$50 per ounce!

 6:22 am - Wednesday - May 25th - Likely, CA - 42° F, humidity 68%, wind - CALM....crystal clear, blue, sunny skies today with a forecast high of 85° F.....wait, what?  Temps in the 80's?  Nice!  On this date in 2020 we had just arrived in Meeker, CO....we stayed four nights in the city park right on the Smith River....50 amp electrical.....↴

I don't know if you have noticed, but the temperatures have been steadily increasing each day this week, and there hasn't been any sleet, snow, fog, or rain.  I'm no longer wearing a watch cap, pants, and gloves to work, but short sleeved shirts and shorts instead. I wear a sweatshirt first thing in the morning until about 8:30, or 9 am, but after that it is perfect weather.

Tuesday was a much lighter day on the golf course....I only staged 13 golf carts, and only 9 were actually rented, and used.  It was a good day to mow around the tee boxes on 3, 10, 15, 16, 17 and 18, so I headed out around 9 am on the slow moving John Deere riding lawnmower to do just that, and I actually took a couple of pictures of my work for a change....

One of the 16th hole tee boxes (blue and white tees)

The yellow tee box on 16

....as you can see, it is way too tight in there for the fairway mower.   They need to be mowed at least once a week, and so far I have been the one doing them, but as time goes on it will fall to Walt for a period of time, just as mowing the RV sites has fallen to Walt until our next 4 day work week when I will be doing them.  This is one of the things I love about working 4 days, and being off 4 days....every week you work different days.  Next week we will work Monday through Thursday so it will fall to me to do the ball retrieval on the driving range on Monday and Thursday.

I took a shortened lunch break Tuesday as TLE and I were scheduled to join a group from the RV park in a tour of the Willow Creek Ranch Sturgeon Farm located about 15 minutes from LPG&RVR.  Dennis wanted TLE and I to go on the tour so we would be able to answer questions about it for future customers.  At any rate, when I returned from my abbreviated lunch all 5 Club Car electric carts had been returned, plus one of the Yamaha gassers, so I quickly cleaned them, and put them away....only 3 more carts to clean after our tour.

Pierce Flournoy's family has been ranching in the valley for several generations, and for the last 30 years they have been raising sturgeon.  They have a unique water situation on the ranch in that there is a spring which flows year round producing water at a consistent 65° F, which happens to be the ideal temperature for raising sturgeon.  The spring produces 3,000 gallons a MINUTE, and has the proper oxygen concentration for ideal sturgeon farming, so a company out of California contracts with them to raise the sturgeon from the age of 3 until they are 8 years old, and ready to produce their eggs (later processed into caviar), or at least the eggs suitable for caviar.  These are 'white sturgeon' (not their skin color, but the color of their meat).   They have no bones, just cartilage, and muscle.  They live to over 100 years of age, and one was caught in California years ago which was 21 feet in length, and weighed 3,100 pounds!  The sturgeon the Flournoys raise get up to over 100 pounds, and some 4-5 feet long before they are harvested.  The caviar they produce sells for $50/ounce.....each sturgeon produces eggs weighing in at about 10% of their total body weight, so you can imagine how valuable they are......

Pierce Flournoy, sturgeon wrangler

.....I think there are 9, or 10 ponds in all with the spring fed water flowing through them at a rate of 3,000 gallons per minute.  The tour began around 2:15 pm, and was over by 3:30 pm.  TLE and I were back at LPG&RVR by 3:45 pm to finish out our shift.  

TLE were on our way home around 5:05 pm, and sitting on the 'lido deck' with adult beverages a few minutes later.  The evenings are finally getting conducive to sitting outside, and Tuesday evening was so nice we even ate an actual dinner outside for the first time.

Thanks for stopping by!