A Perfect Beach Day and Fish

June 30th (Sunday)
Today was a perfect summer beach day! Exactly the type of day we had imagined in our best dreams of Calvert Island.
We hiked our way out to 7th beach and set up our day site in a spot we like, at the far end of the beach. The sun was behind a large cloud at first, but it came out in full strength within an hour.  We spent the day having a ton of beach fun. The beach, especially on a sunny day, is the perfect environment to bring out motivation and enthusiasm.  

We played hacky-sack, skim boarded, played Frisbee, practiced karate, explored the rocky edge to the beach, went swimming, and did some boogie boarding with our skim board a couple of times. Playing in the waves was so much fun! The water was quite cold to get into at first, but once we were in, as long as we were playing, we stayed warm for a while before the deep chill finally set in. The waves were not particularly big unfortunately, but every so often we would get a set of three good sized ones, and we had a great time riding them to shore on the skim board, and then running back out for the next one. 

When the chill set in we would go in and either play some Frisbee or go lay down on our beach blanket to warm up, which didn't take too long.  The sun was hot and the wind was light, so it made for a perfect day!! We had a delicious picnic of crab wraps and leftover sushi.
On our way home we saw a cute toad hop his way off the trail.  It was one of those beach days that you never want to end, but we came home happily tired. All day we only saw two other people on 7th beach, and they came for just the afternoon. We got the impression they were employees from the Hakai Institute.  

Back at West Beach there was no one there. We were surprised to find 18 boats anchored in the main anchorage, and another six anchored in our anchorage, a total of 24 other boats. Wow! It’s crazy, because the majority of the boats we see seem to just spend one night here, so it is a very steady stream of boats coming through the area.

July 1st (Monday)
It’s hard to believe we have been out on our boat now for two awesome months!
Because it was cloudy today, and because J hurt his Achilles tendon yesterday, we decided a rest day would not be a bad thing. But, as with many of our rest days, it ended up turning into a partial workday, but it is the type of work that we enjoy, so it was ok. 

After a relaxing morning we headed out in Kiki to drop our prawn traps. We have not had them back out since getting nothing when we first got here, but we were hoping that two weeks later might be different. We really had no idea how long it takes an area to rebound after being open to the commercial boats. After setting our prawn traps we went and checked our crab trap that we had put out in the next bay over a couple of days ago. There was only one Rock crab keeper, so we decided to try in a whole different area, and reset our trap in Meay Inlet before continuing on out to Main Guy Rock for some fishing. 

The forecast was for a chunk of good weather coming our way, so we were hoping to get some more fish so as to delay when we needed to come out again, in case we wanted to be doing other activities instead. As it turned out it was a great time to come. The tide was so high that our only indication of where Main Guy Rock was was one large head of bull kelp, and the sea lion, although he was not a reliable position marker. We had fun fishing, as it was quite an active day with good-sized fish. In all we kept six Rockfish, one Kelp Greenling, and a Lingcod. Yay, another Lingcod of legal keeping size. We actually caught two more, but they were both smaller. The Lingcod J caught us was a truly beautiful Lingcod, it was a brilliant turquoise blue. And the meat, when filleted, was the same blue colour. Very pretty!

 Jason's Lingcod

 

On our way back home we stopped to check our crab trap, and had two keepers and a bunch of small ones. We kept the bigger two, let the small ones go, and reset the trap. We filleted the fish on the beach at our anchorage hoping to see the marten again, but he was nowhere to be seen this time. In all we packed up five good-sized meals for the freezer, put three into the fridge, plus our crab, which we had for dinner, since it had been a while since we had crab. 

A fine catch, with the crab as well.

Notice the lovely colour of the Lingcod.

Unfortunately none of the crabs were that full of meat, we are not sure if maybe they had just moulted.  The shell of one of them was truly like paper. The top shell was solid, and we could not feel a difference before killing him, but after he was cooked, when we went to clean out the meat, his legs opened up easier than Dungeness. For the other two we used wire cutters, as we usually do, to open up the leg and claw shells, but for this guy, like I said, it was more like paper and easier than Dungeness. Most unusual!

July 2nd (Tuesday)
Although the forecast had been for sun, it was cloudy. Usually we would have gone out hiking or to the beach anyways, but we decided to give J's leg one more day of rest. Instead we did some little project jobs and relaxed. I made a batch of biscuits, and we made a batch of tortillas. 
We detail cleaned Kiki. Poor girl has her first hole. :( It is just a pinprick, but it happened yesterday while fishing. The Rockfish have such incredibly sharp spines that we have to be very careful handling them so that we do not get poked. We wear heavy-duty gloves for the task, and even so it is not uncommon for us to get poked, although it is rarely bad because of the gloves. One of spines hit our tender just right while I was gutting one of the fish. :( Our poor tender, she gets used so much, we try to be so careful, and we try to clean her regularly, but it would be nice to have a suit of armour for her.  Well, she got sparkling clean today, but still has her hole. The patching process requires certain ideal conditions, and also then we cannot re-inflate the pontoon for 24 hours, so that will have to wait for now. For the time being we will just have to add air from time to time.
We sanded a teak magazine rack and teak oiled it. It is now ready to be mounted somewhere. We also did some sketching, reading, and played guitar.
A nice day!