TURNBULL COVE

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Even though we don’t need more fish, John went fishing at 5:30AM this morning just for the fun of it and ended up catching and releasing a little bit of everything – a couple Coho, a couple small springs, and a couple pinks – yuk – we never keep the pinks. Unless you eat them or freeze them the same day, the meat deteriorates quickly and becomes mushy. It’s not that great of eating anyway. It was dripping with mist and fog this morning, literally sounded like raindrops and was running down the windows. A good morning for a hot breakfast of bacon and eggs! We had a few hours of downtime until high water slack again for another session of ling cod fishing. I think I like it more than salmon fishing because it’s not as long of a commitment for one thing, but it’s also active jigging for the fish and SO exciting when you get a bite! Today however was not a fun day for me. We were out in the channel a little too early for slack tide, and the wind kept blowing us off our mark, so basically my line would start to drift behind us almost as soon as I started letting down. You can’t get to the bottom very easily that way, and because your line peels out more than it needs to get to bottom (because of the drift) you end up getting snagged on the bottom which is exactly what happened to me – and I lost two nice jigs in the process. I decided to ground myself and John just fished one pole while I operated the boat and tried to keep us in position. We were just about ready to pack up and leave but decided to do one more pass through the kelp beds where we seem to have luck. Well John Boy snagged a monster from the deep this time! Took a lot of effort to convince him to come to the surface but John finally got him to the boat and he was an enormous 15 lbs! As we were attempting to thread a line through his gills so we could hang him off the cleat and bleed him out in the water, it jumped and both of us got nicked by its teeth – and they have very sharp teeth! So now not only is the fish bleeding but John and I are dripping blood in the boat – seems we don’t have rags or Band-Aids on the boat, note to self to correct this situation. Actually, I think we have a real first aid kit buried in the cabinet somewhere but these were really small cuts – just bleeders. That fish was enough for us so we made our way back to the boat, processed the meat, and cleaned up our mess. It was about 5:00PM before we saw the sun, but the skies suddenly and rapidly cleared out the overcast and we were treated to another glorious evening of warm sunshine! And that means it was time for a cocktail cruise. We motored over to the neighboring Roaring Hole Rapids to see what was happening over there and it was in full motion, purging water from the lagoon beyond. We slowly motored into the current until as John says “we were rejected” meaning no further forward progress. We could have hunkered down and powered through the rapids but I just wasn’t feeling like a bronco ride! We’ve run the rapids many times in the past and it is like violent bumper cars, the current shoves you hard from many directions so you have to hold on tight and wear a lifejacket. We then motored over to Kenneth Passage where last year we saw a bear swim across the channel! I know we won’t see that again but when idling around the coves I did spot something swimming – what the heck could it be? As we got closer to shore we saw it was the cutest little deer that had swum the channel – that’s a new one, never seen a deer up here before. After our cruise I made a salmon dinner using a new rub we bought in Port McNeill, roasted broccoli and leftover pasta. We both agreed the salmon rub was too overpowering for the fish so won’t be using that again. Another nice evening in the books.