It was not without misadventure. But we did survive. And now we have 4 salmon that we didn’t have before.
We left the dock at 8 AM. It was heavily overcast and drizzly. The sun and blue skies of the last week or so had decided to disappear – just in time for our finally being able to make our fishing trip happen.
We went to the northeast corner of San Juan Island (called by local xenophobes of various stripes “Saint John”). We saw other boats, we trolled around through the notch several times. We caught a coho salmon, and so Arthur went to fill the fish-containing basin at the back of the boat with some sea-water. The spray hose attachment pump didn’t work (another thing that should be tested before departing the dock!). I suspect a corroded connection somewhere. So meanwhile, we can always go “low tech” and fill the basin using a bucket.
So I was using a bucket to fill the basin, leaning over the side of the boat, getting some water, dumping it. Well, I was also trying to monitor the direction of the boat – I should have slowed/stopped the boat, but I was trying to multi-task, and Arthur and Alan weren’t being terribly useful with respect to situational awareness. With my attention in two places at once, I managed to lose the bucket. I would have just given up and let the sea have the bucket, but Arthur insisted we circle back and try to fetch it several times, until it had sunk out of sight beneath the rolly waves. Arthur spends a lot of time obsessing over the various buckets in his mental inventory, which all seem to have individual characteristics and personalities, and he has a hard time reconciling this mental inventory to fact in the real world at the present moment. So this will contribute to that problem. Anyway, we’ll need to buy some more buckets. Meanwhile, there was a spare bucket on the boat, though somewhat larger and a bit harder to handle. I tied a rope to the handle of that one, so it would be harder to lose in the sea.
We caught a few more coho salmon, and lost a few, too, as Alan or Arthur tried to reel them in and failed to bring them on board. Sometimes that happens, but it seemed to be happening more than usual.
Around 1100, Alan caught a massive agglomeration of kelp, which took a while to disentangle. That (along with the constant drizzle) dampened our spirits with respect to further orbits trolling for salmon, so Alan suggested we head over to Caldera and try for halibut. We crossed Bucarelli Bay in choppy seas with low visibility due to overcast and rain, and at Caldera Alan got his hook in for some halibut, but Arthur struggled with the second halibut pole, as we realized that the second pole had a mechanical problem which we’d identified last Fall, and which was supposed to have been repaired ™ but of course never was.
So that ended Arthur’s interest in continued efforts to fish, and Alan was unhappy standing in the drizzle at the back of the boat, too. So we headed home. Though it was choppy with a steady south wind out on Bucarelli, inside Port Saint Nick the water remained flat, and docking was easy – we docked at around 1 PM.
We had 5 coho, and Arthur set about gutting and cleaning them right there on the transom, while Alan and I fled the scene because Arthur, gutting a fish, is a demonic thing, unhealthy to behold. Unfortunately, Arthur managed to lose one of the 5 fish overboard in the process of cleaning them. He wanted me to try to fetch the fish out of the water with the net, but by the time I got down there, I couldn’t see anything in the cloudy, sea-green sea under the dim light of the heavily overcast skies.
We had salmon barbecued on the traeger grill for dinner. It wasn’t too bad.
- Coho: 5 (minus 1 lost at dock)
- Kings: 0
- Halibut: 0
- Other: 0
- Too-small fish sent home to mama: 3
