This tree saw the sun make an appearance and illuminate my little greenhouse (maybe pick the small alder tree that I planted last year just to the left of the door). So I worked in the greenhouse preparing some planters for planting soon.
[daily log: walking, 2km; digging in the dirt, 2hr]
Category: Life in Alaska
Caveat: Tree #792
This tree was outside in the returning snow.
This lettuce was just planted in my little greenhouse.
[daily log: walking, 2km; digging in the dirt, 3hr]
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #4
Here are two weeks’ worth of frames – I missed last week because I felt horribly sick due to my second Covid vaccination.
Caveat: Storage Tent Revival
Feeling fed up with my server reconstruction efforts, I decided to work outside all day today. I have made good progress on my storage tent reconstruction. Arthur helped me for one step – pulling the roof tarp over the frame. Other than that, I just plod along, fastening things and such, putting it together. “Starting at the top and working my way down.”
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #3
I didn’t complete that many frames this week. There weren’t that many orders.
This first one is quite cool, though. It’s a 16th century map of Bucarelli Bay, as mapped by the Spaniards exploring the region at that time.
This map shows all the names they gave to the islands, capes and inlets. Some of those names have stuck – e.g. San Juan Island, San Ignacio Island, Madre de Dios Island. Other names were later changed. The town of Craig was place on what the Spaniards named Cabo Suspiro (Cape of Sighs). I think Cabo Suspiro would be a much better name for the town, than Craig.
And here is a hobbled mule.
Caveat: Tree #772
This tree has failed to detach from my treehouse, despite some very windy days.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #2
The frames I completed this week were these.
Caveat: Frame Shop Journal #1
My duties at the gift shop are focused around my role as the “frame shop guy” – the gift shop is the only retail location on the island that does custom picture framing, and there is a fairly steady demand for this service. Wayne, the store’s owner (along with his wife Donna), was the guy who brought this service to the island when they opened the gift shop a bit over 20 years ago.
Working two days a week, there is enough to do in the frame shop that that is mostly what I do. I enjoy it, as it allows me to express my creative side a bit more than most other aspects of working in the store. I have decided to keep a picture journal of the frames I put together. The pictures below are from the last 2 weeks. I’ll maybe post this picture journal once a week or once every two weeks. The things being framed are quite diverse, from parents memorializing their kids’ drawings or paintings to fine art (often local native art) to photography to motivational posters.
Caveat: Tree #757
This tree, which has a nascent treehouse attached to it, was making alarming creaking noises in the high winds. The treehouse seemed to remain attached, however.
[daily log: walking, 2.5km]
Caveat: Tree #745
This tree supervised while I created a rectangle with 4×4’s. Now I need to dig little holes under the six pillars so I can make the rectangle level, and then I can mount my “studio” (storage tent) on the rectangle. This will be a much stronger anchor than just boards on the ground, as it had been anchored before.
[daily log: walking, 4km]
Caveat: Tree #736
This tree has been killed and processed, the better to serve as the flooring (deck) of my treehouse. Also, I bought some wood to frame out a new “foundation” for my storage tent, since it got unmounted by high winds last week.
I hooked up the heavy-duty trailer, and Art and I drove into town on a special trip so I could spend some of my hard-earned gift-store salary on materials for my treehouse project. It was a lot of work, and harder to drive the potholey road with a loaded trailer.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Caveat: Tree #732
This tree was witness to the fact that my “studio” (a plastic storage tent structure) had been subjected to high winds and therefore dislodged from its moorings.
I spent some time putting rocks and logs on parts of the “feet” to hold it in place temporarily, but will need to reengineer the base of it. Meanwhile, I got distracted sorting the dirt in my greenhouse, because I want to temporarily store some of the things from the studio up in the green house.
[daily log: walking, 3.5km]
Caveat: Tree #724
This tree happened to notice that the strong winds of the last few days had disrobed my RV. I put down some rocks to weight it down, and will try re-wrap the machine once this rainstorm dies down (in Spring?).
[daily log: walking, 2km]
Caveat: Curmudgeonly-Elf-in-Training
I was a curmudgeonly elf in training. Santa came to the gift shop today.
Here are my boss and I.
Here are the store’s owner and Santa.
Many children came in the store to see Santa. There are many false Santas on this island, but I guess this was the true one – he had the uniform, anyway. We all had a discussion as to whether groups of children should be quantified as “barrages of children” or as “herds of children.” We decided it was a matter of experience. Having worked as a teacher, I felt children mostly needed to be considered as herds. But working in retail, my coworker felt strongly that children should be considered as barrages.
Caveat: Tree #683
This tree saw that I had helped Richard this morning, as we installed a brand new drainage culvert across the road on lot 73. The thinking is that this might help relieve the flooding problem at the main culvert at the top of Arthur’s driveway. You can see the outlet of the new culvert in the right center bottom of the photo. To the lower left is my famous pile-o-rocks.
[daily log: walking, 3km]
Caveat: Poem #1582 “Flat”
ㅁ The road is bumpy, replete with sharp rocks and holes. So the tire retired.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Caveat: The Saga of the Boat Rail
As mentioned before, last Friday the boat rail pulley on the lower end failed.
On Tuesday morning, Arthur and I got up super early (4:30 AM) to catch the low tide and install a new eye bolt for a pulley to anchor the lower end of the boat trolley cable.
I didn’t take any picture, but this is what an eye bolt looks like.
After I went to work, Tuesday, Arthur tried to pull the boat out of the water on his own at the mid-day high tide.
The new eye bolt failed. So it looked like this.
It left us questioning our choices. Not to mention, it looked like a question mark, right?
Yesterday morning (Wednesday), we got up early again, and tried to re-engineer an anchor for our pulley. We drilled a second hole, and installed a U-bolt.
It looked like this.
Then I went to work, and though the boat was out of the water, Arthur decided to lower the boat back into the water because the boat was crooked on its cradle.
As Arthur attempted this, there was a catastrophic failure of our U-bolt. I found this piece of our rail, and the loose pulley, near the tide line when I got home.
And this was the base of the rail in the morning.
So now there was no chance of getting the boat back into the water to “re-float” it and straighten it out. You can see the crooked boat, here.
Instead, we decided to use a come-along and chains to pull the boat around on its cradle. I didn’t take a picture of this process, because I was working hard. But this is a come-along and a chain, which we used (somewhat blurry).
We got the boat straightened out and up into the barn using the come-along and the trolley winch (but only “uphill” would work, because of the broken pulley at the bottom, so each time we needed to “reverse” we had to set up the come-along).
We paused during the uphill trip because Arthur wanted to wash off the boat. I said it would be a multi-day job, but he plowed into the effort.
After about two hours, he said he agreed it would be a multi-day job, and decided on second-thought he’d just like to get the boat put away in the boat house. So we did that.
Yay.
Caveat: Better Lucky Than Smart
This morning, we took Alan to the airport in Klawock and he headed back home. These are two masked bank-robber brothers at the tiny Klawock airport terminal at 6:15 AM.
Yesterday, we were very lucky. We’d gone in, in the morning, to fetch the boat from the boat service shop. Everything in town went very smoothly. We launched the boat without problem at the public launch, and I drove the Blueberry with boat trailer back home while Alan and Arthur navigated the boat back home. It wasn’t too windy, though it was sporadically rainy.
I got home before they arrived at the dock. I paused my efforts to park the boat trailer – a pretty complicated set of maneuvers involving backing the trailer into position – and ran down to meet them at the dock. I helped get the boat temporarily docked, and then went up to operate the trolley to lower it into the water to get the boat out of the water. We’d timed our trip to town to correspond with the high tide, with this transition in mind.
As the boat trolley was lowering, the pulley at the bottom of the rail snapped off. This was alarming. But it was very, very lucky – because my first thought was: what if the pulley had snapped off after we’d put the boat on the trolley and were raising it out of the water? The cable could have flown around with much more force, for one thing – possibly injuring someone standing nearby. For another thing, the boat and trolley would have been liberated from their cable, and would have rolled without brake or restraint back into the sea. Would we have been able to stop it? No.
That was the first element of luck.
So we paused in our efforts to fetch the boat out of the water. We’ll have to wait for: a) a low tide so we can inspect and work on the lower end of the rail, where the pulley attaches, and b) a chance to go into town to buy a new pulley and whatever other hardware is needed to repair the cable attachment.
Later I went up to finish parking the trailer, I was on the final leg: back the trailer into its slot near the water cistern. And… the left rear wheel came off the trailer. Literally, it just fell off onto the ground.
This was, needless to say, alarming. I stopped my efforts to maneuver the trailer, and Alan and I parked it off to the side of the parking pad by pushing it manually. It’s heavy – but not impossible to shove around with two people.
I was immediately struck by the sheer luck of this event: specifically, the wheel had not come off when the boat was on the trailer, in town. That would have been substantially more disastrous.
So twice, yesterday, Arthur was lucky. Alan pointed out that both failures were instances of a lack of ongoing maintenance. And for that, I feel I bear some blame – but it’s very hard to take on the tasks of ongoing maintenance within Arthur’s domain when: a) he never communicates what those maintenance tasks might be (he’s either forgotten them or he thinks of them but fails to share with me), and b) when he does decide to engage in maintenance, he gets highly annoyed and irritated with me, due to the fact that I don’t already know the procedures and so he insists that he will do it himself because I’m not doing it right. He doesn’t seem to have ever internalized the fact that I don’t actually know all his rules and procedures. Well anyway, that’s neither here nor there… ultimately, collectively, Arthur and I need to be doing more preventative maintenance, and we’ll have to work out how that might happen. This kind of luck can’t go on forever, right?
Today, I began the effort to repair the boat trailer. I removed the other rear wheel and then removed the “axle” – not really an axle, just a beam on which the two wheels are mounted. This will permit us to take the whole assembly into a mechanic in town and try to get the broken wheel repaired. That will have to happen on Monday at the soonest, however.
And we have to wait for a negative tide (not super common) to do the repair work on the boat rail. Meanwhile, the boat is going to have to wait things out, tied up at the dock, cultivating barnacles.
Caveat: Town Day
It being Thursday, we went to town to do the weekly shopping, as usual. But with Alan visiting, he came along too, and we ran extra errands and socialized with some people.
One thing we did was we went to visit Richard, who was working on his landing craft. It’s progressed a lot since I last got a tour last year (when I put in a day helping work on it), and obviously even more for Alan, who last saw it in 2017 when he visited up here.
Richard is installing a crane. So he built a shed over the front of it to cover the work area to weld the base area of the crane.
Looking around, I saw a view that felt like a nice addition to my “Alaskan Gothic” theme.
We also stopped by the gift shop, so Alan and Arthur met a few of my coworkers.
Finally, since today is supposed to be the last day of sun for a while (by the sometimes-not-so-accurate weather forecast), Alan helped me replace the tarp covering the GDC.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+15)
With Alan here, Arthur was motivated to go fishing again, despite continued reports of poor catching.
We left fairly early: away from the dock by 7:30.
The day was clear and the wind was light.
First we went to Port Caldera and tried for halibut. We caught a big ugly orange rock fish, which we decided to keep, though in Arthur’s book it doesn’t count. Then, much to all of our surprise, quite quickly we caught a good-sized halibut. Here’s Alan holding the halibut – it was maybe 30-35 pounds.
After that, we were unable to repeat that luck, so by 9:30 we started trolling for salmon. It was a desultory trolling. We went from Caldera to Port Estrella. A few small black bass, but no salmon at all.
At Port Estrella we tried for halibut again, but there was nothing. We crossed over to San Juan, and trolled from the southeast corner to Black Beach. No salmon there, either. We saw some people camping on the shore there: tents, dogs, a fire going – everything. That was interesting to me. Arthur thought maybe they were hunting deer. The east side of San Juan is native land, so I guess they hopefully had permission to be there. But who knows?
The whole trip, the large motor was behaving oddly. This was not the hiccupping problem we’ve had all summer. It wasn’t something that kicked in when the engine was hot. Instead, right from the start, at high RPMs there would be these irregular surges and pauses – RPM up 100, down 100, up 100. I managed to google the problem on my phone, and everything I could find and read said it was a fuel supply problem, which is also the likely cause of the hiccupping issue. I guess the fuel supply issue is getting worse. Anyway, it didn’t prevent us from using the boat – we could just go more slowly to avoid it, and even with it happening, it didn’t really handicap our ability to get around. It’s just disturbing. Arthur’s stated intention, though, is to get the boat in for service and out of the water before Alan leaves, so it will hopefully get looked at soon.
With Arthur and Alan both on the boat, despite their quite different personalities, they still both remind me of my grandfather (their father Dwight) a lot. It was “stereo Dwight” in some ways. Arthur’s personality is more like Dwight’s, but Alan has more of his mannerisms and his way of talking, if that makes sense. So between them, it feels uncanny sometimes.
Year-to-date totals.
- Coho: 22
- Halibut: 6
- Lingcod: 1
Caveat: Once a year whether it needs it or not
Because the sun was out, I decided I should wash the GDC. I had taken off the tarp covering it, last month, thinking there would be summer sun to bake out some of the mold and moss beginning to grow on it. But with the gray and rainy August we had, it just got greener. So with the sun out, unexpectedly, today, I decided it was time.
I drove it up to the upper parking area next to the greenhouse, and washed it with a soft scrub brush and soapy water and the hose off the well.
A stellar jay came by, apparently interested in the undertaking.
After the GDC was clean (or, um, cleaner, anyway), I decided to wash the Blueberry, too. Although to be frank, that’s a sisyphean task – one commute into town will have it well-coated in gray grime again.
Caveat: Rockpit Resort Dinner Party
Arthur finally got around to wanting to host one of his patented Rockpit “Mexican Feeds”. He made his signature dishes: chiles rellenos, chicken verde, and refried beans. Jeff and Pam and Jan and Richard came over and we ate and Richard told stories, as he does.
In the picture, from left to right, you see Arthur, Pam, Jeff, Jan and Richard. I’m behind the camera.
Caveat: Tree #595
This tree is one of the smaller trees that I am currently permitting to stick up through the temporary deck of my tree house. I kind of want to keep it, but I might end up removing it.
You might ask, “What’s up with the treehouse? You haven’t posted much about it lately…”
In fact, I stopped working on it. The treehouse project was focused on things that didn’t require my spending more money. I reached a point where I needed to invest some more money – I need lumber for the permanent deck. I don’t want to spend money on that project, right now. Maybe after I’ve worked for a while at the gift shop and saved up some money.
[daily log: walking, 1.5km]
Caveat: Maps in Frames
One of my duties at my new part-time job at the gift shop is learning the matting and framing skills, since the shop is the island’s only place where this service is provided.
Today, a guy came in from Shaan-Seet (the native-owned corporation) with a 100-year-old map he wanted framed. I was pleased, since I like maps – especially old, interesting maps such as his. It was a blueprint map of the original Craig, Alaska, townsite. That was pretty cool. He was surprised how much Craig history I already knew, as a relative newcomer to the area. But that’s just my tendency, I guess, being a bit of a local history buff wherever I happen to be – I consider it a part of being in a place, to try to know its history.
Craig used to be an island, shaped like a fish! Now it’s a peninsula, because a little isthmus was engineered (I think in 50’s?) off the eastern end of the island, connecting it to the mainland. That formed the two modern boat harbors, on the north and south side of the isthmus.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+14)
Like yesterday, Arthur went out with Jeff. He left at 6 AM with valet service to our dock. At 6 PM, he called and I went over to Jeff’s to pick him up with his fish. He was very tired.
His descriptions of the experience were vague and laconic. But he came home with 1 small coho, 2 halibut, and some black bass.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 22
- Halibut: 5
- Lingcod: 1
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+13)
This will be a much shorter fishing report, but I’m including it for completeness.
Arthur went out fishing, but I did not. He went out with his friend Jeff, who has a bigger boat and runs charter fishing trips. Arthur was hoping to get some halibut.
Apparently, he did! That’s good. They went out on the open ocean, where I dare not go with the smaller boat. He said there were 10 foot swells. Sounds swell. Anyway, Jeff helped Art get some halibut, apparently. Art was very vague on details, as is his way.
The coho continued playing hard-to-get, though – so it’s not just us. Everyone’s having a hard season, salmonwise.
It was very convenient: Jeff drove his boat over from his house to our house, picked Arthur up at the dock at 6:15 AM, and dropped him back off at 4:30 PM. Valet service.
Jeff and Art are going out tomorrow, too.
Year-to-date totals.
- Coho: 21
- Halibut: 3
- Lingcod: 1
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+12)
We left by 7:20. The weather forecast wasn’t great, but it was the best of upcoming days, so I thought we should try. In fact, the weather was better than forecast, with flat water and very little wind. But it was overcast and kept trying to rain, and by the time we got home it was raining steadily.
We went out to Black Beach at the north end of San Juan first. We trolled down the east side of San Juan. Then we crossed from San Juanito (the southeast corner of San Juan) over to Tranquil Point, where we’d had so much luck two outings ago. We trolled westward to Port Estrella. We never caught anything but some tiny black bass, which Arthur threw back. Arthur said he had one bigger fish hooked right against Joe Island, but it apparently got away.
We tried for halibut in Port Estrella for about 30 minutes. Some other boats were there, but it wasn’t obvious they were catching anything either. No fish were being hauled on board the other boats, that we could see.
We returned to trolling, and circled Port Estrella a few times and then headed back along the shore back to Tranquil Point. Still nothing.
At 1 PM, we gave up and went to the fuel dock just north of Craig, to fill up the tank. Then we went home, watching the boat’s weirdly asynchronous windshield wipers in the steady rain and contemplating the moods of fish. We were fishless.
Year-to-date totals.
- Coho: 21
- Halibut: 1
- Lingcod: 1
Here is a small island just off Point Providence on the western tip of a peninsula of Prince of Wales Island, at Port Estrella.
When we got home, after cleaning the boat I walked up along the road in the rain and found some huckleberries and blueberries up in the shrubberies south of the road.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+11)
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.
Caveat: Sasquatches!
In my new job, I am working in retail. So I get to talk to customers.
A man came in the store today and told a breathless, insistent story about a family of sasquatches that live near a sandy beach northeast of Thorne Bay, on the island. I tried to listen empathetically. He talked about how they never bother any one. How they have their own language, “not quite human.” Then that segued (somehow) to how the government took his land, long ago.
He bought a trinket for his granddaughter.
Caveat: Stuck in the tree
A few days ago, I got a drill bit stuck in the tree, while working on the treehouse project.
It took me a lot of time and tedious effort to get it out. I tried chisels, vice grips, and finally, I used a smaller drill bit at an angle, around the edges of the stuck drill bit, to dig it out of the tree.
Then I completed the hole and installed the giant lag bolt, so I could hang two cables from it instead of wrapping the suspension cables around the tree, as had been my original plan. I decided to change that plan for two reasons: 1) several people felt I might “strangle” the tree over time with wrapped cables, and insisted it was less damaging to the tree to just put a big hole in it; 2) it was quite difficult to adjust the tension with the tree-wrapped method, because the cable might slip in small increments along the trunk of the tree.
Here is the stuck drill bit. It was really buried in there and wouldn’t even wiggle.
Here is the liberated hole.
Here is the giant lag bolt going in.
Here is the final configuration, with the two cables down to the corners.
Indeed, I am pleased with the new result. The cables have good, even tension and are easy to adjust.
Now I have to do the other tree.
Caveat: Fishing Report #(n+10)
We started much later than usual, because we hadn’t planned on going. The weather report last night said it would windy and rainy. When I got up and looked out at 6, it was sunny and calm. So I re-checked the weather, and the forecasters had changed their minds. When Arthur got up at his normal time – around 830 – I suggested today might be a good day for fishing, after all.
So we left by around 930.
We went first to San Juan Island, where we’d had luck last Friday.
Today, we had no luck there. Zero nibbles.
But it was nice and calm. We motored south to near Tranquil Point, on the Prince of Wales mainland there. We had noted some other boats trolling along the coast, and thought maybe they knew something we didn’t.
I guess maybe they did. We put our hooks in just west of Tranquil, and within a minute, we had a bite. And so we circled around there, about 5 orbits in total, and landed 9 coho.
Arthur was pleased. Until we got home, and he had to butcher and clean and package all his fish. Then he was grumpy. I refuse to help in this process, because whenever I try to do something related to fish butchery or preservation, he hovers at my shoulder and tells me I’m doing everything wrong.
But I went down and cleaned the boat, and then I harvested some lettuce from the greenhouse, and then I found a few blueberries to pluck.
Year-to-date totals:
- Coho: 21
- Halibut: 1
- Lingcod: 1
Here are nine bloody fishies in the holding tank in the back of the boat.
Caveat: Tree #562
I attached a sail to my treehouse. Which, you will notice, is attached to a tree. So I can use this picture for my daily tree, though admittedly this same tree has featured before – but with less attached to it.
[daily log: walking, 2km]
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).
