MAY 12, 2022 – LOWE INLET TO KLEWNUGGIT

I started a book yesterday called “Row to Alaska by Wind & Oar” which is a book that was in my Mother’s library when we sorted through her things after she passed. I collect mariner related books for our boat bookshelf, including stories of the people that live along this route, books about Alaska adventurers, wildlife, bears, birds, and anything set in Alaska, mostly nonfiction. Then I endeavor to read them while on our boating adventures. Anyway, this book is a true story of a couple around 60 years old that decide to row to Alaska on a sea dory, basically a rowboat (albeit sturdy) with a small sail, in 1983. They took the same route for the most part that we are on right now, and I am just fascinated and incredulous by their harrowing stories! Fun read for boaters and non-boaters alike.

Only raining lightly this morning when we awoke, but glimpses of sunlight trying to break through gave us hope! Around 9AM it indeed stopped raining, so we piled into the whaler and went for a tour to Verney Falls at the head of the basin. No bears in sight unfortunately, but lots of churning foamy water that looked like icebergs if you didn’t know any better. We estimate that the snow level is about 400’ based on the snow capped hills that surround us which show on our map as 650’-750’ so there is a definite chill in the air. Back in the Grenville Channel, we made our way to Klewnuggit for the next two nights. The skies continued to lighten up as we traveled the hour and a half run to our next anchorage. Our preferred spot is way back in the northwest corner of the eastern arm, and to date we’ve been here three times, and Lucky Dog has been here even more than that, and we have never had another boat back in here. Snowfields all around us, we already feel as though we are in Alaska, about 160 miles to Ketchikan at this point.

Since the weather was fair, and actually nice with some sunshine, Shannon and I went out with our crab and shrimp pots for a set around 11:30AM. There is a commercial shrimper that is always in the area when we’ve come in here named “Dawn Trader” who sets up pots all through the Klewnuggit entrance. We decided they must know something so we placed our pot in the same line as theirs, hoping we weren’t violating some sort of fisherman etiquette. We had various technical difficulties getting the shrimp pots down today, tangled lines, stubborn clips, current, so it wasn’t our most fun set. But we were rewarded with warm sunshine the entire time, so we have to be thankful for that. After about 3 hours we went back to start the pulling process and first up was Shannon’s 1^st pot, placed right between two commercial pots, so surely it would be good? 1 medium sized prawn came up. And to add insult to injury, we spent 5 minutes trying to wrestle with her pot to get it open (sticky clip) only to finally get it open and have the shrimp escape through the netting. Argh! Next up was my 1st pot which again was inline with the commercial ones, and it yielded 2 TINY prawns, no…definitely classified as “SHRIMP” – about salad shrimp sized. We were very discouraged because Dawn Trader leaves its pots down for hours at a time – not the usual 1 hour set. Shannon’s next pot had a couple small ones then my final pot had about 20 very large prawns (I know that this doesn’t measure up to Blakely Island shrimping standards, but we take what we can get!) so we cheered and put all the pots back down in that spot thinking we’ve found the shrimp hole. Decided to leave the pots down overnight because it was getting late, so we will see if that strategy pays off or if an octopus comes in and eats them, leaving just the heads behind (which has happened to us before). Crabbing was not great either, so we changed location on that as well. Even after I offered up a giant chinook head for bait! We have heard though that the crab have been fished out along the BC coast by commercial crabbers, even to the point where they are closing a lot of areas to recreational crabbers. Given the remoteness of where we are, I don’t even see how Canadian fisheries could even regulate the fishing of any kind. In this book I am reading it says between Straits of Juan de Fuca (basically Port Townsend WA) and Prince Rupert BC, there are 17,000 miles of tidewater coastal shoreline within approximately 500 miles which translates approximately to 33 miles of shoreline for every mile of distance. SO many inlets branch off the main waterway it’s impossible to explore them all much less patrol them by fish & game. Dinner on Lucky Dog, cards and Mexican Train, then bed. I guess I could close almost every post with that routine.