Nubble Point is a bedrock outcrop connected to the Kenai Peninsula mainland by MacDonald Spit, which forms and separates Kasitsna Bay from Kachemak Bay, about 11 miles (18 km) south of Homer and 6.5 miles (10.5 km) north-east of Seldovia, Alaska. The point’s name refers generally to a small knob and specifically to a rocky promontory at Cape Neddick on the coast of Maine. William H. Dall of the US Coast and Geodetic Survey named the point and Kasitsna Bay, originally publishing them as “Kahsitsnah” on charts from 1883. The name reportedly derives from the Dena’ina Athabascan word “Ksi’sina” meaning “sandspit”, or possibly “k’tsits’ena” meaning “skull”. The bedrock at Nubble Point represents the McHugh Complex, consisting of pillow and massive basalt overlain by complexly folded and faulted radiolarian chert that developed between the Middle Triassic and Early Cretaceous periods, 225 million to 110 million years ago. An unnamed extension projects south-east from Nubble Point and consists of a spit and a wooded island formed by rocks of the Tyonek Formation. This formation developed from the Oligocene to the Miocene periods, 30 million to 5 million years ago, and consists of carbonaceous non-marine conglomerate, sandstone and siltstone. The Alaska Mental Health Trust Authority owns Nubble Point and most of the extension.

The southern Kenai Peninsula, including Kachemak Bay, was first occupied around 4,500 years ago by prehistoric maritime people of the late Ocean Bay tradition who arrived from the Alaska Peninsula. About 4,000 years ago the Arctic Small Tool tradition appeared, and 3,000 years ago the Kachemak tradition was established. It remained for 1,500 years before disappearing from the archaeological record. A few Alutiiq sites are known on the southern Kenai Peninsula coast in the past 1,000 years. Ancestors of the present-day Dena’ina Athabascan people then inhabited the bay, adopting a maritime subsistence economy. The failure of any prehistoric culture to last more than 1,500 years suggests the southern Kenai coast was a marginal habitat for early humans. The archaeological record from Kasitsna Bay includes artifacts from middens and house pits that indicate a continuous presence, transitioning from prehistoric culture to present-day Euro-American culture. In 1880 Ivan Petrof reported that Seldovia was inhabited mostly by Alutiiq people.

Harley Ekren homesteaded Kasitsna Bay around 1950. In 1953 he married Shirley Hurd, who had a son from a previous marriage. In 1955 the family started a cannery called the Ekren Packing Company, which operated until 1975, hand packing clams, salmon and Dungeness crabs. The cannery stood on wooden pilings; the whole structure sank five feet (1.5m) and flooded during the 1964 Alaska earthquake. In 1957 the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries began studying shellfish in Kachemak Bay, and a small field station was built in 1960 on 27 acres (11 ha) on Kasitsna Bay. Early research focused on the life history, population dynamics and behavior of pandalid shrimp in the Gulf of Alaska. In 1978 changes in research priorities and logistical problems led to the transfer of research activities to the Northwest and Alaska Fisheries Laboratory in Kodiak. For the next three years the Environmental Research Laboratories used the Kasitsna Bay facility for the Outer Continental Shelf Environmental Assessment Program. Since 1981 the University of Alaska Fairbanks has used the station for research and education, though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration still owns and operates the facility. Read more here and here. Explore more of Nubble Point and Kasitsna Bay here: