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Jesse here

Took Jesse on the last summer fishing trip of the year. We caught lots of coho the first day, and that took off the pressure, so to speak, on getting fish for the freezer. The next couple days we caught less, but weather just spectacular. 70 degrees and a breeze.

The second night was one to remember. We’d anchored behind some islands with evergreen trees on them. We butchered our fish, I cooked us salmon and salad for dinner, and while Jesse was doing the dishes, I stepped out on the bow to enjoy the evening for a few minutes. Right as I got out of the door, I heard a splash. I figured it was seals running some of the few pink salmon in the bay waiting for rain to fill the stream so they could spawn. When I looked over, I saw it was a deer swimming from one of the little islands to the big island! Then I saw another deer. A big deer. I realized one was a long antlered spike, and the second – a big four point!. I had my gun, but no way to launch the punt in time to get to land to shoot. I called to Jesse, and we just enjoyed the show.

When the spike got to the beach, it made the splashing sound again. When it’s hooves touched bottom, it made a loud splashing as it got up to dry land. It ran over the big rocks on the beach and right up a rock face into the woods. It didn’t even look for a better place to escape to cover. He was definitely getting away from us. The big buck made a bigger splashing sound getting up on the beach. He was further away than the spike, and on a little better beach for walking. He walked half way to the woods, then stopped and looked back at us. Just like on a magazine cover. Then he trotted up into the woods and was gone. What a show! Like the orcas last year with Pat and Sean, this was another of those once in a lifetime things. Why were the two bucks on this little island next to the big island. And when I mean little, I mean you could walk around it in less than 10 minutes – maybe just 5 minutes. Were they getting away from wolves? When I first saw them, I thought it was a yearling and doe – that I would understand. But 2 bucks? Who knows. It was the highlight of the trip.

I got up about 4:20am this morning and started packing fish. I packed Jesse’s box, then Alan’s box to ship him, and one for my sister, and one for Lance and Dana, who are Salvation Army pastors that were stationed in Juneau for a couple years and great friends. They were back in Juneau for a few days, and I’m taking them to the airport in the morning in Juneau so I get to see them.

Jesse was up and ready to roll when I came in from the shed from packing at about 530 am.. We had a cup of coffee and headed to the ferry. We got there when there was little crowd, got in the front of the line, and Jesse was soon off to Ketchikan. Jesse has picked up cleaning, filleting, double rinsing and bagging the fish over the past few years. He is also the first person to watch me open the tailgate with the screwdriver who could do it themselves. A down rigger was giving me issues sending the cannon ball down, and it took some tinkering to do it each time, but he figured it out right away. Peace Corps friends are great to have and easy to please.

I stopped for more coffee at Lew’s on the way home. His kids are all thriving. He had a big pile of deer thawing from recent success that he was going to grind later. He was soon off to help a neighbor put in a footing for a shed, so I headed for Craig.

Then the usual running around on the last day to fuel the truck and boat. Drop some fish to the POWER food bank. Leave eggs and cheese with Sara’s sister. Clean the boat carpets.

This summer went by fast. The weather was pretty dry, and new winds to me out of the NW showed me new spots to fish. From my log books, I caught about half as many king salmon and three times as many coho salmon this summer as last year. Part of the lower king number was because I had people here fishing in June and early July last year, when king salmon are the only thing to catch, and this year I didn’t have as many people here in June to mid-July. A lot fewer halibut on the skate this year, but we caught more chicken halibut trolling, and I sure like dealing with those rather than 100 lbs fish. Just a great summer.

Two men smiling on a boat with mountains.

Don and Al in town

Don and Al were in this week. Al and I met Don when he came to UAF in 1985 for a year when Al was a fisheries graduate student and I an undergrad. Funny thing is Al and I didn’t know each other then, but met when were were fisheries biologists in Southeast Alaska later on.

Don is up there on the list of most influential people in my life. I knew Don from UAF, although I never took a class from him there. I met him while he took the bus that I drove for my student job from upper to lower campus. He told me about the Peace Corps. He’d gone to Malaysia in the Peace Corps after completing his MS degree. He told me about the advantages I’d have with federal jobs, and that Peace Corps would give me two years of mid-level professional experience. Had I not gone in the Peace Corps, it would take me years of time as a seasonal ADFG technician, or a Master’s degree, just to apply for a mid-level, permanent job with ADFG, which was my goal job after earning my undergraduate degree at UAF. He sold me on the professional job experience aspect of the Peace Corps. I saw the humanitarian experience of working in a developing country as a side-benefit. It certainly wasn’t the reason I went in.

Peace Corps was the most important 2 years of my life. I met fellow volunteers I would never have met had I stayed in Alaska – people from different backgrounds and interests and views. I learned a second language, lived in a rural African village, ate foods mostly grown in the surrounding rain forest, and had my eyes opened on everything from Race to poverty to religion to living by one’s own hand without any modern machinery to “transportation” primarily being one’s two feet to the commonality of fisheries around the world to the worth of fish as a protein in most of the world’s diet to the possibilities of successful tilapia fish farming in rural Africa in ponds built with shovels and feeds found in the bush. You’re just not going to get that and more in your first two years of any job that I know of. Yet I don’t know one person – family, friend, student – that I got to go into the Peace Corps. I think Don may say the same thing – that I was his only one. Sadly, the Peace Corps dropped its fisheries and fish farming program some 20 years ago and I can never get a good answer why from them. They say they only assign volunteers to programs that eh host countries want, yet just about every country the Peace Corps is in will note they don’t have enough fish production to even meet the needs of residents, much less for export. I think Peace Corps dropped the program because the stateside training was expensive. Teaching seems to be the big thing now for Peace Corps Volunteering. Countries like Sierra Leone that pay their teachers little, and often a salary that’s delayed months and months in getting to the teachers, is happy to have a Peace Corps Volunteer teacher who gets paid by the US government on time, and who doesn’t have to have a farm on the side just to get by. I haven’t seen many Peace Corps programs that a more appropriate technology and had a real chance to sustain themselves than fish farming. We worked with farmers to build ponds by hand, fed the ponds water by gravity, used African fish that reproduced right in the pond, and raised a fish- tilapia – that would eat about anything, from termites in their mushroom dirt house available year round in the surrounding country side to the rice bran left over when rice was extracted for everyone’s daily meal that was otherwise thrown away. And for people like me who stayed in the profession here in the states, a couple generations now of fisheries or similar degree college graduates haven’t had the same opportunities I did with the Peace Corps, which is also just plain sad.

Don also told me I’d be part of a Peace Corps community when I returned, and that I’d need them around. Ironically, I maybe came to know how combat veterans like my elder cousins who fought in Vietnam felt when they returned home. I didn’t know what they went through, just how they felt when they got home to their hometown and friends and family – only people who went through what they did knew what it was about, and it was impossible for someone who hadn’t to really understand. Not your parents, not your siblings, not your best friends from high school.

Don kept track of me during and after my Peace Corps stint in Sierra Leone. When I sent him a letter asking just out of casual curiosity what he did at Mississippi State, where he went after his year at UAF and remains today, he took this as an opportunity. He replied with a 3 or 4 page typed letter, outlining the research he was doing there, that he’d love to have me in the program, what I needed to do to apply (like take the MSAT), and that he could offer me a full-ride assistantship if I was accepted. I had no intention of going to grad school, but here was opportunity knocking. And if I’ve learned one thing, it’s the important of saying “yes” when things like this come along.

I’d recently been to a Board of Fish meeting, where a state biologist was going over a tagging study that was relevant to the area I was working in. I was as clueless as most in the crowd as to the workings of the statistical models used in the study, the findings of which were important to the management of salmon in our area. A masters degree program dropped right into my lap was just what I needed to help learn that statistics stuff. Kodiak Community College was, by chance, offering the MSAT exam that Saturday. I grabbed the MSAT informational booklet, completed the practice test in the book over the next two days, and took the exam on Saturday. My score was good, and I was on my way to MSU that August.

Peace Corps again entered the equation. I asked my friend Tom, who was just here in Craig fishing with me, to come up for the ride down. In addition to companionship on the ride, I knew he was mechanically inclined. When we broke the timing belt in Haines Junction in the Yukon Territory, Tom went to work, with me assisting his mysterious instructions, like we got to get the piston to top dead center, and things like that. Luckily, I’d thought to buy a timing belt before I left, and after a few hours, we were back on the road.

MSU was another trip into another culture. I think many of my collegues in Alaska wondered why someone managing Alaska fisheries would want to go to a college in the deep South. I always felt there was a lot of monoculture education the department from Pacific Northwest schools – the U of Washington comes to mind – and I was excited to go somewhere different and learn about different fish in different waters. Like the Peace Corps, it was a great experience of a new place and new ideas and new people. I made some life long friends there. One was the son of a man who worked in the Sierra Leone embassy who I met while I was there. All of us under Don worked our asses off with piles of field work, as well as getting our class work done. We all had assistantships, and nobody working in one of Don’s projects was going to finish if he couldn’t put in 60 to 80 hour weeks between classes and fieldwork. I liked Mississippi. It’s a rural, outdoors culture where most people fish and hunt or know those who do. I worked in the Delta region of Mississippi, where lots of civil rights history was made. I knew I could never live in Mississippi, though. After doing my first summer of field work in 90+ degree blazing sun and high humidity, I knew I’d never want to live in a place like that, having already had experience doing that in Africa. Cold climates are for me. As I told my Sierra Leone friend in Juneau – you can always put on another coat to keep warm if you’re cold, but when it’s hot, you can take all your clothes off, and you’re still hot. He has come to love Alaska, and complains a little bit more each time he returns from Sierra Leone at how hot it is there- the country where he was raised. I still see my Mississippi friends. I welcome them here to fish and as a respite to the heat at home.

When I completed my Masters degree, I had a lot of experience under my belt. I’d lived in the Alaskan bush for 3 seasons as a fishing guide at remote camps in Bristol Bay. Then 2 years in a rural African village in a subsistence economy where people grew their own food with no semblance of a governmental safety net, starting a successful fish farming program and seeing how 4/5 of the world lives. And now I was armed with a little bit of scientific methodology and statistics. I owe 2/3 of that experience to Don.

Don flew into Ketchikan. Al drove to his high school friend’s place near Bellingham, WA. He left his truck there, and came up on the state ferry MV Columbia to Ketchikan, then he and Don met and came over to Hollis on the Prince of Wales Island ferry. Al and I were good friends when he worked for ADFG in Yakutat. I visited him several times to duck and moose hunt, and to net fish for salmon on the Situk River. It’s been a long time since he’s returned to Alaska, and I hope he can make a habit of it.

We got home from the ferry near dark, so we overnighted in the container cabin. I made the boys a tray of smoked salmon, wasa crackers, and kelp pickles for a late night snack.

Everyone was up early the next morning. Both boys were up and dressed when I got up, and I thought – this is gonna be a great trip when that happens, as I’m usually the early riser when fishing. We had coffee and took off.

We set the skate at the honey hole and fished nearby. We had steady coho fishing. I trained Al on cleaning fish, and he took over that duty for the rest of the trip. We quit fishing about 3 pm. Don cut his finger somehow and I got him the first aid kit as the bleeding was not wanting to stop. After checking the skate for nothing, we anchored by the pine islands and butchered fish in the pouring rain. I trained Don on scraping the fillet frames from Al with a spoon to get the remaining salmon burger off, and pretty much left the salmon butchering to them for the rest of the trip. I made salmon tail fillets and salad and pasta salad for dinner. Don and Al ate their fill, went to bed early, and both slept hard.

On day 3, everyone was up early again by 5 am, and both boys said how good they slept. We drank coffee for 2 hours, then checked the skate for zip and reset it. We went to the coho drag nearby and put the trolling gear down at 730 am, and caught 3 coho in the first 15 minutes.

By 1230, we had enough salmon for the day already, so went to check the halibut skate. A perfect 34 lber on the skate. We anchored up again in the early afternoon at the spot nearer the outer coast, butchered the fish, then Don got prepping a salmon stir fry with onion, mushroom, and peppers that was just great.

On day 4, we were all up by 530. I weighed anchor straight away to check the skate as it was in the channel where seiners were passing on their way fishing, and I was nervous it might get run over. Nothing on the hooks, and we reset it. We fished the outer island on the lee side, ran over to the chicken hole and fished down to Kelly Cove. We caught a big coho, a chicken halibut and 2 ling cod. When we checked the skate, I broke off a hung anchor on the skate but got the rest of it back. Nothing on the skate. We ran back inside and reset the skate near where we caught the earlier halibut. This time it was first aid time for Al. I just sharpened a dull hook that caught Al’s finger and glove as it went over, and took with it a chunk of Al’s finger. More bleeding and first aid for the crew. We anchored behind the high island in a new spot for me. Don made dinner with salmon burger, making a sort of quiche with bacon, eggs, peppers, onions and mushrooms. Excellent fare, again.

On day 5, we had nothing on the skate, and moved it closer to the high island as the winds were to come up and we didn’t want it in too breezy a place as that’s what cost us the earlier anchor. We caught a king right off the bat, and the winds picked up steadily all day. We scratched a few cohos, then I had enough with the wind on the beam, and we moved to calmer waters between two of the big islands and scratched one fat coho there. Even though we moved the skate, it was too rough to pull it. We ran to the pine islands anchorage after it was too windy behind the high island, and that worked great. I made king salmon, salad, and sauteed vegetables for dinner, and Don said it was the best salmon he’d ever had. Hard to beat fresh king salmon.

One thing of note was that we’d seen hardly any whales this week, which was odd after fishing around them all summer. That made each one we did see a lot more special for the boys.

The next morning, the winds had calmed, and we checked skate first thing for nothing. We fished a new spot by the island where my nephew got his deer in years past, as well as a channel my neighbor told me could be good (it wasn’t), and we finished at the Point Tranquil drag. We scratched a handful of coho, and quit midday, as Don left on the ferry in the morning. We ran to the harbor. After we got the fish and our gear off the boat and put away, Don took us to dinner at the dockside cafe, but Alan demanded to pay.

I went over to Sara’s sister’s house later in the evening. My niece and her friend from Kotzebue were in town to deer hunt and fish. They flew them into an alpine lake, and got a deer, then came back and got some king salmon on the outside waters later in the week. I’d taken over my bag of found reels and was glad the friend took a pile. I’m hoping to go out to Kotzebue late next winter to fish for sheefish through the ice, and she and her family know all about it.

On day 7, we were all up early as usual, and I packed Don’s fish box, being careful not to short his box like I did Tom and Cheese’s boxes. He said it came in at 49 lbs. Then I filled the thermoses with coffee and we were off right on time to the ferry. We arrived at a perfect time when the line was already moving out the door. Don got his ticket and box checked in and was soon walking to the ferry. Al and I were back to Craig before 8 am.

I made a big breakfast when we got back, then we got down to getting our coho catch from the last 2 days butchered to smoke and can. We cut the fillet sides into length-wise strips, then put them into Nevette’s 18 cups water to 2 cups brine for 10 minutes, rinsed off the excess salt, and filled the Big Chief smoker racks. I put the fish in the smoker on just heat (no smoke), and headed to town. I walked my mile dock walk, stopped at the boat and figured out a problem we had with the downrigger and fixed it. Then I went swimming.

I picked up 2 dozen oysters on the way home from Maranda at the pop-up sale she and her newlywed husband were having in the Craig Tribal Hall parking lot. I asked her they were still married 2 weeks out. She laughed. He laughed. They thought I was kidding. Silly kids.

When I got home, Al, an oyster connoisseur from his time on the Texas Gulf Coast and elsewhere down there, ate a bunch raw with hot sauce, then we steamed some for 2 minutes in the instant pot. I put a few cooked oysters with my salad (I’m not a big oyster guy), and Al ate the rest out of the shells. He said they were fantastic. I’l take his word for it.

We took the fish out of the smoker in the early evening. The rainy weather and high humidity didn’t make for much a pellicle forming on the strips, but otherwise they looked okay. Al cut strips to size, which I loaded into jars. I decided to finally take out the big crab cooker stove I garage-saled in Juneau several years ago to can the salmon, rather than using the standard propane cook stove. Good move. It was steaming in just a few minutes under the blast flame of the cooker, and after 10 minutes, I put the 10 lbs pressure cooker weight on the nipple of the lid, and it was rocking immediately. We set our watches for 110 minutes of cook time.

We watched the next to last episode of this season’s Alone show on the History Channel. I watch very little TV or other video, but I’m a big fan of Alone and watched all the episodes. Two women and a man left. And we found out at the end of the show that next week’s show is the last one, so maybe this will be the first time in the “standard” Alone series a woman will win. Many have made it to late in the contest, but get pulled because they lose too much weight to be safe for their health. The two left this season- the first season of the show in a temperate / tropical location in south east Africa – look to be in good shape and in no danger of excessive weight loss.

The first batch of Al’s salmon was in the smoker for about 7 hours, with about an hour of alder smoke on it. The fish looked tasty, but didn’t get much of a pellicle because of the rainy weather. It might not come out as strip pieces, but it’ll eat good. The fillets we cut looked fantastic from our fish care on the boat. The first batch into the jars looked like it was not going to be great. We barely got a pellicle or none at all on some of the strips. This morning I took the jars out and two didn’t seal, and one of those jars broke. We took the fish from those jars in for breakfast. Perfect. All the worry about not perfect smoking on the fish going in was soon allayed by fantastic fish coming out. Again, quality starts at the time of capture. A good fish will be good with most things you do with it, but a poorly handled fish won’t taste very good, regardless of what you do with it. We left the second batch in the smoker on just heat overnight. The rain quit, humidity dropped, and these looked alot nicer. We’ll see if they actually taste better, though. Might be a tad drier than the earlier fish, but it all is going to be great, I’m sure.

I got fish out of the freezer to thaw for canning my smoked salmon. I started cutting off the rib section from the loin of the coho when we butchered them earlier in the season. Sent the loin home with my aunt and the Morgans, and saved the rib sections for me for smoking.

Fish being reeled onto the boat

Tom and The Cheese

Tom and Jasper (aka, The Cheese, from his primary sustenance: string cheese) arrived 45 minutes early from Ketchikan. Luckily, I had gone out early to drink coffee on DJs porch. I heard a plane arrive as I entered the cafe, and saw Tom and Jasper exit the plane when I came out.

We headed straight for the boat and were soon idling out of north cove past all the seiners in town between fishing periods. The boys have been here many times, and were ready to go straight away.

We reached my favorite spot 2 hours later and put the lines out. We got a couple cohos, then put out the skate, and went in to anchor. Jasper took the kayak to the beach to look at rocks. Tom and I had salmon and salad for dinner. Jasper had pasta.

The next morning, there was nothing on the skate. We started trolling about 6 am. We caught a couple coho in the morning. After telling my college friend Scott in Ketchikan I hadn’t seen many pink salmon yet here just a day or two ago, well, they were here now. Near high tide, we found some fish. Cohos and pinks. And the pinks were plump, like the coho and kings this year. We quit fishing in the early afternoon with coho, a few pinks, and a rockfish. Jasper was off in the kayak to beach comb after we took care of the fish. Tom went to the beach later. I took a short nap and got up about 7 pm. By then, both boys had gone down for their own nap. I waited til 745 pm, and realized both boys were out cold, so I made the table into my bed and called it a day without making dinner.

On day three, we had enough cohos for the day by early afternoon, so I said let’s go check out Kelly Cove. We steamed an hour to get there. Two big seine tenders were anchored near the entrance as we steamed by to anchor after setting the skate. Then we took the punt and kayak to the beach.

I expected to find remains of a fish plant or something up from the beach, but we saw nothing man-made. There’s old dock pilings, a grave stone like you’d see in a cemetery for someone on the beach rocks, and an old mini sort of silo on a little cliff up from the beach, so something was once there. Maybe all the infrastructure other than the silo was on the dock that was once on the pilings. We had rockfish and salad for dinner. Jasper had pasta and popcorn. We turned in early, as usual. A seiner joined us in the anchorage about 1125 pm, and another at 1 am, after they off-loaded to the tenders.

We were up at sunrise the next day, as usual. The seiners were already gone fishing. We caught a chicken halibut on the skate, than put the gear out for salmon. By mid-morning, we’d caught only one coho, but also a couple lingcod and a big black rockfish.
We ran about an hour to my new favorite coho spot that I tried this year when the strong NW winds prevented us from fishing my regular haunts. By 230 pm, we had all the cohos we wanted, and called it a day. We set the skate, then anchored behind the pine Islands, and took care of our fish. We beach combed the beach there, and found lots of stuff. Buoys. Black mesh fencing. A sea otter skull. Jasper had the best find – a flasher (which doesn’t float) had floated in because it was attached to a commercial troll J-plug (which does float).

On day 5, we checked the skate a little after sunrise and caught a nice 37 lb halibut. We ran back to the coho spot, put on Jasper’s found flasher, and fishing was steady with it all morning. We trolled right along the beach, while two commercial trollers fished the deeper water just outside of us, so it was nice to have some body guards to protect us from a mob that could descend on us and mooch, which makes trolling a challenge in the same water. By about noon, we had our share of cohos for the day, and the cooler was full. We headed to town.

We butchered the day’s catch at the harbor stall, and headed home to get the fish into the freezer. Everyone got a shower. I made fresh salmon for dinner for Tom and I, and gave the Cheese step by step instructions on how to cook his pasta in the instant pot. We watched an eagle a good distance from the shore on the water in front of the cabin rowing with its wings to the shore with something it killed.

The next day, I awoke to both my fisherman down with COVID, it seems, so we laid low. I had them go through all the fishing reels that Sara and I found in the dumpster earlier in the summer to take any they wanted, as several of the reels are bass casting kinda reels I’d never use here, but would work well in in Iowa.

Today, we were up a little after 6 am. I got to packing their two boxes of fish about 7 am, and we were done at 8 am. We got to the airport, and Tom and Jasper got in line while I walked over to DJs to get coffee. When the boys got up to the counter, I walked in to see the box weights: only about 44 lbs each. Dang it! I’d added the weights up wrong for the boxes! I weigh the fish as I put them into the box, and I accounted for the box weight in the total weight twice. For each box!

The Cheese on the jet to Seattle

Each box should have weighed just under 50 lbs, and I pride myself on getting it within a pound or less to that. Tom is never gonna let me live that down. This Getting Old is getting old.

Man steering boat wearing camouflage jacket, hat.

Fishing with Bob

My friend Bob came down from Juneau to fish for the week. We were at UAF at the same time – he doing a PhD fisheries program when I was an undergrad – but we somehow didn’t know each other there. One link between us was Don, who befriended us both.

Bob’s beat back the pancreatic cancer in his body through a combination of modern medicine and self-healing. He’s on Sara and my list for people we’ve gotten fish to over the past few years during his illness. Right now, he looks healthier than I’ve seen him in years. I was surprised he felt up to coming down fishing for a week, and was happy to provide the opportunity. The fishing and weather did not disappoint.

The first day out, we fished for coho along a steep island where Charlie and I blew getting not one, but two bucks on different beaches a few years ago. We caught 9 cohos one after the other over a few hours, and several more came off. Bob said when he had a fish on, the cancer went away. We set the halibut skate in the honey hole for the first time this year, and anchored at pine Island and I took care of the fish while Bob rested. We had coho and salad for dinner.

The next day we moved to another favorite drag about an hour run away. We checked the skate on the way, and nothing there. There was nothing at the drag, either, and the NW wind that had come up over the past week made it less than comfortable to fish. So, we ran back to the steep island and scratched 3 cohos near top of tide. The wind was supposed to change, so we went back to the favorite drag to anchor. We set skate right out from the anchorage in the channel for the first time. Then we sent the anchor and went beach combing. I picked a couple bags of beach asparagus, and this was probably the last pick as the plants are getting buds and woody. I found another new patch by a creek making 3 spots I know of along this beach.

I discovered my freezer onboard was not working properly. I keep frozen water bottles in it to chill the fish we catch, so now we were limited to what ice we had and would have to go back to Craig to get more. We had dinner of salmon, salad, and sauteed beach asparagus. The next morning, I pulled the skate and had a 27 lb chicken halibut on! The sand fleas had killed it, but the gills were still red and the fleas had not gotten inside, so the flesh was still good. Great to find a new place we can set the skate so close to the anchorage. I put the salmon gear out, and we trolled all the way to the point for nothing so kept going around the point and whamo. A nice king. The humpback whale with the white scarred dorsal fin was there in its usual haunt, feeding right in the kelp on the shoreline. We saw the whale dive, and for the first time, I saw its massive scar across the left side of its body. I’ve seen this whale often, but never seen it dive deep I guess, so as to see the scar. Hard to believe it survived that injury. Wow.

We Trolled back up the drag and got a coho half way up. Near the anchorage we caught a shaker king, then got another one on right away. This one was a keeper and twin to the first one. We got three more coho.

We ran to town to replenish our ice. We butchered our fish at the container, then Bob went beach combing while I made dinner of king salmon and rock fish with salad. I introduced Bob to Alone on the History Channel, my only current TV show vice, as we watched episode 6 and ate our dinner

Brian stopped by last evening and said a lot of eagles seem to leave this time of year and no one is sure where they go. We put our the fish heads and frames in the usual spot last evening and nothing has come by yet as of today for them- eagles, ravens or crows. Bob rested up today. He said he might have had a GI issue with eating the beach asparagus. I vac packed the fish, put them in the freezer, and we’re all caught up now. Another hot breezy day here, with the wind out of the south. Only a partial day of rain in the forecast for next week.

The next day, we went back to the favorite spot. I gave Bob some options for other spots, and he said he was happy going back to where we’d been fishing. Good call. We set the skate. Then, we started to catch fish right away on the magic spoons, when we started trolling at about 11 am. By 230 pm we had about a dozen coho and a couple kings. The fish were all fat. Seems like a good year in the ocean for feed. The cooler was full with nearly all our ice on it, so we were done fishing for now. We anchored up, and hung out til 630 pm. After Alaska News Nightly, we checked the skate and nothing. I had Bob choose the next skate location, while I added a mesh bag of salmon eggs to the octopus bait on both hooks. We had king salmon and salad for dinner.

The next morning, Bob was tuckered out and still sleeping when I pulled the anchor about 6 am. The wind had picked up from the southeast, and I wanted to get the skate up before it was too rough. I let Bob sleep, and started pulling the skate on my own. Bad move. The breeze quickly put the boat downwind from the skate line, and the anchor hung. I made the mistake of tying off what line I’d pulled aboard and tried to run the boat upwind to take the load off the line. The boat couldn’t turn on a dime in the wind, tighted up the long line, and it broke (I found out later) at the anchor, and I lost one of the two hook, ganion, and snap set ups. Nothing on the other hook.

We spent the next few days at the container. Bob beach combed up and down our beach, while I changed oils on the Jeanne Kay, and sent some of our catch up to Juneau on Alaska Seaplanes to friends at the Salvation Army, and the widow of one of my fish business mentors.

I was up early this morning packing Bob’s fish boxes. I tried out the new used box bander I Craigslisted before I left Juneau for the first time, and after several times without doing it right, went to the University of You Tube and figured it out. Bob was up and at ’em, eager to see his wife again and tell her stories of his week fishing.

Person by boat on rocky shore, forested lake view.

Aunt Barb in Town

Aunt Barb finally showed up a little haggard but ready to go, after an extra day of travel with an unplanned overnight in DC, and a planned overnight in Seattle to get here.

She was under the weather from a cold – maybe she caught it on the way.

She wanted Dungeness crab her first night in, and that’s what we had, with salad. We got the crab on the sockeye trip a week or two ago.

We went to Kasaan and Thorne Bay the first day, as the NW winds were too big to want to fish. It gave Aunt Barb a chance to catch her breath from the trip. In Kasaan, we walked to totem park, where totems from Old Kasaan were moved in 1938–1940, and now there are some newer ones in the mix as well, alongside a long house. As usual, the café was not open. I’ve never seen it open. Just advertised as open.

We got invited to a crab feed at Ellen’s, and after we all ate our fill at dinner, Aunt Barb got introduced to a crab cracking party. All of us around the table cracked the remaining crab and pulled the meat. Fun.

Next day we got out and fished a new spot for me. We couldn’t get to my favorite drag as it was too rough. I’ve never seen a spate of NW wind like we’ve had this week. Beautiful weather otherwise, with sunny days near or above 70 and cool nights in the 50s for great sleeping.

We left town late the next morning and got to our fishing spot a little before low tide. We caught one coho and saw humpbacks.

We got back to town in time for a presentation at the library by a woman who trains dogs to find wolf scat. Aunt Barb is a retired pet groomer from Ithaca, NY, so was eager to go. The scientists learn from the genetics of the scat how the wolves move around the area’s islands. They also learn what they eat – which includes sea otters. After the talk in the library, we walked down near the city beach. Aunt Barb led a group of kids around a grassy area near the beach that had bushes on either side. The trainer gave them some wolf scat to hide, and then brought the dog to find it. The dog does its job – not for a food treat – but to play with her dog toy ball. Wow. More socializing that night out at Kevin and Brynn’s, where we roasted hot dogs around a fire.

Scat Dog

The next morning we went fishing again. We caught 5 nice coho, then the bite quit. We went to a favorite anchorage and got in the lee of a little island of pine trees for the overnight. We had fresh salmon for dinner, and salad.

Next morning I got up early as usual. Aunt Barb was sawing logs, so I didn’t get up and get going. The fish seemed to bite a bit before low tide till an hour or two after, so with low tide at midday, we just hung out on anchor for the morning and watched the neighborhood humpbacks. We weighed anchor about 10 am and were fishing by 10:30. Aunt Barb was soon down for the count in the bunk with her cold.

Fishing was really good, and we caught more coho than the day before. When she got up from the bunk mid-afternoon, she was refreshed but still moving slow. I asked if she wanted to anchor for the night or go to town, and she said let’s go to town, so that’s what we did. Fresh salmon again for dinner with salad.

She wanted to go fishing again the next day, and we finally made it to a favorite spot. Along the way, I set the halibut skate at my secret location for the first time this year. I’ve been getting nice chicken halibut regularly this year, so hadn’t needed to set the skate. But the halibut supply is low now after sending fish back to Juneau for the home team with Sara, some to Bob and Laura, and boxes to the Salvation Army crew at the Juneau store.

On the boat

While the wind had laid down considerably, it was still blowing NW on the drag, with a considerable chop. So, I ran to the west end of the drag, then turned around to troll with the wind. We didn’t catch a thing. When we got near the anchorage, I asked Aunt Barb if she still wanted to go beach combing, which she mentioned on the way out, and she did. We anchored up, launched the punt, put on the electric motor, and went to shore. She looked for rocks while I looked for other stuff up above the tide line. I discovered yet another nice patch of sea asparagus, which was still in great shape. We picked enough to fill our pockets on the way out.

Another great day of catching up and whales and scenery. Dinner was canned venison burger from the deer Nick harvested right across from where we were beachcombing today. With onions and mushrooms and some of the beach asparagus, with salad.

Sunday was Aunt Barb’s day to pack, do laundry, and shop. We went to the gift store, and Aunt Barb shopped and shopped. I took a tour or two around the store, then went over to Papa’s Pizza and got a good coffee, then settled in on a bench in the shade. It’s in the 70s during the day now, and a little hot for me, but the breeze sure is nice if you’re in it.

We slept in this morning a bit. I cooked a big breakfast of eggs, onion, mushroom, a leftover sausage from the hot dog roast, lots of crab meat, and some of the beach asparagus. We ate our fill on that into the early afternoon. Aunt Barb got packed up, while I packed a box of fish for her, and a little box of the remaining halibut to send to Wendy. After a walk down to the beach and a stop at the library to print out Aunt Barb’s itinerary, we made it to the airport in plenty of time, and off she went. A great week.

Man filleting fish on boat in harbor.

Fishing (Again) With Roy

Roy came down from Haines fishing with me for the first time this past week. It was great to be hosting him fishing after all the times he’s hosted me fishing in the Chilkat River and picking the cherries from his trees. He bought his house from the parents of a long time teacher now here in Craig, and the parents live in Hollis.

Things didn’t start out so good. Roy had a short layover during a plane change in Juneau, and when the plane he transferred to got to Klawock, his luggage did not make it with him. The luggage would arrive on the evening flight, so we couldn’t leave town to start our fishing trip as planned, and I’m thinking – well, we’ve lost a day of fishing.

Doug was walking by the high school as we returned to town from the airport, and I stopped to see if he’d like a ride. He jumped in. He had left his rig at the mechanic at the launch ramp, and was walking home. When we told him our predicament, he said we should fish near town at a couple spots he’d recently caught fish. Why didn’t I think of that? He told me of one spot that I knew of, but didn’t even think of, fishing near town, so we headed there first. As usual, a setback leads to a lucky encounter and some new fishing information.

Roy and I fished the 3 different spots from Doug’s intel. At the last spot- the closest spot to town – we had one on, it came right to the surface, and spit the hook. We got Roy’s luggage that evening, jumped on the boat, and headed for an anchorage about 2 hours from town. A humpback whale cruised our anchorage.

Next morning I was up shortly after first light, and started my morning routine. I put the coffee peculator on to boil, removed the cushions from the galley table I sleep on and returned it to normal table height. I recently replaced the table with two telescopic legs that came with the boat with a coffee table I got on craigslist. I removed the legs, and installed a center leg that goes up and down with a hand crank. The telescopic legs on the original table was difficult to lift up to table height, and the new hand crank leg has been a welcome success.

I then checked the oil and coolant on the Yanmar, started the engine, and went to the bow to pull the anchor. When I returned to the helm, Roy was up, dressed, and ready to go. We motored the short distance to our fishing drag, poured the finished coffee into two thermoses I got at the St Vincent Depaul Thrift store in Juneau, had our first of many cups of coffee, and soon had the trolling gear out.

We caught a couple nice king salmon, a couple unexpected chicken halibut, and a big black rock fish we had for dinner the first day. That sure sets up the week nicely and puts me at ease, knowing Roy has already got a nice catch of fish to take home, even if we caught nothing the rest of the week.

The king salmon are bigger this year. The first increase in size I’ve seen in 20 years. I’m not sure yet what to make of it, but I like it.

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We were up early fishing the next day. It’s great to have early risers aboard, as I love fishing the early morning. The winds came up later in the morning. After several passes, we caught a chicken halibut but no king salmon. We moved to my other favorite spot, about an hour away. The winds were up there, too, from the opposite direction (I don’t know how this is possible, but it is!) and we caught no salmon. We continued on to the inside waters and fished the Prince of Wales Island shore. More of nothing there, and we headed for the harbor.

We headed out the next day mid morning and were at fishing spot number 2 by mid day. We caught two nice kings by late afternoon, and anchored up. A whale that seemed to homestead the mouth of the anchorage was back feeding. The whales in the area have some specialized feeding behavior I’ve not seen around Juneau. This whale would seem to swirl around sideways, with first a pectoral fin out of the water, followed by the tip of a tail. Then the whale would stand on its head, with his tail out of the water, and slowly tip over backwards. From the sonar, it looked like the whales were feeding on masses of krill, as we also saw floating krill cases.

On day 5, we were fishing about 5 am on a beautiful partly cloudy morning. With not much luck on the electric blue spoons, I recalled seeing herring in the kings I’d cleaned, so I put a King Kandy cut-plug lure on one pole, and the blue spoon on the other. We caught two kings by mid-day, both on the King Kandy. I also lost what I’m sure was a bigger halibut, which cut the line at the precious King Kandy. We thought we were hung yet again on kelp, and Roy put the engine in neutral so I could pull the wad of kelp in. After allowing me to yard it up like a pile of kelp, the fish started to pull. It was fighting like a halibut, and it cut the line right at the lure before I got a look at it. We tried for a third fish all afternoon, but no action. Roy idled us right to the mouth of our anchorage, and said pull the lines. When I hauled in one rod, I saw the other rod bouncing and thought we had shallowed up and that the cannon ball was bouncing on the bottom. I grabbed the rod and started cranking up the down rigger to get off the bottom. Then realized we had a fish on, so called Roy back to help. We landed Laura’s proxy fish, which will make her happy. We had for dinner what we ate every night after – fried king salmon collars and green salad with red onions, bell peppers, and a European white cheese I love from Costco.

The next morning, we got our first king about 545 am. Friends showed up in a couple boats an hour later. They fished a few hours after we caught our fish, then left for better fishing elsewhere. We fished the rest of the day with the whales and the sunshine, but no more keepers. We released a shaker king and beautiful ocean-bright chum salmon.

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The NOAA forecast for the waters just west of us, on the open ocean, for our last day of fishing showed the winds would pick up. The WINDY app showed winds at 8 kts, increasing to 12 kts where we were fishing. We got up extra early to get in a solid day of fishing, knowing we’d leave midday for town. We caught the first king about 2 hours later at 630 am, and it was our biggest of the season at over 21 lbs. I saw the first needle fish of the season in this king, along with some partially digested herring. I put the blue spoon back on one rod after seeing the needle fish, but we caught no more fish when we pulled the gear at 1145 am and headed for town ahead of the weather.

Back ashore, we enjoyed our first showers in a week, and had a dinner of elk burgers and socialization with Brian and Ellen and their house, along with Howard and Michelle.

Up bright and early again to get fish boxes packed, and Roy on the plane to Ketchikan and on to Juneau, where he’d take his son’s truck back on the ferry to Haines. I also sent Laura her fish on the plane to Juneau. A great start to the season.