Sincerely, Denise

Friday, July 18, 2025

“You want to go fishing?” is the first thing I heard at 5:30AM, groggy from an uncomfortable sleep. I had my shoulder replaced 15 years ago and for some reason in certain positions my circulation is cut off to my hands. Annoying! Yes I will go fishing, and mainly because there is no fog today which means it will be much warmer out there! After some eye opening caffeine we took off for the fishing grounds which is a very short ride away. A visitor was there, no, actually, one resident humpback was already feeding along the shoreline right where we were going to fish, and it was a HUGE whale, enormous body. We altered our path so as to stay out of his way, you never know when they will decide to come up next to you and it will scare the you know what out of you! The whale soon made his way down the shoreline and around the corner out of our fishing route. Lines were down and we were a couple bites into our morning when John says “there’s another whale down the shoreline headed this way” which turned out to be at least two whales maybe three. They were giving us quite the exhibition as we once again steered out more offshore so they could pass on the inside. They seem to like to feed along the shoreline. We got a lot of pictures, none of which are very clear (remember my gray on gray comment in an earlier post) but I hope you get the gist of what we saw. It was pretty darn special! Soon they too made their way around the corner from us and that was the last we saw of them. We think one was a baby humpback but only glimpsed the baby one time. We caught and released a few more salmon and then tried our luck at bottom fishing for lings but not being familiar with the territory here we weren’t sure where to find them. We tried several rock piles along the shoreline and pulled up a rockfish and then two smaller ling cod that we didn’t keep. We ran across an eagles nest and again, my pictures don’t do it justice, but it was too far up and away. Another eagle watched as we bottom fished. We were back at the boat by 10AM and enjoyed homemade egg McMuffins. 12:30, John is back out fishing again, trying for ling cod at slack. AFTERNOON UPDATE: No ling cod could be found. He tried all the rockpiles in our area and no bites. Disappointing. Afternoon nap for John, dinner prep for me, then a 5:30 cruise around our bay exploring. I think I posted about this a couple of years ago but there’s a section of abandoned and dilapidated dock anchored in the back bay near us. We can’t figure out why someone would just leave this here, but now it has become a wildflower platform and it also appears some tuberous sea creature is growing on one side. And it is smelly like an otter den, yuk. Dinner was flank steak, baked potato and salad, lettuce being the only vegetable left in my fridge, it’s slim pickin’s. Tomorrow we hope to cross back down to Port McNeill and the predictions look favorable, but we won’t know till morning actuals.