The Perfect Day

July 5th
(52-58 degrees, clam, partly cloudy)


We were dressed and loading up the boat to go and spray oyster bags this morning early with the tides when JR and Zach came in to tell us how calm the waters were out beyond the islands.


We took the chance and repacked to go adventuring instead of working. We have learned to take advantage of good weather when it comes. We ran hard out to the edge of the open ocean and started to fish.

Right away I hooked a nice sized Ling Cod. I had forgotten how hard they fight. We were fishing just 134 feet down but just when I would get it close to the boat, it would rip out line and take off again. Larry soon hooked another ling even bigger.

We were watching whale all around us. It was amazing. There were water birds feeding and darting by in all directions. We could see three or four whale at a time scooping fish on all sides of our little 16 foot skiff.

At a curious sound we turned to watch a sea lion rolling and feeding along. Another sound had us turning to see two different whale jumping and breeching in the open waters. You could hardly take it all in. I pulled up another fish after a fierce fight only to see that his tail was a bloody stump. Evidently I had been playing tug of war with some creature in the deep. At one point Larry remarked that one of his gadgets marked the water at 428 ft. The random thought floated through my mind that this is too deep for any dragging of the water for a body. They would just say a prayer, toss some flowers, and not eat the crab from that area for a week or so!

Eagles where fishing too! There was an amazing amount of bait fish in the water around us. It was quite the show watching the eagles soaring by and snatching a fish from the water.

Thankfully we stayed in the skiff except for a short landing on the shore of an island. We have seen refuge from the Japanese Tsunami that people are starting to find. I got a buoy, a piece of net, and a spray can with foreign lettering. (Zach says it is Chinese, not Japanese).

The whole day was magical like this. It followed us right back to the float house. We all met up and sat on the front deck to share our day and eat dinner. We cleaned our fish and put the carcasses on the front log boom. We got to watch more eagles fighting over them.



We could see seal feeding on on shore across from us, a whale lay on its back repeatedly smacking one flipper on the surface, and in the distance we could just see a Black Bear rolling and feed on the tall grasses by the shore. It will be hard to top this day.