Roy was coming back through Juneau town, and I asked if he could stay a few days to go shrimping. I’d hoped we could run down the 8 hours to the honey hole, but decided that was too far to run for just the overnight time Roy had to stay, so we tried prospecting closer to town.
We first tried a cove which was a favorite for pot fishermen targeting spot prawns till it was closed due to low numbers. We would be after coon stripe, side stripe or pink shrimp on what looked like a muddy bottom at the head of the cove. It was a flat calm, dry day and we drank gallons of espresso and coffee on the ride out. I served up some of my canned smoked salmon and some cheese with some carb free little tortilla shells and we both agreed it was freaking excellent stuff. We set a 2 hook skate baited with octopus when we got to the head of the bay, then got to shrimping. I had some octopus left from Craig from last year, and scored two more whole octopus Costco is selling for food seafood here in town for this year’s bait supply.
We made 4 trawl passes for the day. We caught maybe 50 shrimp of varying species – some “rock shrimp” and coon stripes. All small shrimp. Plus, as always, some cool fish you never would catch hook and line fishing, and some crab. We didn’t keep anything. We pulled the skate on the way back. Man, was the tide running. I sure thought we had something, but it must just have been the anchors dragging on the rocks. Nothing but octopus baited hooks came up.
The next day we tried right near town to start. We made an hour long tow over what we knew to be mud bottom, I think, and this time, we caught exactly 1 coon stripe. And a lot of cool flounder and sea starish looking things. The wind picked up to a chop so we decided to drown a herring fishing for king salmon around Auke Bay. That produced nothing but sunshine and an even better batch of canned smoked king salmon, cheese and tortillas.
We had dinner of king salmon, salad, and sauteed asparagus that Roy’s wife Brenda showed me how to cook. Roy caught the midnight ferry to Haines.
Today, I was back to chopping some wood and swimming. I’ve dropped 20 lbs this past month in preparation for a hopeful hip replacement later this month. Losing the weight hasn’t been hard at all with the motivation of hopefully getting my hip fixed. Man, I miss being in the woods. Just cut out most sugar and carbs, eat great salad from Juneau Greens with venison or seafood for dinner, and keep up with a little exercise. I didn’t go for the new miracle injection medicine to start, and happily losing weight the old fashioned way. My sisters and Sara have used the new medicine successfully. One sister is down 70 lbs (which doesn’t seem possible) and Sara down 30. Seems to give a lot better outlook on life as we golf the back nine of life, even with those we’ve elected to Congress turning a blind eye to the government takeover. The best I can say about that is it’s gonna get worse, before it gets worse.
