My grandson Bryan, who now lives in Olympia, and his girlfriend Lindsay, came up for a few days of fishing and boating adventures. We made two trips while they were here.
For this trip we started out trolling between Mountain Point and Herring Cove, and then eventually made our way up into Carroll Inlet to spend the night at the Shelter Cove dock.
I've learned through experience that the Garmin InReach is not infallible. For this trip it only logged our return trip, not our outbound trip. This track shows our return from Shelter Cove back to town.
When Bryan came to Ketchikan in 2007, he was just a little tyke. He lived with us for about a year until his Mom found her own place.
On July 7th he will turn 18, and he is taller than me now. He has really grown up!
We started trolling and almost immediately were treated to a whale bubble feeding right along our path. Bryan managed to get some pretty good photos of it. Bubble feeding is when they create an almost perfect circle with bubbles, which is said to corral the small fish into the center, inside the bubbles. Then the whale comes up right in the center with his huge mouth open and gets lots of small fish.
In this shot you can clearly see the ring of bubbles he has created.
Then he comes up rapidly right in the center with that huge mouth open and scoops in all those fish.
Once they dive, they are usually under for a little while.
It wasn't long after that that we hit our first fish. We didn't know it at the time, but it would turn out to be the largest one we got on this trip. Unfortunately, it was only 26" and they have to be 28" in order to keep them, so we had to throw it back.
We trolled for a few hours and got several smaller Kings but did not get any that were big enough to keep.
Eventually we stowed the trolling gear and brought down the shrimp pots to prep them for dropping. We made our way up into Carroll Inlet and dropped the shrimp pots just North of Island Point.
Once the shrimp pots were off the boat, we had room to pull down the 2 crab pots and got them ready to drop.
We made our way North up to Shelter Cove and dropped the 2 crab pots in about 70 - 80' of water out in front of the dock.
We got tied up to the Shelter Cove dock at about 4:30 PM. No one else was there. It was raining very hard by this time. I snapped this photo the next morning when the rain had stopped briefly.
Bryan & Lindsay at the Shelter Cove dock in a brief moment with no torrential rain.
Bryan & Lindsay got right into fishing from the dock, in the pouring rain.
And then later they decided to watch a movie on board.
We had a quiet night on board with rain off & on throughout the night.
When we left the next morning, we pulled the 2 crab pots and got a pretty good haul.
Bryan convinced Lindsay to hold one of the crabs, but I don't think she was too happy about it.
We pulled the shrimp pots but there wasn't even a single shrimp in them, so that was a bust.
I pulled up near Cutter Rocks, which are right near Mountain Point, and set Bryan up for some mooching (as opposed to trolling.) The conditions were a little breezy so I had to constantly maneuver the boat to keep him somewhat stable so he could stay near the bottom.
He did manage to get a small halibut while mooching.
He also got a lot of Rock Cod that now have to be released at depth using a deep-water release device.
After mooching for a while, the weather got a bit nasty, so we headed for the harbor.
I think they had a pretty good first trip, although Bryan really wanted to get a King salmon that he could keep.
We got into the slip at about 4:30 PM and logged a little over 67 miles.
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