I feel like a broken record, but where did the time go? Already halfway through the summer and it feels like I just moved in last week. 

Last Friday was the first Shop at the Dock event. While this is the third year of the program, this year was a bit of an experiment in terms of staggering tours, due to the popularity of the program last year. We weren’t sure whether it would draw huge crowds (which makes the tours difficult due to limited space on the dock) or no one (also makes the tours difficult…), but it ended up being nearly perfect groups for each tour. Everyone seemed really excited and happy to learn about buying off the dock and quite a few people left with seafood.

Camped out at Port Dock 5

Even more than that, the tours seemed to address one of the key issues: people being intimidated or scared by the process of buying directly from fishermen. One of the survey questions was “What was the most important thing you learned from the Shop at the Dock Program?” and some of my favorite responses were “fisher people are nice” and “non-fisher people are welcome”. I’ll continue surveying both participants in the program as well as the fishermen every week to look for ways we can improve the tours week to week and to assess their economic impacts. 

Fresh crab from F/V Orca

Right after Shop at the Dock, the summer scholars headed to Willamette National Forest for a weekend of camping. It was definitely nice to unplug from technology and moving inland made it feel a bit more like summer. By some miracle, I only left with two mosquito bites (thank you, mosquito gods). The beautiful views in Oregon are endless and I’m so grateful I’ve had the chance to experience them.

Summer Scholars at Sahalie Falls

More updates to come next week! Thank you as always for reading. I’ll finish it off with a song from a local band, Hemlock Lane, (from Eugene, Oregon!), who captured this weekend pretty perfectly- “in the car, on our way to better places, without a care, we’re halfway there”.