Day: August 13, 2020

Thursday isn’t a normal fishing day. Thursday is supposed to be shopping day. But now that I’m working Tuesday and Wednesday, I think Arthur felt some weird impatience about going out fishing. It’s odd – I suspect strongly that if I hadn’t worked Tuesday and yesterday, he’d not have had any interest in fishing today. But he may have felt some weird pressure to “make use of me” when I wasn’t working, now that I’m working, however limited my schedule. I don’t know.
We left the house at around 7:20 – pretty early. We motored out to Port Caldera, because Arthur was suddenly gung-ho to try for halibut. But as happens every time we try for halibut, after about 20 minutes he got impatient – halibut fishing requires more patience because unlike trolling for salmon, for halibut you just hold the boat still, put your baited hook on the bottom of the sea and wait. And wait.
No bites.
So after that, we pulled up the halibut hooks and began trolling for salmon. We trolled all along the shore from Port Caldera past Tranquil Point, which is where we’d hit the jackpot last time we went fishing. But this time, no luck. And worse, there was a net seiner at Tranquil, scooping up fish with a net. I guess that requires a special license and all that, but it sure takes the fun out of sport fishing. You just watch all the salmon jumping trying to get out of the net as it closes in around them, but they will be caught – probably hundreds in a single scoop.
I took a picture. It’s hard to see, but the idea is there’s the main boat, on the left, and a little skiff, like a motorized bathtub, on the right (right up tight against the shore, there), and a giant underwater net stretched out between them. Then the main boat and the skiff parallel each other and close their ends off, and all the fish between are scooped up. You can embiggen the picture some by clicking on it.

We caught no fish in our prior hotspot – the net took them all, maybe.
We motored over to the southwest corner of San Juan, and tried trolling up the west side (not sure I’ve ever done that before with Arthur). No luck there, either. And there was a very irate fisherman anchored there halfway up the west side, who seemed to take great umbrage that we got within 200 yards of his boat – he was leaping up and down on his deck, yelling at us to get away. Neither Arthur nor I could identify what possible offense we might be causing – he was clearly anchored and not in motion, he had no lines in the water we could even make out, which would be the main concern, that someone would foul some lines if you had them in the water. Well, who knows?
Arthur lost heart after that. We motored home, and got home around 1 pm. We were skunked.
Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 21
• Halibut: 1
• Lingcod: 1

Since it was Thursday, we went ahead and did the shopping in town later in the afternoon. Arthur was quite exhausted.
When we got home from shopping, I noticed the real-estate guy sitting in the lot next door, which has been for sale these past few months. And he told me the lot had sold. I was surprised – it had seemed overpriced, to me. Anyway, if you’d been planning to surprise me by buying the lot and becoming my neighbor, I hate to say, but you lost your chance.