Another Perfect Day!

Hard to believe that so soon after the first one. Larry and I had the pleasure of experiencing another perfect day.  We give thanks to the Lord for the conditions and our friends John & Emily for taking us out on this adventure.

Every since we moved to coastal Alaska I have wanted to see the Tucan bird of the north, the Puffin but our boat doesn't safely travel out as far as they nest.  Our friends have a bigger, covered boat and agreed to the trip.  We took our regular delivery trip to Craig and then spent the night to get an early start out.

Wednesday dawned sunny and warm and we were off.  We headed south and west to open waters and cliffs and caves around Addington Island.  We were scooting along watching humpback whale and sea otter and more eagles feeding then you would normally see in one place.  The bait fish are really thick right now.

We got to open ocean and the rocks were ruggedly carved by the wave action.  

The Sea Lions were everywhere sunning on the rock ledges and barking at our engine noise.  We were watching all sorts of water birds diving and sunning on the rocks but as much as I glassed them I could not identify any Puffin.



John cut the big engine, they set up the fishing poles, and we started trolling the coastline.  I kept seeing the red legs of the Mere birds and then someone said that is a red beak!  We have spotted the elusive Puffin!  There was a small flock floating, fishing, preening, and even sleeping as we trolled along the shore passing them again and again.  I got to view my fill.

About this time we spotted fins near the shore and soon we were watching a pod of Orca whale feeding and floating and unbelievably, got a picture of one of them breaching fully up out of the water!

It was almost an interruption of the wildlife viewing to stop and attend to the fishing poles but we managed to pull in a limit of silver salmon and some nice black bass.  This was the second day of catching any salmon, they are just starting to move in from the deep.

Soon we were surrounded by charter boats chasing after the salmon.  We were fully satisfied by then and headed back to check the crab pots and go to the campground where the Carrolls spend their summers.

They were surprised when we cleaned the fish and wanted to fry some for dinner instead of having some sort of shore food.  We enjoyed Emily's cooking and the Black Bass, Salmon livers and hearts!

We spent another night in the ol' mini camping van and had a great summer break from the oyster bags.  We returned to the float to find that JR and Zach had been catching salmon and viewing whales as well.  JR got a picture of a huge humpback coming out of the water looking like a speeding freight train.  Truly we had another perfect day!