the verge of stopping the whole MPA process. It was a 3-2 vote for a pause. Suddenly, a commissioner (who supported the stoppage) claimed she had a conflict with her employer and had to remove herself from her chair.

George was a 1955 graduate from a high school in Kansas. While in school he played football and ran track. His time of 4:24 in the mile run is still the school record. After high school he joined the Air Force and spent 21 years, 11 days serving before he retired at Requa. George first started coaching at Del Norte in 1993, when he worked as an assistant in track for coach Al Morris.

He has continued assisting in the track program ever since. Working for coach Morris, then for coaches Gary Hall, Terry Vance and now Scott Lindsey, has been real rewarding.

He had nothing but praise for all of them, and how much he learned from each. In 1994 he started coaching boys soccer as an assistant to Dan Gonzales and was with the program when they won  their only Humboldt-Del Norte league championship in 1995. In 1997 George took over as the head coach for the girls soccer program.

Indeed, since two of its three flights go to San Fran­cisco, SkyWest basically allows you to take a one-stop trip from Crescent City to almost anywhere.

Catching those connecting flights in the Bay Area can be challenging. Sure, the sky is blue this week and the departures from Del Norte County Airport are probably timely. But sometimes fog gets in the way. Not a huge deal if you don’t mind getting moved to a later connecting flight out of SF; the folks behind the local check-in counter are adept at doing that for you automatically when our little airstrip is shrouded in gray.

Such was the case a week ago Saturday morning when we sought to begin a journey to visit family in Cape Cod. We got up in the dark for some last-minute packing and drove the five minutes to the stagecoach station a half-hour ahead of our scheduled 8:52 a.m. takeoff. It had been postponed to 10:30 by fog. One of the charms of the local airport is that if your car is parked outside, you don’t have to wait out delays in the, ahem, terminal. We hit a coffeehouse, picked up some sundries at a drug store, and made it back in plenty of time to learn of another one-hour postponement. This allowed us to go home and ponder what else we should have packed.

The weather today has been as close to perfect as I could wish for. If only we had more of these days! But if we did we’d never find a stretch of beach to walk the dogs or enough unbroken sand dollars to fill the basket in the guest room. If our weather were like this all the time, Del Norte County would be so crowded with people and congested with traffic that we’d never be able to hear the foghorn.

I have to disagree with the woman who finds the foghorn noise offensive. It’s one of the reasons I choose to live near the ocean. I love the soundtrack of foghorns and buoy bells. At my last home in Brookings I had to really strain to hear the foghorn. Where we live now the foghorn sometimes is drowned out by the barking of the sea lions.

On this balmy evening as I try to concentrate on writing this column I keep thinking about things that bug me like someone complaining about the foghorn. Here’s another one: Three women, all of them younger than me, called me “Hon” last Saturday. “Hon!” Where did that come from?