Category: Life in Alaska

We pulled the boat out of the water today, because there was a nice high-tide mid-day. We’ve decided to close the fishing season on ourselves. Here is Arthur, amazed at the low barnacle-count – I’d expected more.

The high today was 39° F.  There was frost on the dock that persisted while we pulled out the boat. I found this fish skeleton, likely abandoned by a raven or regurgitated by an eagle, lying in the frost.

We left the dock at 7:30.

The sea was calm when we started out. Based on the marine forecasts, I was trying to hit a “hole” between two fronts of the storms we’ve been having, and it seems like I did it right. Tomorrow is supposed to see “gale” conditions on Bucarelli Bay.

We went out and started trolling along Cemetery Island, just outside the north entrance to Port Saint Nicholas.

In fact, it felt like Arthur’s heart wasn’t in it. He didn’t want to go out farther, so we turned around and trolled southward, back past the north entrance, along the Coronados to the south entrance. And having caught nothing, Arthur started pulling in the lines without even commenting. It was like the whole fishing trip was just “going through the motions.”

We returned to the dock at around 9:45.

“Skunked” – though I’d call this a self-goal, to a certain extent.

With so much of the day still remaining, I decided it was a good time to check the running condition of the GDC (my RV camper). Its battery was dead. So I’ve been charging it.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 15
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 10
• Muy Grande Halibut (> 50lbs): 2
• Other: 3
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 28
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

Joe and Arthur and I went out fishing today. Joe’s stepson had intended to accompany us, but bowed out.

We got a very late start. That’s because the batteries were dead in the boat. And then, even when we charged them up, the big motor wouldn’t start. It was an electrical problem. Troubleshooting revealed that one of the connectors to the battery was so corroded it had broken through (picture).

We had to repair the electrical connectors to the battery.

We finally left the dock at 9:15. We went to Black Beach, at the north end of San Juan, and trolled for salmon. Nothing.

We went to the north end of San Ignacio and trolled southward along the eastern side. We saw my boss Wayne in another boat. Maybe he was catching a fish – it was hard to tell from the distance. But we caught nothing.

We were skunked for salmon for the day. At about 12:30 we put in for halibut on the southwest corner of San Ignacio (Cocos Point).

Joe caught one humongous halibut. About 70 pounds, 56 inches long.

It didn’t fit in the fish-holding tank at the back of the boat – its tail stuck out.

Arthur and I were satisfied to have assisted, and we headed back. The sea, that had been flat in the morning, was whipped into a frenzy by increasing wind, going home, and we were slapping 3-4 foot waves all the way until we got inside Port Saint Nicholas.

We tied up at the dock at 2:45.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 15
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 10
• Mongo Halibut (> 50lbs): 2
• Other: 3
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 28
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

We went fishing again today. This is because Joe wanted to maximize his friend Jim’s chances to fish, before Jim goes back to Idaho.

We left right before 7 AM. Joe rejected even the possibility of trolling for salmon. My impression is that Joe finds trolling boring, and his fishing dreams focus on catching great big halibuts, battling them with his fishing rod silhouetted against the horizon.

Arthur, on the other hand, seems to find fishing for halibut frustrating and boring. It’s mostly waiting around. There is much more to be done when trolling. The downriggers have to be deployed, depths monitored, and the whole thing takes place while in motion. So Arthur was visibly disconsolate when Joe declared his desire to focus on halibut, but, since Joe and Jim were guests, he hunkered down and decided to just mess with rigging up new hook assemblies for some future trolling excursion.

We motored straight out to Diamond Point and parked there, and fished for halibut. Joe’s instincts worked out, this time, and we caught quite a few. Importantly, Joe got to hook a 60 pound halibut, much bigger than the other small ones, and hauled it in. It was actually impressive.

Arthur actually rejected fishing at all, except a very brief stint at the end. Earlier, I took a third rod and fished instead. I even caught a halibut. I’d never caught one before. It was small. Mostly Jim and Joe did the catching. We did it all at Diamond Point, so from a navigational standpoint, the day was straightforward. The weather started quite calm but it was getting blowy by the time we decided to head in, around noon.

We caught a total of 10 halibut. Here they are, laid out on the deck, with Jim and Joe admiring them.

I have had another depressing insight about why communication with Arthur breaks down for me (and I mean for me, specifically) so frequently.

It goes like this. Arthur’s default belief is that I’m incompetent. This isn’t precisely that he thinks badly of me, but rather, in his mind I’m frozen, developmentally, at around age 11 or so – at least as far as I can figure out. So then when I ask Arthur something, or make a statement, and he misunderstands me (which is the most common result, these days, either because of his hearing loss or his cognitive processing issues), he always misunderstands me in the direction of assuming that my question or statement is coming from the position of incompetence. I am not a particularly thick-skinned person. So of course my feelings get hurt by this insinuation of incompetence, which is further offensive because it’s based on a failure to understand what I’ve said.

It might help to give an example. Arthur prefers to dump the fish carcasses from a big haul far away from the dock, off in the middle of the bay somewhere. This is an established procedure, in which I’ve participated many times. I went to ask Arthur about if he wanted me to take the scraps out in the boat and dump them in the middle of the bay right away, or if he wanted to supervise that undertaking. He didn’t fully hear me, and of course he doesn’t remember ever doing that with me before (I’m still 11 years old, right?), so he immediately gets upset, because he’d already said that the fish carcasses needed to be dumped in the middle of the bay, and he starts explaining, defensively, in excessive detail, why he believes this to be important. All the while, becoming increasingly agitated by what he clearly perceived to be an obvious question that he’d answered before. But remember – I wasn’t questioning the procedure, I was merely trying to take initiative and see if he simply wanted me to do it, or if he didn’t trust me to do it.

Anyway, I walked away. And I did it.

Here is a rather large boat that passed us while we fished.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 15
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 11
• Other: 3
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 27
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1

Art and I went out fishing today, accompanied by Joe and his friend Jim. It was a very long day, but quite mediocre in terms of results.

We launched a little before 7 AM.

We trolled from Tranquil point to Port Estrella, and tried for some halibut there. We moved northwestward to the center of Bucareli Bay, to a spot over a shallower underwater plateau there, and tried for halibut again. Jim caught the bottom and there was lots of spinning the boat around and yelling while we tried to get him loose – in the end, we broke the line and left his hook and weight at the bottom.

Then we crossed increasingly rough and windswept waters to the southwest corner of San Igancio Island, where we again tried for halibut, drifting northward with the wind, motoring south again, and drifting northward again.

That having proved fairly fruitless, we trolled through the passage on the west side of San Ignacio to that island’s north end. Nothing at all bit our hooks. We proceeded southeastward from there to Diamond Point (the southwest corner of San Juan Island), where Jim had had much luck with halibut a few days earlier. But nothing – though Joe hooked what he and I both believed was a “big one” that seemed to get away.

Then we gave up and went home.

I didn’t keep a very good mental record of where we caught our fishes, but in total Art got one “pink” salmon. I got one silver (coho) – which I caught, much to my own surprise, using a halibut hook. Joe got one smallish halibut and one healthy-sized ling-cod. Jim caught a tiny black bass that didn’t seem much larger than the bait it had swallowed. Art and I sent all the caught fish home with Joe and Jim.

After getting back to the house at just before 5 PM, Joe had his cooler with his small haul of fish, with the tail of one fish sticking out.

Year-to-date totals:

• Coho: 15
• Kings: 0
• Halibut: 1
• Other: 3
• Too-small fish sent home to mama: 22
• Downrigger weights left on the bottom of the sea: 1