Sailing with Dummies (Alaska to Seattle Edition)

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

by Mike

We spent the night anchored near Bligh Island. That’s near where the Exxon Valdez crashed. Everything seems normal there now. Lots of sea otters, birds, fish, etc. seem to be doing fine. The wind and waves outside Prince William Sound were big and rough so we decided to head generally toward Cordova to have a look. Everyone says Cordova is a nice place to see.

We stopped to fish along the way. We anchored the boat in 110 feet of water. It was raining so we fished mainly from inside – we dropped our halibut lines to the bottom, and went inside the boat to stay dry. Halibut fishing is like catfishing. Drop a line and wait. Commercial halibut fishermen drop a long, 1500-foot line with hooks and bait every 18 feet. Then they leave it on a buoy and come back later to bring the fish in.

After a couple of hours one of the poles was bent a little bit. Figuring it to be hung up on bottom I started pulling on it. I decided to reel it in to check the bait. To get the dead fish heads to the bottom we use a 3-pound weight. Reeling in that the bait plus the weight bends the pole a lot anyway. It seemed a little heavier than normal so I was hopeful we might have something.

It takes awhile to reel in 110 feet of line with weight on it. Eventually we noticed a big fish coming up through the water. It looked like it might be dead, until it hit the surface. I remembered reading that halibut start thrashing when they hit the surface and that was certainly the case here.

When we finally got the thing on the boat (tied around a tail with a sailing rope and winched up the stairs) we let it die for a long time. Then we weighed it and cleaned it. It weighed 47 pounds and the filets from it weighed 15 pounds.

We fished a couple of more hours with no more bites and then motored to Simpson Bay for the night. It rained all the way there. It rained more when we got there.

Fishing Report:

See above.

 

Daily Cuisine:

We ate halibut!