The season is finally upon us.  The bargas' wool is ready for shearing, and the young male bargas have reached enough maturity for slaughter.  Thankfully, I'm not completely flying blind on the slaughter portion of this, since we now have Arat living here and working as a rancher.  I expect he'll also be a lot better at shearing them than I was, which hopefully will result in better yields.

Ultimately, I expect we'll have a significantly larger amount of wool this year as compared to last year, and that should mean I have enough wool on hand for us to start felt production in earnest.  For the time being, I intend to just train a goblin in the manual machines that I made and the procedure I used to make the felt from before.  In the future, if we have enough bargas, then I'd like to get a textile mill set up to reduce the manual labor and increase our output significantly.  For now though, the volume is so low that the manual labor is already more than enough to handle all our current wool production.

Since we had gotten a lot of the leatherworking process set up long ago, back when there were still lizards on the island, getting it all cleaned up and ready to use again only took three days until that was ready to begin.  By that point, Arat has already started the butchering process for the male bargas that we'd decided to butcher.

Ultimately, the leather making process takes about two months from start to finish, but has a lot of hands-off time while you wait for the hides to tan and cure.  So after those three days, we were pretty much set for some downtime on leathermaking before I have to show the goblin the next step.  For this cycle, we're doing a bit of an experiment with different wood and plant mixtures for the leathermaking process.  It will be useful to us down the road to know the best materials we have available to ourselves for leathermaking.

At that point, he started taking a bit of time each day showing me how to properly shear the remaining bargas to get their wool without upsetting the animals themselves.  As a consequence, after another eight days, I'd sheared our herds of bargas.  We'd acquired a pretty decent amount of wool.  I paid Arat for his help, along with pay for the actual materials we acquired.  I'm splitting those earnings to some degree with the two other goblins who also work on the ranch.  Arat and them will have to decide how they'll be splitting what they end up earning from the bargas meat on their own.

The construction crew that is still working building new housing in town is taking a short break to build the new smokehouse, which is going to be larger than the old one, and located closer to the marketplace.  It will still be located inside the inner wall though, as the smoked meats are more valuable than any raw meats in emergency situations.

I spent another eighteen days working with the goblin who makes clothes from plant fibers, along with a few new goblins who were interested in the felt making process and the ability to make clothes from it.  I had to get some new scissors made by Karsh to handle cutting through felt material, but outside of that, it wasn't too hard to teach the goblins how I processed the wool before in order to make felt using the hand operated machines I'd already made.

I also gave them some insight into how to vary the thickness of the felt and some general improvements in the process that might benefit them down the road.  Ultimately, outside of new clothes, there are a few useful purposes for felt, like blankets, backpacks, and sleeping bags that all can have their own purposes.  We got a decent amount of wool, and expect to have even more next summer, but it's not nearly enough for everyone to have felt clothes, so it'll be expensive for some time until our herds expand more.

The whole process also ran through the next cycle at the academy, but thankfully we had much fewer new goblins this time, so I had extra time at the end of each day to help guide the felt making process.  Just as I was finishing up with the goblins working with the felt, Boggs returned again, so I took a day to get as much info from him as I could.  He fishes in what I consider to be a more proper fishing method, with a rod and line.  Well, with multiple rods and lots of different lines and lures.  When he stops back in town like this, it's usually to get new hooks from Karsh.  I was a little confused where he got the money from, but he's been trading dwarven coin for it.

I'm not a huge fan of this under the table dealing in currency, but I double checked with Karsh, and he's trading well over market value and he's also getting some of our currency back after the exchanges.  However, I told Boggs that the exchange of dwarven currency for goods isn't going to be allowed moving forward, but if he provides me with information on his fishing, then I'll pay him enough to handle his costs, which are minimal, and his house which again, is minimal.  He agreed, so I gathered more info from him to catch up on all the fishing he's done so far on the island.

He let me look at his fishing rods, and it seems like it should be possible for us to replicate the rods he's using to some degree, including the reel.  I'd be a little concerned with our ability to produce fishing line, but his line doesn't look like it's particularly special, and he said that his is made from a plant that they grow on the human continent for its plant fibers.  In theory, we could make our own line from the fine fibers of some of the vines that grow here, if we use them correctly.  His line is pretty thick already, and since he apparently enjoys catching large sea fish, we might be in the clear to replicate that ourselves.

He also said that of all the places he's fished, there are two spots that he particularly enjoys fishing on the island.  One is near the ocean on the craggy part of the island, just beyond the next valley.  There, there is a rock jetty and a cliff that isn't too tall that he can fish off of during high tide.  Then, on the opposite side of the island from there, he's found a decent area that also juts out into the ocean near low tide that he can fish for a few hours before the tide comes back in.  He's hauled in a few fairly large fish according to him, but a fisherman's word is only as good as the fish he can actually show you, so I'm not holding my breath on the actual sizes he gave me.

Even if the sizes are a bit smaller though, we're still talking sea life that is as big as I am.  Which I do have some reason to believe exists.  I did have to help kill that large eel-like creature before after all.  So if it's anything like that, then I could see there being some large fish.  In theory, that also means that we could artificially make our own fishing jetty going off from our artificial tide pool where fishing could occur.  It's a little extra food, which might not actually mean much, but it's actually a very good source of levels, as it sounds like a lot of these large fishes have lived for a considerable amount of time and also carnivorously eat other fish, furthering their own levels.

That's definitely something that I'll have to get the construction crew to consider making.  It's definitely a different kind of project for them, however, as a large amount of it is underwater.  They will need to consider the fact that it has to also function as habitat for the fish, so making it entirely out of fused stone won't be great.  However, given the fact we have extreme storms occasionally, it might be worth fusing central pillars of stone, and then backfilling boulders around that.  Which would make it a bit of a hybrid between a pier and a jetty.  Ultimately, I think having a highest point elevated walkway, and a few tiers of walkway down from that for the various tidal heights might be beneficial to the usability of the space as a fishing pier.

Of course, it would be significantly easier to just lob boulders out to sea and let them settle.  Perhaps fusing some of the boulders slightly once they've landed to make them more stable would be enough, and then you could overlay the flat walkways on top, and hope that a severe storm doesn't wipe the whole thing out.  That's probably the most viable option.  Especially since we had that one goblin evolve into the gorilla demon about a year ago.  He'd probably be singlehandedly capable of moving sizeable boulders out to throw into the sea.