Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

July 22nd (Monday)  Today we had a nice day relaxing, doing chores, and working on projects. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and the clouds did not roll in until the afternoon. We did two loads of laundry, and as the wind picked up in the afternoon it helped it dry on our lifelines. I started another net project, and we mounted a stainless tube safety-bar in front of our stove.   When we pulled up our first crab trap, it was our round one, the carcass was totally picked clean, and there were six small Dungeness crabs. They got put back in the water, and they presumably had an amazing meal.  When we pulled up our square trap we actually had some edible crabs. We kept two large Rock crabs, and we let two go. We also had one Pacific Lyre Crab, which apparently can live in depths up to 2,100'.  It was an interesting day, as the wind was forecasted to be south becoming southeast up to 30 knots. We definitely got some wind that seemed to be as they had forecaste...

July 21st (Sunday) We were up at 06:00 and headed out salmon fishing. It was such a beautiful morning to be out on the water. The sky was mostly clear, the wind was calm, the sea was glassy, and we were alone; alone in a spectacular spot, surrounded by beauty, and trolling for salmon while watching the activity around us.  Over the time that we have been here the level of activity has definitely increased each day. Every time we are out we see more and more fish jumping, more areas of disturbed water from the baitfish surfacing, and more salmon porpoising. This is something that although we have seen a single salmon do it from time to time, today we saw groups of salmon, four or more, doing it several times in a row, and we saw it multiple times in the little while that we were out.  They surface as though they are coming up to breathe just like a porpoise or whale does; head first, then back, and you can see a good inch or two of the top of them along their back and ...

July 20th (Saturday) Although we did not want to get out of bed in the morning, as we were still tired from our long day yesterday, we got up just after 06:00 and headed out salmon fishing.  It was a beautiful morning, and as the high fog quickly burned off, the sun came out in full strength. Jason was using a hoochie, which the guy on the powerboat had given him last evening, and I was using a lure that we already had that looked very similar. These were slightly different looking from what we had been using in the past, although not that different. We were filled once again with optimism, and this time we were not disappointed.   Jason put his line out first with the fishing rod, and then I started to let mine out with our hand line. I had not even had time to let mine out all the way when Jason had caught one. He got it to the boat, and we got it in. Yay, our first Salmon. It was a Coho, and 24" long. Yippee. Finally!  We reset our lines out behind us, and i...

July 19th (Friday) We awoke to blue sky and sunshine! After some early morning cleaning we headed to shore with our kayaks. We carried them over our heads along the trail into Sagar Lake. It was a trail with lots of twists and turns, but only 100 metres of elevation gain, however, with a kayak on our head it was made a lot harder. I found myself bumping into trees and barely being able to make some of the corners. The people who built the trail clearly did not have portaging in mind.  Of course we could have deflated the kayaks and put them in their backpacks, but that seemed like way more work. The trail came out to the lake onto a long beautiful reddish sand beach. Very pretty. The dark water was fairly warm and we looked forward to swimming later.  We paddled along the shore trolling for trout. In the little bays along the shore we would stop and cast in along the logs and lily pads. Jason caught two this way before we found the hot spot.  The l...

July 17th and 18th (Wednesday and Thursday)  It poured rain all night on the night of the 16 th , and although we believed that the forecasted gale-force winds never materialized, in later talking to another boater it would appear that they did, and we were just very sheltered in our spot. They apparently had 20 plus knots where they were anchored in the main popular area of Codville Lagoon, and friends of theirs anchored elsewhere on the central coast got over 30 knots, so odds are it was the full forecasted 35 knots if you were not in a protected area. It got windy, but never too bad where we were, but it sure did rain. We woke up to pouring rain and enjoyed it from the comfort of our home.  In the afternoon we got suited up in our heavy-duty rain gear and went out to do some trolling. Of course we did not catch anything, but we did put in the hours of effort. We checked our crab trap when we came back in and were very disappointed to find it empty. We re-set it in a ne...

Today it is my mom's birthday. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank her for all that she does for this blog. I know from some of you how much you appreciate getting to read about our trip and without what my mom does, the posts would not happen. I write the blog stories on pretty much a daily basis and they stack up in my phone until we get into an area with either cell service or wifi, then I send my mom all the stories. I also send her any pictures with captions, usually one by one because they often take so long to send because of bad service or slow wifi. My mom then has to compile everything into a presentable format with the pictures input into the appropriate spot in the story before she can finally make the post. All of this would be incredibly challenging, frustrating, and time consuming for me to do with my phone over spotty cell service or on the computer with limited wifi and the fact is that it just wouldn't happen. So a big thank you to my mom for taking o...

July 15th (Monday)  This morning was such a beautiful morning that we were out fishing just after 07:00. It was glassy calm, and the sun was just up over the mountains. Since we did not get to do any fishing yesterday we did not know how it would be, and we were filled with hope and optimism. The current was perfect for drifting, and so we started at a promising point and drifted along the shore. We tried different drift passes at different depths, but we were not catching many fish. Unfortunately the fish we were catching were all on the small side. We even caught two baby Lingcod, they are so cute when they are small.  As the morning progressed we had only caught two fish that we thought were worth keeping. After losing one jig early on we ended up losing a second one as well. This was our last jig, so that was it for jigging for us.  We had seen a couple of salmon jump in the area so we decided to try trolling. This is usually a type of fishing that we both find...

July 13th (Saturday)  It was a beautiful day! We still had dramatic skies and many dark clouds passed over that looked like they might bring rain, but none of them did. When the sun shone through in between the clouds it was brilliantly warm!  We spent the first part of the morning doing little projects around the boat.  I am learning how to make nets and enjoying it. It is fun because I am making nets for securing things, and having new storage areas while we are at sea. It is also an easy thing to do in the cockpit while enjoying the beauty around us. This truly is a beautiful spot! We paddled to shore to an area where a small stream flows out. We got out of our kayaks and bushwhacked our way up to the first small lake. Although there was a Red Throated Loon on the lake there were no signs of fish and no bites on the hook. We think the loon may have been fishing for frogs, because when we skirted our way around the lake we came to an area that was hopping with ...

July 11th (Thursday)  So today was a fishing day, and it turned into a bit of a fishing marathon. We fished, and fished, and fished and we were actually catching a lot of fish. The only problem was they were small. They ranged in size from about 5" to 12". It was crazy.  We started the day out fishing close to the anchorage, and right away we were catching fish. Once we saw that an area was only giving us small fish we would move on to another area, and we slowly worked our way further and further out the inlet. At times we were catching so many fish that we wouldn't even get a chance to really start jigging before we had one. Our logic was that if there were this many little fish deep inside the inlet that there would be bigger fish out closer to open water.  We worked our way all the way out Convoy Passage to Nucleus Reef. It was open to small ocean swells, and with it being a rocky reef coming up from the depths, with no land around, we thought it had the maki...

July 10th (Wednesday)  Today was moving day! We had grown to feel very at home at Calvert Island, and it was somewhat sad to leave, but on the other hand we were very excited to be off adventuring to a new anchorage once again.  Before leaving I paddled over to the Hakai dock for some last-minute internet. I wanted to get the blog stories and pictures sent out to my mom to bring you up until today. I paddled in the kayak instead of taking the tender because we patched Kiki yesterday afternoon and it is not supposed to be re-inflated fully for 24 hours, and because we could not keep it at a perfect temperature we were hoping to leave it longer than 24 hours to fully cure.  When I got back home we started the engine and raised our anchor.  We started trolling with two lines out, and also started making water. Today was the first time that we had tried running our water maker system fully off of our vessel batteries with the engine running to replenish charge thr...

July 8th (Monday) Today we headed to the beach. It was a cloudy morning, but lovely anyway for walking the shore. We took our time on all of the shorelines, and on many of the beaches we took off our packs and strolled around looking at whatever had washed in. We enjoy looking at all the colourful shells and rocks and seeing what we can find. We have found some very beautiful shells.  We slowly made our way out to 7th beach where we enjoyed our picnic lunch. As the afternoon progressed the clouds broke a bit and it was nice to be on the beach. We had our slackline set up and had a lovely afternoon.  We saw some whales from shore, but they were too far out to tell what type they were. It was still nice to see their blows from a distance. July 9th (Tuesday) This morning, partly because we have decided that we will leave Calvert Island, for the time being at least, we had some stuff we had to take care of while we still had access to the internet. All those little things like ...

  July 6th and 7th (Saturday and Sunday) Both on Saturday and Sunday we mainly stayed home and did projects on the boat. We saw a good-sized salmon jump four times in a row not more than 150' from our boat. We were in the cockpit at the time. I was actually just walking through when we saw it off to the side. Each time it was way out of the water. I spent a while doing some casts off the boat, but no luck. We would love to know, was that the only salmon in our bay, were there a couple, or were there lots. Who knows, but we sure weren't expecting to see a salmon jump so close to us in our anchorage. We made a lovely dinner of fish burgers. We shake n' baked some beautiful Lingcod fillets, and cooked them in the oven. I made biscuits for our buns, and we made up some homemade tartar sauce and had some of our cabbage from Dawson’s Landing. We also had some fresh sea asparagus to go with them. It was delicious! We enjoy listening to the different birdcalls from our coc...