Seward Alaska

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Another chilly, rainy day. Didn't do much today. I am attaching a picture of Jim, Charlie and Barbara cooking hot dogs at lunch on a fire by our RV's. We also had s'mores. It would have been better if it hadn't been drizzling rain. We went to Church tonight and then went out to eat. We ate at a restaurant on the docks next to the fishing boats. Next to us was a fish market that also cleaned the fish that the charter boats brought in. We could see the men cleaning the fish from the restaurant. There were 12 cleaning stations and they were very fast at their work. There were some very big fish. One fish, a halibut, took two men to get it up on the cleaning station. But, he made short work of it. I imagine it didn't take him over 10 minutes to finish it. Seward is a town of about 2700. I imagine the main industry is fishing and tourism since the cruise ships come in there and the train is there also. Nice little town. Something I found interesting was mentioned on TV last night. It was about Alaska's Permanent Fund. During the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970's oil companies flooded the state with money paid for leases to explore and secure drilling rights. The legislature spent all $900 million of that initial lease money within a few years. Alaskans realized that they were about to receive a great deal of money from oil when the pipeline was complete. They wanted to better safeguard the income coming from the pipeline, but the state constitution did not allow for dedicated funds. So, Alaskans voted in 1976 to amend the constitiution to put at least 25% of the oil money into a dedicated fund - The Permanent Fund. This would save money for future generations which would no longer have oil as a source of income. The Permanent Fund has a Board and their goal is to achieve an average rate of return of 5% at risk levels consistent with large public and private funds. The news release said that The Alaska's Permanent Fund Corp. expects to transfer $605 million to the dividend division for checks, down from $801 million last year and the lowest transfer since 2005. The reason for this is that investments last year were flat. Last year's dividends were $1,174. This means that every Alaskan resident - no matter your age received $1,174 from this fund last year. They didn't say how much they would receive this year. They said the Fund ended the year with a value of $40.3 billion. Nice chunk of change. Tomorrow we are going to Girdwood and will be staying in a state park. So, probably no wi-fi and no blog. Monday we will be traveling to Whittier. There we will be taking the RV's on a large ferry to Valdez. I am not sure how many hours long the trip will be.

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