SULLIVAN BAY TO LAURA BAY

Saturday, July 26, 2025

John and Bill went fishing this morning and caught a couple of 20-pound chinook, beautiful fish! The fishing is so good again this year, it’s pretty exciting to see the Chinook salmon run healthy again. There were many years up here where it was slim pickin’s and we’d settle for Coho, which in my opinion, aren’t as good eating. Good for the Orcas too! After processing the catch and collecting our warm cinnamon buns from the store – and they are worth every single calorie – we said our farewells and cast off headed for Laura Bay to do one more round of prawn harvesting and maybe some get some Dungeness crab as well. It was another slow cruise so we could fill our water tank along the way, but what an absolutely gorgeous sunny day. We’ve been so lucky to have good weather up here in the Broughtons – it has a reputation for rain and fog and we’ve been so fortunate to be here in the good weather. We arrived at Laura Bay to find 3 other boats already here, and a 4th arrived later! But we were able to get a spot with plenty of distance from other boats so everyone is happy. I immediately set out my prawn and crab traps, so we will see how that goes.

Evening Update: went to inspect the prawn traps after dinner which was about a 4 hour soak and we slayed with a count of 201! And there was a ratfish in one of the traps eating our prawns!! He had one hanging out of his mouth when we brought it up. That trap didn’t have as much as the other one, he probably scared them away. Wish I would have gotten a photo of the ratfish, haven’t seen one of those since my youth fishing of the pier at Blakely Island. We decided to leave the crab traps out overnight as I wasn’t prepared mentally to deal with processing all the prawns and any crab we might catch. As it was it was 9:30 before I had all the prawns beheaded, rinsed and vacuum sealed. Earlier in the evening while cooking dinner (before we retrieved prawns) I noticed a black bear on the beach in our cove but had too many things in motion to get a closer look in the tender. On our way back from prawn harvesting around 8PM we noticed it was still there, very busy digging in the sand for clams so we motored into the back cove for a better look. Couldn’t get too close but was so fun to just watch him foraging. Busy night full of adventure but so fun! And the weather. Wow, we are just so lucky to have this sun in the Broughtons.