My daughter Jennifer and my grandson Hayden came into town on 07/06 for a little over a week.
Our goals for this trip were to try to catch a salmon, and then to walk up and see the bears at the Marguerite Bay fish & bear viewing platform.
This map snippet shows our track for this 3-day outing.
We trolled 2 lines off the downriggers for about 4 hours between Survey Point and Pup Island. We picked up 7 or 8 undersized Kings which had to be released. The largest of these was 24", but they have to be 28" to be kept.
When I went to take the downriggers down the swivel base on the starboard downrigger split in half and I just about lost the downrigger overboard.
When you use your boat, stuff breaks. That's just the way it is.
When we pulled into Margeurite Bay in Traitors Cove at about 6:15 PM the dock was full, but the mooring buoy was open. I started making preparations to tie to mooring buoy, but just as I did so a large boat at the dock pulled out, so we were able to get tied up to the dock.
I had deliberately timed our arrival for late in the day because I thought that they would be flying in tourists to go up to see the bears. I found out when we got there that the bear viewing tours had not started yet.
This photo was actually taken on Saturday. When we pulled in on Friday evening there were a couple of commercial trollers tied up there, but they left early on Saturday morning.
We took a little walk up the logging road to the landing that is just a short way up the road.
These are the vans that will be used to transport the tourists from the dock up the logging road about 3/4 of a mile to bear & fish viewing platform. Jennifer noted that some of them had expired license plates. I guess driving on logging roads does not require current registration and tags.
This is a big truck loaded with tires and other gear to service the other trucks and equipment that was there.
There were 2 big trucks with flatbed trailers, and on the trailers were new outhouses, and what looked like the big cisterns that will go under the outhouses. There is a small one-seater outhouse up there now, but it looks like they have plans to replace that with a bigger one, and then place another outhouse somewhere along the road system.
If you want to place that big cistern under the new outhouse, you're going to need to dig a big pit and that will require an excavator. There were 2 excavators at the landing.
And of course, all those trucks and excavators are going to eventually need to be refueled, so they brought along a fuel truck.
The USFS cabin there had several 4-wheelers and a couple of ATV's for their use along the road system. In the past they would have big trucks but now maybe they can accomplish many of their goals with just the 4-wheelers.
There were lots of Foxgloves along the sides of the road.
I don't know what these flowers are called, but they were sure beautiful.
When we got up to the bear and fish viewing platform there were neither fish nor bears to be seen. I guess we were a week or so too early.
I rigged up one of those multi-hook herring jigs for Hayden to use at the dock. There were dozens of little fish right near the dock. He spent hours fishing for and catching these little guys. I don't know what kind of fish they were, perhaps some kind of perch or minnow. Of course, he had to keep some in a bucket for a while.
I had bought a BB gun for Hayden last summer but he was unable to pump it himself so he really couldn't use it much. This summer he is much stronger and was able to pump it himself, so he had a lot of fun with it.
On Saturday morning I put the raft in the water and prepared the crab pots. Hayden and I went out and set them over near the lagoon. He's getting quite good at steering the raft.
After we got back from setting the crab pots Hayden took his Mom out for a raft ride.
I try to have lots of diversions for Hayden on trips like these and one of those diversions was a kite. Last year he flew one from the back of the boat while we were underway. This year he flew it from the dock.
Just before dark Hayden and I went out and pulled the crab pots, one at a time. I can only safely carry 1 pot at a time in the raft. We did better than I expected as there were several other pots in the same area as our pots. We got 4 crabs in one pot, 2 of which were legal. We got 5 crabs in the other pot and 4 of them were legal.
I did not want to spend the time to cook them this evening, so I just hung the pots off the dock for the night. That would keep them alive overnight.
It was a beautiful Margeurite Bay sunset that evening.
On Sunday morning we cooked the crabs. I was disappointed that my brand-new crab cooker would not work, so I had to use the Coleman stove again, which is much slower than a real crab cooker.
We pulled away from the dock a little before 10 AM.
We did some trolling near Escape Point on our way back towards town. I could only troll one rod because that one downrigger swivel base had broken. We got one nice Silver at 80' deep.
It was getting close to lunch time, so we decided to pull into the Naha for a few hours.
The other boat there is the "Next Summer," owned by my longtime friend Norm Skan. We had a nice chat there in the sun on the dock.
Hayden did some fishing from the dock and managed to catch a little Dolly Varden.
From there we headed back to town, getting into the slip at about 6:30 PM. We did troll one rod for about an hour in the Clover Pass area with no luck.
It was a good trip, and we have time for one more trip before they head back to their home in Federal Way WA.
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