My fondness for enumeration has been made demonstrably clear by this here blog. I thought I could start enumerating fishing reports, since Art and I go out fishing now and then. But I have no idea how many fishing reports I’ve already done – the “fishing report” aspect was incorporated into other various blog entries over the last year and half, and it’s hard to go back and isolate those references.
So this enumeration will be somewhat vague as to its starting point. This is not “Fishing Report #1” but rather #(n+1), where n=’however many fishing reports I’ve already given.’
Hereforthwith, then, is the first Fishing Report explicitly declared as such.
Today, Art and I went out in the boat.
We left at 8 AM. The weather was forecast to be partly cloudy but with little wind. In fact, over the day, the skies cleared to beautiful sun, but the prediction of light wind was a bit inaccurate. It got pretty breezy, and the trip was through choppy water – especially on the way back. “Hammer off those barnacles!” Arthur insisted.
We motored out to Ulitka Bay, off the northern tip of Noyes Island. That’s open ocean (“next stop: Kamchatka!”) just around the point, there, so the swells were wide and slow.
We trolled for salmon. There were two other boats there, when we got there – a much lower number than the 20-30 we saw several times congregated at the point last summer. I expect the sport fishing season is seriously impacted by the pandemic. One boat trolled around randomly, the other was mooching close in to the rocks.
We trolled in a loop around the little bay there, and then eastward along the north shore of Noyes Island all the way to Steamboat.
We caught no salmon, but we caught a ling cod and 3 black bass. We threw back the two smaller of the black bass, as not worth the effort. The 3rd black bass we ate for dinner, and the ling cod was frozen for future soups. Despite this, Arthur will tell all our acquaintances with utter sincerity that “we caught absolutely nothing.” That’s because in his mind, only salmon and halibut count as something. I somewhat understand this, but it’s annoying too, because he gets all depressed about our fruitless fishing trip, but it’s not, technically, even true that it was fruitless.
We also put hooks on the bottom off the east side of Noyes for a bit around noon, hoping for halibut. That’s the spot where we caught halibut a week or two ago with Joe.
The sea was quite bumpy on the return trip. We got home around 2:30.
Here is a mountain on the north side of Noyes Island. It still has patches of snow in mid June.
Here is Arthur with one of our fish we caught which he will tell you is nothing.
