Pacific Cod

October 3rd (Thursday)
We awoke to some very low cloud this morning. It was not fog, not over the water anyway, but it was filling all of the mountain valleys and gullies, and hanging low around the rock faces. It was a very fall-looking day. The yellow colours of the scattered deciduous trees are becoming more and more pronounced each day.  The air was very still all day, and Dean Channel was glassy calm when we were outside of our anchorage in Kiki.
We managed to receive a good-quality weather fax, so that was a nice change. It is amazing how much the cloud cover seems to help with reception.
We went ashore in the morning to check on our hot spring pool, and we were happy to find that it was fully filled and overflowing. We closed the inflow up most of the way so that it was only running a bit, and later we returned to check on it again and found that the level had dropped a bit, but only just a bit; quite acceptable. We then closed the flow off completely so as to allow the water to cool to a bearable temperature. Hopefully the water level will not drop too much and we will be able to enjoy a soak tomorrow. Usually to maintain a good temperature the inflow is left somewhat open, but because we just filled it with fresh hot, hot water, it will need some time to cool.
We took advantage of the drizzly, calm weather to go out fishing. It was the first time that we had been out fishing here, and so also the first time that we had been out fishing in quite a while. Fishing had not been a priority for us here, because, not only was our freezer full when we came here, but mainly because we did not think that fishing would be very good. We had, however, been seeing a lot of flat fish in the shallows, and so we were curious to see if there would be bigger ones out in the deeper water. 

We were very surprised when we caught our first Rockfish, and even more surprised when we were catching quite decent sized ones. We did not keep any because most of them were Quillbacks, which have less meat on them for their size, and we were curious to see what else we might catch. We caught a couple of other types of Rockfish as well, one of which we would have kept but it got away right at the boat. We have removed the barbs on our primary jig so as to make releasing the fish much, much easier. We do not lose that many more because of having no barbs, and it is a lot better for the fish being released.  

Our big surprise of the day came when we caught our first Cod. After getting home and referring to our fish book, it was a Pacific Cod; in fact we caught three of them.  We did not keep the first two because they were only about 12" long. We would also have released the third one for the same reason, but it got hooked really weirdly and so we had to keep it. 

Ever since leaving Vancouver we had been hoping to catch at least one type of Cod, and these were our first ones. Where there are small fish, there have to be bigger ones somewhere around, so hopefully sometime we can catch a bigger one.
Because our fish was so small we did not fillet it, but instead baked it whole. We had it for dinner with spaghetti squash and mashed potatoes, and it was delicious. The meat had a beautiful flavour and texture. I hope that we can catch a big one sometime. That would be a real treat!!  Apparently they can get up to 48" in length; that’s a big fish!
In the evening I spotted some black shapes on shore, and went out into the cockpit to look through our binoculars. It was a mom bear and three cubs. That was the first time that we had seen a mom with three cubs here. We have a single bear and a mom with one cub that seem to frequent the shore, and also a mom with two cubs that come by occasionally, and now a mom with three cubs. While I was watching through the binoculars one of the cubs stood up on its hind legs. It was super cute!