We had time for just one more 3-day trip with Jennifer & Hayden before they had to leave town.
The destination chosen for this trip was Shelter Cove in Carroll Inlet.
We had stopped there briefly last year, but only stayed a couple of hours.
We pulled out of my slip at Bar Harbor at about 11 AM on Wednesday.
The weather was very sunny, warm and calm.
When we got to the Mountain Point area we trolled for a couple of hours.
The downrigger base on the starboard side had split on our last trip out and so we could only mount a downrigger on the port side and could only troll 1 line.
We did not hit any fish so pulled gear and headed for Shelter Cove.
We got to the Shelter Cove dock at about 4:30 PM and there was no one else there, just the way I like it.
On this trip Hayden ignored all other distractions that I had there for him, like the BB gun and the sling shot and the kite. He spent almost all his waking hours fishing from the dock. He couldn't seem to get enough of it.
I had set up a multi-hook herring jig and he used that most of the time, but he also cast Pixies, spinners, and other lures.
He caught mostly little perch, but also got some small rockfish, turbot, bull heads, and other fish that I could not identify.
He liked to hook them but wasn't too keen on taking them off the hook, so that's where I came in.
Hayden liked his fish so much he even tried to kiss one of them!
And of course, some of these fish had to go into a bucket to be tormented briefly before ultimately being released back into the water.
The other activity that Hayden really enjoyed on this trip was going out in the raft. We took the raft to set the crab pots, and he also took his mom for a raft ride. He got pretty good at steering the electric kicker.
Hayden liked to help me measure the crabs to see which ones were legal.
I had dropped the shrimp pots on the way to the dock. After dropping them I realized that I had a bit of a logistical problem. My pot puller is electric, and it sits on the downrigger base and plugs in to a socket that I set up on the starboard side. The problem was that the downrigger base on the starboard side had split on our last trip so I could not mount the pot puller on that side. I had wire and connectors on board so I set out to lengthen the power cord so that I could mount it on the port side but still plug it in on the starboard side. That process went pretty well, except for the fact that I sliced my finger quite badly in the process.
There is an old native natural fish trap not far from the dock. It is a round "pen" of sorts that fills up at high tide, and then when the tide goes out any fish that are in there get trapped and are easy to scoop out. Later in the summer the Pink salmon are thick in here and they would be easy to get in that trap. We took a raft excursion over there and Hayden used his net to scoop out the very tiny little fish that were in there.
Jennifer took a little walk along the beach near the fish trap and was surprised to see this 3-point buck in the brush.
Just for fun I set up one of my trail cameras a little way up the logging road. When I went to collect it it had been knocked over. It wasn't windy enough for the wind to knock it over so I figured it must have been a "critter" of some sort. First a deer walked by, but it was the Raven that was really interested in it. If he had been able to, I think he would have stolen it. (Note, the date and time on the trail camera are not set properly.)
When we got to the shrimp pots, I pulled them with the pot puller. It's easy to pull crab pots by hand since they are usually at less than 100'. But the shrimp puts have 600' of line on them and pulling them by hand would be pretty difficult to do. I had not set the pots for a long time, and they had deteriorated quite a bit. I found out later that 2 of the 3 pots that I set had holes in the webbing. As a result, we got a pretty meager haul of shrimp, but that did not lessen Hayden's interest in the process.
There was quite a difference between the smallest and the largest shrimp we got.
We even got what I think was a small Tanner crab in the pots.
Even though Hayden had no interest at all in eating any of the shrimp he surprised me when he had no qualms about helping me pop the heads off of them.
When we got to the Mountain Point area, we again trolled our 1 line for a couple of hours, but got no action, so we headed in.
I think we had a couple of good trips this year, and we had not a drop of rain the whole time we were out.
61 nm logged this trip.
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