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Marc Daniels, who's been building and restoring traditional skin-on-frame sea kayaks for decades, is leading a niĝilax̂ build in Northern California, along with KUCB’s Kanesia McGlashan-Price who is apprenticing and documenting the process.

The National Weather Service is reshaping its coastal waters across Alaska, adding new zones and more accurate forecasting.“We decided to go ahead and pare down our marine zones,” said Aviva Braun, warning coordination meteorologist for the Anchorage weather service office. “So what is currently the coastal water forecast, which goes from shoreline up to 100 nautical miles, is now going from shoreline to 15 nautical miles, and then 15 nautical miles and out. So they’ll be split into two zones, essentially.”

A meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Anchorage said a fairly strong low pressure system is traversing the Aleutians from West to East. Cold air, mixed with subtropical moisture, is leading to heavy snow and high winds.

At a U.S. Senate committee hearing about the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down off South Carolina, Sen. Lisa Murkowski lashed out at the Biden administration. “As an Alaskan, I am so angry, I want to use other words, but I’m not going to,” said Murkowski, who asked representatives from the Defense Department why the administration waited so long to respond to the threat – and why it did not take action, when the surveillance balloon first entered U.S. waters north of the Aleutian Islands on Jan. 28.

The district’s Board of Education will hold interviews in Naknek with each of the candidates on Feb. 16 - 17. The candidates will also tour the community, visit the school and attend a public community candidate forum on Feb. 16. The new superintendent will start around July 1.

Unalaska is officially connected to high speed fiber internet, but not everyone on the island has access to the new service.GCI connected its first customers in December, and now, Rural Affairs Director Jenifer Nelson said around 200 homes in the community of about 4,500 year-round residents are turned on and either actively using the fiber broadband or ready to start service.

A collection of 50-year-old audio recordings from the Aleutians have been digitized and are now accessible online.The recordings were part of an Unalaska school project from the ‘70s. A group of students and their teacher recorded various Elders in hopes of documenting the language, culture and history of the Unangax̂ community and the Aleutian region.There’s about 60 reel-to-reel audio tapes that make up the collection. They include topics from day-to-day activities to historic events, fishing stories and recipes, to accounts from Makushin and the other lost villages that were forcibly evacuated during World War II.

The local Russian Orthodox community celebrated Slavi, or Russian Christmas, over the weekend, which follows the Julian calendar and takes place Jan. 7. It was the first time the church held in-person Christmas services since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unalaska’s Church of the Holy Ascension is one of the oldest churches in Alaska, and arguably the oldest Russian Orthodox church in the state. On Russian Orthodox Christmas, congregants stood at the front of the church, spinning large, colorfully decorated stars in clockwise circles, while the choir sang traditional songs in Russian, Unangam Tunuu, English and the Eastern Orthodox Church’s liturgical language, Slavonic.

Atka, just east of Adak in the Aleutians, is in danger of losing electrical power because of problems with its hydro plant and backup generators; a collection of 50-year-old audio recordings from the Aleutians have been digitized and are now available online; and Alaska Army suicides decreased last year, reaching their lowest point since 2018.

The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery has been closed for two years, and along with it, Bering Sea snow crab have abruptly disappeared, causing another complete closure. Together, the fisheries generally bring in millions of dollars to the fleet and the coastal Alaska communities that rely on them. Since 2021, when king crab closed and snow crab saw a huge decline in harvest numbers, fishermen have taken an estimated $287.7 million hit. Without those fisheries and without that revenue, more and more boats are relying on other work like fishing for cod and small amounts of bairdi crab or summer tendering gigs just to make ends meet. So when a group of Bering Sea fishermen recently heard they’d be getting paid less than they hoped for cod this winter season, they figured they couldn’t afford to just sit by. But that’s exactly what they did. When the season opened, they didn’t go out to fish…and it worked.