Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+9)

We got a fairly early start, leaving the dock at exactly 7 am.
The weather called for summery skies, no wind. All was smooth and calm but the skies were starting to cloud over. You could feel that the weather would shift – a storm (wind and rain) was forecast for tomorrow.
But our start was inauspicious. We had planned to go out to Ulitka – the north end of Noyes Island. That’s pretty far. Forty minutes into our cruise out there, at the eastern end of the San Cristobal Channel, the motor started that stuttering problem we’ve had.
Since the motor never completely dies when it does this, we didn’t feel it merited completely scrubbing our mission, but we decided that, in case things did go wrong with the big motor, not to go so far out. We turned south and decided to fish off San Juan Island instead.
In fact, it turned out to be a good decision – there were actual fish biting actual hooks off San Juan.
The first two that we hooked and reeled in we lost, though. Arthur was being stubborn about trying to pull the fish aboard on the line, instead of using the net to scoop them out of the water and onto the boat. After he lost the second one, I gently suggested, again, that we try the net, and he relented. After that, we hooked two more in rapid succession off Black Beach (the northeast corner of San Juan) and pulled them into the boat using the net without any problems.
We trolled around the little bay at Black Beach a few more times, and when no more fish bit, we moved down the east side of San Juan. We hooked three more at wide intervals down the east side. We rounded the southeast corner, at San Juanito, and Arthur decided to try trolling back up, rather than continuing around the island to the west.
We caught no more fish. We decided when we got up to Black Beach that the fish we’d caught must have been “morning fish,” since as the day aged, the fish had lost interest.
We headed home at around 12:30. From Black Beach to our dock is only 26 minutes cruising at 19 knots, so we didn’t give the big motor time to get hot and start its stuttering games. It is a bit anxiety-producing when it happens, and I’m not sure what Arthur will want to do about it, over the longer term. For now, we might just limit our fishing outings to itineraries where we can limit the continuous cruise time on the big motor to shorter periods. This avoids the issue without solving it, as long as the problem doesn’t get worse.
Longer term, we probably need to get the big motor serviced. As said, this will be a drawn-out operation, which normally Arthur prefers to do only once a year: haul the boat out of the water at the public dock in Craig, use the trailer to take it to the boat store, wait a week or two… reverse the process.
Year-to-date totals:
Coho: 12
Lingcod: 1
Halibut: 1
Here is a picture of San Juanito, a well-named tiny sibling of San Juan Island off the southeastern corner of the island. I think it maybe only has 50 trees on it. It would be a nice spot for a gazillionaire to build a getaway fortress. I think it’s not forest service land, but owned by the Shaan-Seet (local Haida tribe).