The Summer that wasn’t

Posted under North to Alaska

Time for an update from the summer that wasn’t. Todd, Kristen, Kayla and Matthew arrived from New York as scheduled. Flew the distance in one day, so was a long trip, plus a 5 hour layover in Vancouver. As a special treat the weather tried to co-operate by giving out fleeting glimpses on sunshine — a rare sight this year. It seems that it went directly from June-uary to November, and we now have cool days with much horizontal rain and, of course, frequent storms. But once again I get ahead of myself. 🙂

The weather is not the only item difficult to predict, there is also the location of the fish which has been, to say the least, very erratic. We strike out for the area which has shown a degree of dependability for us, and offers areas of good moorage, should a storm rear its ugly head. The north end of DundasIsland gives us both, as Brundidge Inlet offers excellent holding when at anchor. Unfortunately, it also offers a type of black fly that is actually a set of sharp teeth and a pair of wings. As a special bonus they come in large quantities, and I am certain that they can chew their way into a sealed boat when they are in a feeding frenzy. Now, I suspect, that in an effort to lure these carnivores away from her grand babies, Granny offered herself as a sacrifice, with the result of some rather nasty welts. Her year to look as though she was the loser in a bar brawl. Not to paint this picture all in the negative, we did get into a rather good bite of nice size cohos, which put something of a smile on Todd’s face. 🙂 Rather than face another opportunity of feeding the flying teeth, we struck out for the Moffats, and God”s pocket. On the way we decided to drop the prawn traps for a succulent feed of the little critters.

As we now had a good catch of salmon on ice, we decided to set our sights on some fresh halibut. Now as halibut have been the only dependable thing this season, that we should get our limit is pretty much a given — wrong !!! Just when I was starting to get pretty cocky about getting these “flat fish” at will, they up and disappeared. Possibly just to teach me a little humility.  We offered them some of the most delectable fishy type snacks known to man, and couldn’t get a sniff. We caught red snapper, caught lingcod, caught rock fish galore, but not one ugly halibut. Plus we tried the above at all the spots where we had previously caught halibut over the past two years. Some things are just not meant to be. Oh yes, our prawn pull yielded us a much better catch of starfish than it did prawns, and as their were no commercial prawners in the vicinity for Bonnie to exhibit her prawning skills, we opted to move the traps to a different location. It was a good thing that we did, as when we pulled this set, we not only had a bountiful two prawns, but one of the largest Pacific octopuses I have encountered. 🙂 It would have reached about eight feet from toe to toe and yet had managed to squeeze into the prawn trap through it’s three inch opening. While in there, he unscrewed the bait container and had a snack, but courteously left the container and lid. Now as the trap has little gates which fall down on the inside, he no longer had the little three inch opening to leave by and was in the process of building a new exit by tearing a hole in the net cover of the trap. This is when we brought him aboard and watched as he squeezed himself out of his newly created opening. Getting a fairly large octopus aboard the boat is one thing, getting him to leave is totally another. Worse than a landlord trying to evict a nasty tenant, or so it seems. I was about to get out my cookbook of Chinese cooking delights when we managed to entice our unwanted guest into the landing net, and then back into the water. So much for prawns.

As we continued our pursuit for the wily halibut, in the open, bouncy water south of Melville Island, we noticed a Humpback whale in the distance, trying to out do us in the fishing department no doubt. Apparently we elicited a degree of curiosity in the brute, for as we started to leave the area empty handed he surfaced about twenty feet abeam our starboard side. Now I can tell you that this is somewhat impressive, and as he dove back down we could even see vegetation hanging on his tail fluke. Another Kodak moment in trade of poor fishing. Unfortunately it is hard to think “picture” when your mouth is open in awe and your mind is in neutral.

A few more salmon for good measure, including a nice Spring, and we are off to Tuck Inlet for, hopefully, a feed of crab. As luck would have it, this came through for us as, on the pull, we had twenty – eight crab in the trap. Kept eleven of the biggest and sent the rest back for the next time.

Don’t have to like it but time is up and the family is off  to New Jersey. Time for us to prep the boat and point ourselves Southward in search of some sunshine — hopefully.

More to follow.