Our Days at Fury Cove

June 17 (Monday)
It was a rainy day, and since we woke up still feeling tired it suited us just fine to have an inside relaxing day. We had the fire going, and Jason made us baked beans on the fire that smelled delicious. We enjoyed them with biscuits for dinner. 

Jason's homemade beans.

I have been working on sorting pictures. I try to stay on top of sorting and deleting pictures, going through the new ones every week or so. I always seem to manage to take so many pictures, but I think I have been doing an alright job of deleting. It is enjoyable to go through them and see the best of the ones from our last few anchorages.
Over the course of the day most of the boats that came in yesterday left, and new ones arrived. By evening there were 12 other boats here -- our busiest anchorage so far of the trip. We would not have guessed our busiest anchorage would be here, where are they all going? They come one after another, anchor, spend the night, and leave the next day. So strange unless they have all been here before.

June 18 (Tuesday)
We woke up to sun in the morning, and while it did not take long to cloud back over, there was still blue sky in the distance and we were optimistic that it might come our way. 

We went out and pulled up our prawn traps. The first one we knew was a little shallow, but we thought it was worth a try. There were no prawns in it, however, it was also not completely empty. There was one crab who kind of looked like a box crab but also a little different. When we opened up the trap he made his way directly to the door, walked out and off the side of the tender and splash into the water. We also had about six brittle stars. They are quite cool, when we held them in the palm of our hands they would move their arms, and sort of walk across our hands. When we dropped them back into the water they did the same motion and managed to almost swim. Our fish carcass was fully eaten except for the entire skeleton, which was left perfectly intact. It is interesting to think of what must have come in and picked it clean.
In our other trap we were a bit luckier; we had seven prawns. Five were a good normal size, and the other two were very large, one was the largest prawn I have ever seen. They will make a tasty addition to our dinner. I think they will go quite well with lingcod. :)  One of the cool things about prawning is that it is almost like a mini glimpse at what is down at 270-300'. It is unusual if we do not pull up something interesting.

Large prawns 

Back home we packed up a picnic and headed out kayaking. We did not go too far, but explored the shoreline around the outside of the island. We stopped at one of the beautiful white sand and shell beaches that was on the outer side of the island from the anchorage. Here we sat and waited for the sun to come out, which it finally did, and then we enjoyed our picnic lunch on our picnic blanket even though we were still bundled up as though it was winter. 

A beautiful beach for a picnic.

We had seen porpoises not too far away while kayaking, and from shore we saw a whale. It was a humpback whale, and we saw it off on one side of an island. We saw its blows, and then a full arch of its back all the way to the tip of its tail as it dove. Surprisingly it came up again in perfect view on the other side of the island. Again we saw its blow, and then a pause, then it came rocketing up out of the water. "Breech!!!!!" I said and pointed, just in case Jason was not already looking. He had briefly looked away, but looked back to see a flying whale!! It was truly flying with its side fins out like wings, then Splash!!! As it landed back in the water on its side!  Wow!!!! So amazing!!!! I can't believe we saw a humpback whale breech!!!!!!!!!!!  We saw it again later in the distance blow four blows before diving once more.
We explored the shore area, and went out to one of the little islets that was connected by rocks. Here we saw a dead bald eagle that appeared to be eaten from the inside out. All of the feathers on its body were still intact, but it was dried and hollow. The islet clearly had a resident of some kind, as there were many little trails and piles of shells, mainly urchin shells. The islet was also covered in strawberry plants and Salal, which were all in bloom. That will be a yummy islet in the fall or late summer.
Back home it got quite stormy, and we were happy we made it back before the rain and strong wind gusts came.