Hochstader Basin

July 25th – 26th (Thursday and Friday)
It rained a lot and was windy on and off, but we found that our little anchorage was quite well protected. Our anchorage was often glassy calm and then we would get the occasional gust that would rocket down upon us and do spirals around us. Our boat would barely have time to react to the gust before the wind was making our flag blow back on itself, and then it would disappear altogether and leave us in the calm once again.
We found the brightest period between rain and hard drizzle that we could and went out to set our traps. We put one prawn trap in close to 400' of water in the hole inside Hochstader Basin, and one crab trap inside the basin as well. We put our second prawn trap in about 330' of water outside of the entrance to the anchorage area. We tried some fishing spots and explored our new area a bit before coming back home to get out of our rain gear and get a fire going.

July 27th (Saturday)
It was a much nicer day than the previous two days. It had clearly rained overnight, but it was dry when we got up, and as we headed out for some exploratory fishing the clouds lifted. We actually had a couple of short periods of sunshine, and the rain held off until after we got home.
Getting out into the channel beside Matilda Island we saw a whale surface up ahead of us. On its second blow, that we saw, it did a big dive and showed us its whole back and tail. We later saw it further along the shore as well.
We tried fishing in a bunch of different spots trying to get a sense of where was good, and what was around. At one of our spots, over a deep reef, we caught a Tiger Rockfish. This was the first one of this type of fish that we have caught, and they are super cool looking. They are actually stripped red and white. 

Since we were planning to head to our next anchorage the next day we pulled up all of our traps. In our prawn trap that was in the outer area we had one prawn that we let go. There was also one snail on top of the trap, but that was it. 

The prawn trap in the inner basin was a different story. As we were pulling it up we remarked that it felt heavier. Upon getting it close to the surface our anticipation was high as we saw it was full of the reddish colour of prawns. Yay we thought, finally our massive prawn haul we have always dreamed of. 

But upon pulling the trap up into the boat we were both shocked and disappointed. They were not prawns, but squat lobsters; tons of them, probably around 200. Definitely our biggest catch of anything yet, and quite something to see, but not prawns as we had hoped. We thought about keeping one to try eating, but they seemed to have such a little amount of meat on them that it would have been a shame to kill something for such a small amount of food. We let them all go, and enjoyed watching their funny bodies swimming back to the depths. 

We did get two decent-sized Rock Crab in our crab trap, so we had crab and Rockfish for dinner. Yay!