Day 75 – Moored at Sullivan Bay

It was a beautiful relatively clear morning, and the slack was at 7AM, so my fisherman husband ran 40 minutes to the outside at the entrance to Wells Passage (James Point) and fished his heart out while I sipped my large coffee and read my book in the warmth of the boat. This is not River’s Inlet, that’s for sure. He had one small fish on and that was it, just not a lot of activity. Nobody else at the dock had much luck either so the fish apparently just aren’t here yet or they are in between runs. It was such a beautiful day, in fact the skies opened up here at noon which is early for this area, and we were basking in the hot sun. At the noon slack we decided to go all out and put out shrimp pots, crab pots and go bottom fishing. The bottom fishing resulted in 2 dog fish over the course of the hour so we gave up on that when the tide starting running too hard for us to keep still. We checked the crab pots and had lots of action with many smalls and females, but we were rewarded with 2 keepers after just 2 hours. This area has been fished out by the commercial guys already so it’s slim pickin’s. We went out at the 5:30 slack and trolled for silvers at a new place on the inside that the manager “Chris” at the marina had told us about, but again we were skunked. But we saw several humpbacks today in our channel so that is ALWAYS exciting! We checked the crab pots one more time before dinner and got another 2 keepers! This time we decided to rebait and move to a new location, so we motored further down the beach to find a suitable spot. A dark shape started to take form on the beach and we were delighted to find a black bear turning rocks on the beach foraging for small crabs and sealife that hides under the rocks. We slowly crept up close to the shore and he really didn’t seem to care about us at all. He looked at us and knew we were there but went on about his business. We got pretty close and had a nice observation session before he eventually wandered off back into the woods. Dinner tonight was…you guessed it….fresh cracked crab, salad, and garlic bread.