Category: Fishing Report

You will have noticed the lack of Fishing Report features on this here blog, this summer. I have avoided going out fishing with Arthur through the last several months – though Arthur, too, has been avoiding, in his spectacularly non-communicative way. But now that Wayne is here visiting, you would think there would be fishing reports.

Actually, Wayne and Arthur have just now gone out fishing in the boat for the third day running. And I’ve avoided going with them. This has forced me to acknowledge a very difficult emotional truth about myself:

I hate fishing.

I didn’t used to hate fishing. I used to rather enjoy it, I think.

But nowadays, Arthur’s spectre hangs over my shoulder and whispers to me, inevitably, that I am doing it wrong. That was Arthur’s habit in the best of times – he’d tell me I was doing it wrong, or worse, just barge in and take over, because he wasn’t always great at explaining how to do it right. He was better at demonstrating. But at least in the past, his telling me that I was doing it wrong was accompanied by an effort to teach me how to do it right.

The last vestiges of that mentoring behavior evaporated last summer. It was in that moment when he announced to me, forlornly, that he’d forgotten how to deploy the downriggers on the boat. That left me doing everything, while he just watched sulkily.

And yet… he still found it in himself, later on that same trip, to tell me that I was doing it wrong. I think it broke something inside me.

So there is just no way I want to go out fishing with Arthur. Nevertheless I have neither the self-confidence in my own ability, nor the cruelty toward Arthur, to somehow go out fishing without him.

So I’ve been miserable. And I’m done fishing, I guess.

That’s too bad.

I’ll be glad when fishing season is over and the boat is back in the barn, and the people around me stop talking about fishing constantly.

As Arthur put it, as we headed back at around 1 PM: “another perfect score.” His meaning was: zero fish caught. The wind was picking up, snapping waves at the boat as we entered Port Saint Nick via the south entrance.

Of course, we started out too late in the season, didn’t we? Anyway, we should have been able to catch some halibut – there have been reports from other fishers I’ve talked to, at the gift store, about catching halibut. But we only had one halibut pole (Arthur forgot to fix the other one, which was declared broken a few outings back), and the place we’d been lucky last year didn’t work out. We caught two of what I call a small “uglyfish” – some kind of bottom fish or rock fish, that we returned.

We’d tried for halibut after an obligatory troll down the east side of San Juan Island. That was utterly fruitless, too. We caught a lot of kelp.

We hadn’t started early – maybe we left the dock at around 8:30. But the sea was very calm and some heavy fog made our navigation out the inlet a GPS-based untertaking. It had lifted by the time we reached the open waters of Bucarelli Bay.

Overall, nothing really went wrong. It was just what fishing would be like, if it were an overly dramatic sigh.

Seasonal totals:

• Coho: 5 (minus 1 lost at dock)
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 5

We were skunked.

I kept waiting for Arthur to say he wanted to go fishing again. He never did. I suspect he finally picked up on my frustration with our efforts and putting up with his “drama” (as Alan termed it), and it’s easy to just keep procrastinating – he’s still Arthur, after all: the erstwhile emperor of procrastination.

Anyway, the other day I pointed out that the weather was looking promising (for a change), and so we set Sunday as a day to try fishing.

We departed the dock at 8 AM. It was quite windy – there’d been a rainy deluge in the predawn hours, as we’ve been having quite a few of, lately. Instead of getting the usual drizzle-all-day pattern of rain, we’ve been seeing these massive deluges of an hour or two, broken up then by spots of sun and strong wind: a more “midwestern” weather pattern.

So it was windy and between deluges. We went out to the north end of San Juan Island, and started trolling. Here is a picture.

We trolled down the west side of the island, rather than our typical east side, so as to stay in the lee side of the island. Not a single bite on our trolling hooks. We stopped at Diamond Point, on the southern tip, and crossed over to Tranquil Point. I was proud of crossing to exactly the point on just visual dead reckoning, not using the boat’s GPS navigator thingy intentionally.

We trolled more but found no fish. The wind calmed and the sun came out for a bit, but Arthur seems to be content with a half-day of fishing, so we headed home at noon, and were docked and stowed at 1 PM.

There was no drama, nothing went wrong, but there were no fish, either. A neutral day.

• Coho: 5 (minus 1 lost at dock)
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 3

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

After a very long winter season, we resumed fishing today. As usual, Arthur gave me basically zero notice of his expectation. His approach has always been “military style”: never announce plans in advance, better to catch those around you unawares with whatever project you have in mind. His idea of advance notice is to say something at bedtime the night before a proposed early departure. Still, I’d more or less expected it – it was bound to happen sooner or later. He has a hard time conceptualizing the idea of “preparing” for going fishing – in his mind, the boat is always ready and nothing could possibly go wrong, it’s just a matter of walking down to it, staring the engines, and pulling away from the dock.

That said, really, it wasn’t much of a fishing trip. It was more of a “shakedown” cruise to see where we stood with boat after such a long period of non-use.

On the positive side: it still floats.

On the negative side, we seem to have some increasingly serious engine issues – the stuttering problem we’ve seen on and off in previous years (and which has never been diagnosed) did NOT return, but we did have issues with the engine not staying running on idle – which is very problematic, because it must be in idle to shift it into gear – and we got the “overheating” alarm several times, essentially randomly. I’m not sure what’s going on, but it may need a visit to the mechanic for service. The problem, of course, with that, is that it’s a quite involved process to get the boat to the mechanic. We may pull it out of the water and try flushing the engine’s cooling, and I might research online on how to adjust the idle on these types of engines (if possible – I think they’re without carburetors, using fuel injection instead).

Another negative – one of the downriggers wasn’t working. An electrical problem, in the source cable – not in the downrigger itself, as it worked fine when plugged in to the other downrigger’s socket. So I’ll have to try to solve this electrical problem. I’ve messed with this issue before (last year? Or was it the year before that?).

We departed the dock at around 8:30. It was overcast but flat. We went to Caldera, a spot which I associate with luck with catching coho early in the season. We got a tiny black bass and tiny rockfish with our one working downrigger, which was reassuring – we know the hooks are working, right? But no coho.

The wind picked up shortly after we started trolling. The forecast was that a big storm with 4- or 5-foot swells on Bucarelli was coming in by this evening, so we decided we’d done enough testing of our systems, and got home again by noon. Arthur was cold. He suffers a lot from feeling cold, these days – it might be one reason why he has much less patience for fishing up here than he used to.

• Coho: 0
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 2

Here’s the boat before launch, anticipating its upcoming short voyage.

Arthur, Alan and I went out fishing.

The weather was good for fishing. Mostly overcast, but only a few sprinkles of rain and the sea was utterly flat.

There were a lot of boats out fishing. I didn’t see much action on the other boats, either, though.

We did a kind of circle: Black Beach (north end of San Juan Island), San Ignacio (up and down and up again), then Tranquil Point over to Caldera Bay. We caught one fish off the middle of San Ignacio (near Silvester). We didn’t catch any at the “hot spot” from last week, off Batan Point just west of Caldera Bay.

So it was a mostly disappointing day: we seem to be back to our one-fish-a-day quota.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 11
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 1
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 14
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

As is sometimes his custom, Arthur didn’t bother telling me that he wanted to go out fishing today until he’d already gotten everything in the boat and had decided he was ready to go. I had figured it out about fifteen minutes earlier, when I heard him start the motors – testing them. So at least I had my boots on.

And so we went.

We went to San Igancio, again. We caught one good-sized Coho, right away. This raised Arthur’s spirits, but it wasn’t to prove a meaningful omen. We remained fishless for the subsequent hours trolling up and down along the east side of San Ignacio. Then he wanted to go to “Real Marina,” which created a lot of confusion for me, because he meant Siketi Bay – one of his favorite places. But he’d forgotten the name and he’d forgotten I’d ever been fishing with him there, so communication about his intentions was complicated.

But we went to Siketi, finally, and caught one smallish bass in the passage between Lulu Island and Cone Island. By the time we got to the east side of Noyes Island, the swells off the open sea to the south were broad, and the wind was pushing the boat around. Also, the hose with sprayer attachment that pumps seawater, that he uses to clean off the back of the boat and fill the fish holding tank, was acting up (it has leaks, and the on/off switch is unreliable). So Arthur was kicking it, and it ended up spraying the inside of the cabin of the boat. My clothes got soaked with seawater. So then I was feeling cold and grumpy too.

So we gave up and headed home over very choppy seas, reaching the dock at about 2:30. All the way back, Arthur was very angry and as restless as a foul-mouthed teenager suffering from ADHD, because he’d lost the sheath to his knife that he uses to cut up fish. He kept looking for it over and over in the same places: glove box, storage cases under the back bench seats, etc. I suspect it ended up in the water because he likes to set things down on the gunwale, and with as bumpy as the water was, it may have descended into the sea.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 2
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 1
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 10
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

Well, we went out fishing this morning.

In a way, I’m surprised I went along. A part of me wanted to just tell Arthur to go ahead and go out on his own – I’m not sure that he would have, but it seems possible.

In the end, some weird welling-up of a vague, Confucian-like sense of obligation made me agree to go. The Koreans call it 효 [hyo: 孝], which is translated as “filial piety.” I don’t know where I came by it – I suppose through some kind of cultural osmosis, having lived there all those years.

We had a serious talk about trying to communicate better, first, before going out – but the talk itself was fraught with the kind of issues that have been bothering me. He denies not paying attention, if that makes any sense. He doesn’t recall ever having used sarcasm inappropriately or dismissing my concerns. To conclude: “Anyway. Whatever.”

But we went out. It went better than last time, at least. He was making a sincere effort, within the constraints of his personality. I had told him quite explicitly, I’m not angry that he’s not showing gratitude – he does, in fact, show gratitude and generosity with me regularly. But that isn’t the same as giving a damn about what I have to say, or bothering to pay attention to find out what I’m trying to communicate.

Well, we went over to San Ignacio and ran into Art’s friend and sometime fishing companion, Jeff (in another boat, trolling the other way). We had a shouted conversation with him, boat to boat. And after a while, roughly at the southeast corner of San Ignacio Island, we caught exactly one (1) fish. So we’re not skunked for the season.

There’s some terrible irony – not to say outright tragedy – that “going fishing” is the single most stressful, dreaded aspect of my life here in Alaska. For most people, including Arthur, going fishing is fun, if not the actual goal of life. I’ve always been a bit neutral with respect to the practice of going fishing – it’s never been a strong pleasure for me. But there was a time when I did enjoy going out in the boat. I enjoy boating around, I enjoy the scenery, I enjoy being out “in the world.” But at this point, the emotional and interactive aspects of the venture, functioning in my role as Arthur’s wheelman and protege, overwhelm any pleasure I could take from it.

Actually, I sometimes very much wonder what exactly Arthur finds so fulfilling about going fishing. He doesn’t really seem, to the outside observer, to be enjoying himself. His mood tends to vacillate between long stretches of transparent boredom and brief explosions of frustration and anger when things aren’t going his way – which seems like so much of the time, these days.

I believe Arthur doesn’t actually enjoy the act of fishing, but rather, he yearns for some Platonic “state of having caught fish.” Which is to say, he enjoys it only after the fact, and only if the venture has been successful. And he’s not generous with his definition of success – today, for example, was not in any way successful.

I once said that my feeling toward fishing is similar to my feeling toward gambling: it seems like putting one’s mood in hands of random fate, which is not quite the way to achieve any kind of consistent happiness. On Arthur’s approach, that is certainly true.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 1
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 10
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

Still no luck catching fish.

We left at just before 7 AM. The morning was extremely foggy. We motored out of the inlet at half-speed, because visibility was probably no more than about 200 yards. We gamely attempted to start trolling along the west side of Cemetery Island, just north of the north entrance to Port Saint Nicholas Inlet. I don’t know why Arthur has fixated on that location, these days. There have been a lot of commercial boats outside the entrance, but I am wondering if they are there simply because they’re being restricted there by the authorities. Certainly despite the number of boats we’ve seen there, I’ve not once, so far, seen much activity on the rear decks hauling in lines or fish.

We trolled past the north entrance, southward along the Coronados Islands, and past the south entrance, and down into Doyle Bay, where the Kelp Farm is. The sun finally started coming out, there. When the fog lifted at the entrance to Doyle Bay, Sunnahae Mountain was revealed.

We kept trolling all the way to Caldera bay, to the southwest. We caught some tiny sea bass. Nothing else.

Giving up, we fished for halibut under bright sun and in calm waters, at Caldera. We pulled up some bottom fish, but they too were small, and we sent them back.

We headed to the fuel dock, refueled the boat, and were home at around 12:30 pm. It was our longest outing so far, but no more fruitful, for all that.

Meanwhile, I have become increasingly unhappy and uncomfortable in the boat with Arthur. He is very, very difficult to communicate with: both at the level of “hearing” and at the level of “listening.”

At the level of “hearing” – well, we all know he has some hearing loss. I basically always must repeat myself several times, with any kind of statement longer than a simple “Yes,” “No,” or “Okay.” This in itself is exhausting and frustrating.

But on top of this, he insists on sticking his audiobooks (playing loudly on earbuds connected to his iPod) in his ears at any idle moment. So any kind of talk where I initiate has to be started with getting his attention, conveying that it’s important, and then waiting for him to fiddle with the “pause” on his iPod (a fairly drawn out procedure, sometimes). So I end up deciding very little is really that important to say. And I just sit in silence, and have a little mantra, now, “Only speak when spoken to….”

But even when he asks me a direct question, half the time he still fails to turn off his iPod, which means he can’t hear my answer, and it requires multiple repetitions, followed by him finally realizing he could maybe turn off the iPod, and my repeating it yet again.

This is all just about the “hearing” part.

But he’s a poor “listener” too. He often responds to my efforts at communication with sarcasm, strange non-sequitur humor, or even a condescending tone of “Of course,” followed by a repetition of what I’d just said as if it was his own idea.

Add to this the fact that with our poor results, he gets grumpy and frustrated and well… we all know how that can go.

I know there are cognitive issues here. I try to be patient. But I’m imperfect, and it’s getting more and more difficult.

I really don’t want to go out fishing with him anymore. It’s not fun. It’s stressful and actually lonely, punctuated with moments of stressful and comically incommunicative shouting. It’s as if I’m doing it alone, for all there’s any kind of companionship or friendship or camaraderie.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 0
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 8
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

We tried going out fishing again today. It was an ill-fated venture. Because we are still having downrigger problems.

Anyway, we only started with one working downrigger, this time. The other is missing cable (line), and we have to purchase replacement line and re-spool it. This time, we got the weight and line down in the water at depth, and were trolling, but when we went to pull it up, once again, the “up” wasn’t working.

Very frustrating.

At least we had brought the new halibut poles and reels. So we put in a few hours hoping for halibut, at Caldera Bay. A few nibbles, and some orange-colored rockfish that we threw back, but no halibut.

Very sad.

Once again, hearts heavy, we returned home.

Once again, I put in a few hours trying to figure out what it was that I don’t get about downriggers, their motors, their switches, their little circuit boards inside. Perhaps the motor is just “tired.” That’s how it seems. Like, it has enough umph to let the cable out, but not enough to pull it back in with a weight attached.

But then I discovered something. Perhaps I’m just hallucinating, out of some misplaced hope that I can get it fixed, but it seemed to me that when I reversed the polarity on the connection from the circuit board to the motor, the motor’s “up” seemed more energetic. Yesterday (or, rather, day-before-yesterday) I had learned that polarity was in fact something that was important on the inputs to the circuit board, and  today, I wonder if what I learned is that polarity also matters on the outputs – the connection to the actual motor.

The reason why this is surprising is that Art has been quite insistent, all along, that polarity shouldn’t matter with an electric motor. That might be true for old style electric motors, but I’ve begun to wonder if his knowledge is out-of-date. Anyway, I got a lot more “pull” out of the “up” direction on the downrigger, by switching the polarity on the outputs to the motor. So maybe that’s been the issue? Art had taken apart the motors back before we launched the boat, and I wonder if maybe he switched things up when he put them back together – based on his assumption that polarity didn’t matter.

I told Arthur that I can foresee two distinct possibilities as outcomes for my third effort at downrigger repair: 1) “third time’s the charm,” and things work great; 2) “three strikes, you’re out,” and we give up and buy new downriggers.

We shall see. Because of the weather, and upcoming scheduled time at work for me, we probably won’t get another chance to test things out on the water until maybe Friday or Saturday.

And thus the fish are safe, for now.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 0
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

We got up bright and early to go out fishing today. After all the various delays and problems we had, the weather seemed auspicious and we wanted to give it a try.

We went out to Caldera Bay, only to find that the downriggers would go down, but not up. Both of them. Despite the fact that I’d tested them before departure, and had thought I’d solved the electrical problems yesterday morning.

Having the downriggers already partly down and then not having them go up is a bit of a problem. You have to turn the wheels manually, very slowly, pulling up on the weights (8 lb) on the ends of the lines. Arthur was doing that on the port side downrigger, and I was on the other side messing with the switch and trying to see why it would go down but not up. I made the mistake of messing with the “clutch” – a screw-in clamp on the side of the mechanism. This was because I was thinking maybe the wheel was screwed in too tight and so friction was combining with gravity to make it too hard for the motor to do “up” while it still could do “down.” Well, that may have been the case, but anyway I loosened the clutch just a bit too much, and suddenly the wheel was spinning and gravity was pulling the weight and the line out fast. I tried to stop it, and managed to lose my grip entirely, and just like that, the whole length of line was out and the wire snapped, and the weight was lost on the bottom of Caldera Bay.

Meanwhile, Art got the other one up, but the motor remained unable to do “up” and so we gave up on trolling. We thought: well, we could try for some halibut – Caldera is a place where we’ve had luck with halibut, before. But then we realized that Art had brought along the old halibut rods and reels – despite the fact that they both had some major problems and in fact, Alan (Art’s brother, my other uncle) had bought us new halibut rods and reels last fall. They were sitting in the boathouse. We should have brought those, right? But we hadn’t.

We sat in the sunshine and discussed looking at the scenery.

“Looks about the same as it did last year.”

“Yep.”

We decided to go back home. We tied up at the dock again by 8:30 AM.

I spent the rest of the day wrestling with downrigger electrical problems.

I feel, once again, that I’ve solved things. But! I’m not very confident, given I felt the same way yesterday at this time. So… looks like some stormy weather is coming through tonight, but Sunday might be nice. Tentatively, we’ll try again on Sunday. We will only have one downrigger though, even if the electrical problem is truly solved – because we don’t have any replacement downrigger line. Unless I drive into town tomorrow and shop for some. I might.

It was a trial run, I guess. On a positive side, the boat remains unsunk and no lives were lost.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 0
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 0
• Other: 0
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

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.

Personally I felt this trip was ill-omened, because instead of any kind of back-and-forth discussion between Arthur and me over when we would go next, Arthur simply imperiously announced, last night, “So we are going fishing tomorrow.” It’s just another example of his recent imperiousness in matters of communication, I guess. It meant I was grumpy, starting out.
Arthur got up quite early – around 5 AM, which is also when I normally get up. I found him already up when I went into the kitchen to get my oatmeal. But he futzed around with his anxiety with respect to a freezer malfunction and we only finally left at 6:30.
The weather was supposed to be light wind and no rain, and it cooperated in that respect. The swells at the open ocean felt quite substantial, but that was forecast too.
We drove the boat directly out to east side of Noyes Island just west of Siketi, where we’d caught the two coho on our last trip. We trolled through the channel and down along the east side of Noyes at Saint Nicholas Channel. We caught one quite small coho and one small black bass. We ventured into the open ocean south of the channel, but the swells made me uncomfortable and I could tell Arthur was struggling keeping his footing as he deployed the downriggers, though he’d never have admitted it.
We trolled back up alongside Noyes, back and forth over the spot where we’d had success the other day, until the low tide had come. Nothing more.
So we went to San Ignacio (which is on the way back, anyway). The commercial fleet was still there, as they’d been the previous few times. I theorized that it was because it was where they were being allowed to fish, and not necessarily because that’s where the fish were. The commercial boats are often restricted by regulation to smallish areas. Arthur said he hadn’t thought of that – his tone said that meant it wasn’t worth thinking of.
But I saw a lot of sonar fish (I’m never sure if they’re really fish, but their shape/size/movement on the under-boat sonar always make me think they’re fish). So maybe there were some fish here. We trolled all the way down the east side of San Ignacio to the southern end, and back up. We caught a tiny black bass. Finally, Arthur landed a fairly substantial coho at around 1:45, back up at the northeast corner of the island.
Because we needed to get fuel, we decided that despite that unexpected success, we should pull in and head back.
We had a stuttering engine problem – which we’ve had before, sporadically. I always feel like it seems like vapor lock or some kind of fuel supply problem. When we have it, it’s always much more likely when the tank on the boat is low. It was much worse this time. It was like the boat was running out of fuel. The indicator was at a quarter tank. But maybe that’s not very accurate? We had brought along the 5 gallon extra fuel, so we added that to the tank. We still had the stuttering problem, on the way in to the dock.
We got our fuel. The fuel dock was busy – the sports fishermen are out in force, COVID be damned. I feel a lot of anxiety about parking the boat at the fuel dock when there are other boats – I don’t feel like I have enough experience to be particularly competent, and I worry about offending the other boaters with my bad driving skills. It’s hard to slot yourself in to a spot at the dock when other boats are tied up there.
We got fuel and headed home. The engine ran smooth for about 20 minutes and we were feeling optimistic that the stuttering problem had been entirely an issue related to the tank being low. Perhaps the fuel pump had trouble getting fuel when it was low? But then the engine stuttered when we were within one mile. This is the most common place to experience the stuttering problem, in the past – enough so that Joe once called it our “Bermuda Triangle.”
It’s annoying, because neither Arthur nor I have any idea what causes the problem, and since it’s sporadic, it’s very hard to take it to a mechanic and have them diagnose it. Not to mention that taking the boat to the mechanic is a very major ordeal, requiring taking the boat out of the water and putting it on the trailer.
I left Arthur to butcher the fish and I went up to water the garden. I don’t like being around when he butchers the fish. When he was done, I walked back down to the dock and washed the boat. Arthur seemed surprised that I was going to wash the boat, despite the fact that I always wash the boat, and I had told him when we’d docked that I would come back down later to wash the boat.
Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 6
• Halibut: 1
• Lingcod: 1

Coda
During this trip, I had resolved to not bother talking except when spoken to directly – because we spend most of our time in a communication no-man’s-land, between my spontaneous statements and his refusal to listen or care what I have to say. I mostly stuck to this resolve, so I was quite taciturn I suppose. Arthur didn’t seem to care. And the few times when my resolve failed and I did say something spontaneous… each and every time, they began with “what?” (because unless he himself has immediately asked me a question, he isn’t paying attention), and ended with a dispute about some factual aspect or another of what I was trying to say. Trivial things:
“That boat is towing something, a raft or skiff,” I said. I had been watching the boat for a while, and had seen the two from the side. It was evident to me.
“What?”
I repeated my exact words, more slowly. Then he said, “What boat?” He scanned the horizon for a while. “No. The black thing is in front of the boat.”
“I saw it earlier. It’s towing,” I explained.
“Maybe. If you say so.” An almost resentful tone.

The trip was exhausting: not physically, for me, but emotionally. Not because it’s a fishing trip, but because 10 continuous hours cooped up with Arthur in our communicative purgatory is taxing.

We went out fishing today.
It started overcast and drizzly, just like our last trip, last Saturday. But instead of keeping that up all day, it cleared up nicely. And the seas were calm and almost glassy on our way out.
We trolled along San Ignacio from south to north (for a change – we normally do the other direction). No fish.
We went out Siketi, and trolled there. Nothing until we’d gone through the channel between Cone Island and Lulu Island, and were in the confusingly-named Saint Nicholas Channel (confusing because we live at Port Saint Nicholas, 15 miles to the east).
There, amid tide-roiled waters and a brisk wind from the open sea to the south, we caught a black bass and two coho. Arthur was pleased. We also tangled our propeller in some kelp. Arthur was displeased. These things happened in no particular order.
And then we came home.
Arthur gets grumpy when he cuts up the fish. I’m terrified to even offer to help, because every time I have attempted to assist with fish-butchery, he gets very controlling and perfectionistic and he makes clear that I can do nothing right. So I leave it to him, even though it makes him grumpy.
Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 4
• Halibut: 1
• Lingcod: 1

[daily log: walking, .5km; boating, 40km]

Art and I went out in the boat today. Joe went fishing too – but not on our boat, rather, on some other friend’s boat. No report yet as to how he made out.
The weather was predicting drizzle and light wind. That’s about accurate, the only piece that was maybe off was that the swells on the southwestern exposures were broad and maybe 3-4 feet. It drizzled or rained the whole time.
We got launched without problem by 7:45, but then realized about a mile west of home that Arthur had forgotten his cellphone and fishing license. Since I don’t have a phone I felt more strongly that Arthur should have his, and of course, the fishing license is a good idea. So we turned around, re-docked (I think it was a good docking, smooth and gentle), and Arthur went into the house to get those things.
We re-launched at 8:05 and cruised through the misty rain out to Siketi Bay. We trolled along the south shore of Lulu Island, hooked one Coho salmon that got away, and then landed another moderately-sized one. We turned around and trolled through Paloma Passage back into the Marina Real channel. We saw a salmon jumping in the water, but no more catches. We went back east to the north end of San Ignacio Island. There were lots of commercial boats there, and we trolled down the east side of the island. We got to the southeast corner and the large swells from the south were making me nervous, so Arthur and I agreed to not proceed along the south side of the island. We turned around and trolled back northward. No more luck catching, though right at the end, back at the northeast corner, Arthur landed a tiny Coho, which we returned to the sea “to grow up some more.” We pulled our downriggers out at around 1:45 and came back home. It was very drizzly and misty, that meant calm winds so the docking was again very smooth.
I was tired when we got home, but I had dried another batch of salmonberries, and found some fresh blueberries down between the kitchen and the sea, and so I ambitiously made another berry cobbler. It came out much nicer than my first effort; I think drying out the berries helped a lot in reducing the liquid content.
Then after dinner when Art and I were watching TV, the power went out. So this is posted a bit late.
Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 2
• Halibut: 1
• Lingcod: 1

[daily log: walking, 1km; boating, 35km]

We went out fishing today.
We left early – before 8. That was easier without the dead battery we had last time. It was only Arthur and I, since Joe or friend didn’t come along. It was raining as we left but cleared out nicely during the day. The forecast for “light wind” seems to mean about 10-knot winds, but it was fine.
We went to the fuel dock to get fuel and ended up spending a long time there, because Arthur couldn’t get his credit card to work. He called his bank on his cellphone and found out he hadn’t paid his bill. He was definitely disturbed by this news, as it was a real-world bit of confirmation that his attentional issues are “real.” Fortunately I’d brought along my card, too, so we used that. We left the fuel dock around 9. But it put him in a grumpy mood.
We went out through the north entrance to Craig harbor (north of Fish Egg Island) and then southwestward to the northern tip of San Ignacio. We trolled southward on the east shore of that island. There were a lot of commercial boats clustered in the area, trolling up and down. I saw at least one of the commercial boats pulling in a fairly steady supply of smallish salmon – so we took that as a good sign.
We didn’t hook a salmon until we reached the southwestern corner of San Ignacio, at Coco Point. The swells were pretty sloppy there, but we trolled back and forth twice hoping for another. No luck. Anyway, as Arthur put it, “at least we’re not skunked.”
“Not even for the season,” I agreed. It was, after all, our first salmon of the season.
We trolled up the western side of San Ignacio, where it gets quite shallow. I’m not sure that was a productive use of our time. But we made a full circumnavigation of the island, which I don’t think I’d ever done before in a single outing.
We finally pulled up the downriggers at the island’s northeast corner, and headed home. We arrived home at around 2:20. I didn’t dock the boat very well this time. I used the “crash the boat into the dock” method, which is a bit humiliating. No damage, though.
Arthur cut up the fish and cussed a lot because he wasn’t happy with the quality of the job he was doing. He fired up the traeger woodsmoke grill and I had a brainstorm to try to make a salmonberry glaze for the salmon, since there are fresh salmonberries abounding in our driveway right now.
I adapted a recipe for raspberry glaze that I found online, using salmonberries instead, with honey, garlic and balsamic vinegar. I thought it was pretty good, but I think Arthur didn’t like it, mostly because he didn’t like all the little salmonberry seeds.
No pictures, because no smartphone.
[daily log: walking, 2km; boating, 30km]