Summer Fishing Part 1

Summer Fishing

It has been a slow start to the 2014 fishing season.  Last week marked our first fishing trip out on the boat and I have some new stories to tell.  We went out on June 27th, and the skies were clear, water calm, or so we thought.  we hit some pretty large wind swept waves as soon as we left the harbor. The days crew consisted of: Brian, Eli, Jenny, and Doug.  All the gear was packed up and ready to go by the time we got the boat in the water.  It was around 10:30 by the time we left harbor and headed out to the south side of Shelter Island for some halibut fishing.  

Halibut Fishing

Halibut fishing is pretty straight forward.  You drop a weight with 2 hooks about 1-2 feet apart with bait on them and let it sink to the bottom.  We usually like to fish in the 250-280 foot depth as you can get some rather large Halibut but not so large that you can't eat them.  This picture is facing west toward the Chilkat mountain range and the island in the foreground is Shelter Island.  We chose this spot first because it was out of the wind and was relatively flat calm. We caught 2 small sized halibut before we pulled anchor and moved to another spot.

Salmon Fishing

The time of year to catch summer kings is here, so we decided to drop a troll line and see if we caught anything.  We did not :(

Secret Spot

We got to our secret spot and dropped anchor and began dropping the lines.  Here is Brian dropping a halibut line with some bait on a down rigger.  It only took about 10 minutes before we had our first fish on the line.  The only thing exciting about pulling a halibut up from 300 feet of water is when you see the poll jerk downward and you know you have a fish on the line.  Otherwise it is a lot of hard work and persistence you will find that they like to dive back down and become dead weight.  However with a bit of persistence you can tire them out and have yourself a nice fish on the deck.  The largest halibut we caught that day was around 30 pounds which is fairly small but the amount of edible meat on them is pretty decent so everyone that went fishing that day went home with about 10 pounds of fish each.

The Catch:

Fishing was great that last Friday of June and we look forward to many more sunny days on the water this summer in Southeast Alaska.

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