A Pointed Encounter With A Rockfish

December 8th (Sunday)

At 06:00 we were rudely awaken out of a deep sleep by the most terrible sound. Thump, thump, crunch, scrape! It was so loud, and since it jarred us both from sleep, terrible thoughts jumped into our heads. Moments later we came to our senses a little more and listened more perceptively to the noise, and realized it was ice, although it was a much louder noise than the other day when we had first heard it scraping past our hull.

Later, when we got up, and it had gotten daylight enough to see, we saw that we were fully iced in, shore to shore across the bay and out past us. Burrrr, it was a cold morning.

The winds were light, and were forecasted to remain that way until evening, and the swells were down to two meters, so we headed out fishing. The bottom type in Kwakshua Channel is not well marked on the charts, but based on what we had pulled up on the bottom of our prawn traps we were curious if it might be an area for Cod and Halibut. We gave ourselves an hour to test out the area, and we floated in the sun on the glassy water feeling surprisingly warm considering the temperature. Of course floating gently in the sun, and being all bundled up made the difference. I tried normal jigging and Jason tried having a baited hook on the bottom, but all we caught was one tiny flounder.
We pulled up our lines and headed out Meay Inlet, and out into the swells around Main Guy Rock. Unfortunately the current was quite strong, and it was pulling us quickly past our ideal fishing area and out into deep water. We had to keep starting the outboard and motoring back in, and even with Jason rowing against the current we still had very little time to jig in our desired area.
We snagged bottom, and after a bunch of pulling on the line from different angles we managed to get it free. When we pulled it up we had an anemone on the hook.  Feeling badly, we removed the poor slimy animal, but we were also glad that it had come free, and we let down our line again. As soon as the line touched bottom we snagged again. Once again it finally came free, and it was another anemone, poor things. 

As we jigged and drifted, I finally caught a big one, it pulled and pulled on my drag before letting me slowly reel it up. It was a big Lingcod. Probably about 30" long, unfortunately, however, Lingcod season closed on November 15^th, so we had to let it go. Apparently male Lingcod guard their eggs, so if we were to have kept a male during this time we could have been killing thousands of babies. We also caught a couple of small Rockfish, and in the end all we had was two Rockfish keepers. It was really unfortunate for us about the Lingcod because they are a plentiful fish that give us a lot of meat. That one fish probably would have given us six meals for both of us, which would have really helped to fill up our freezer.
We headed into Sand Spit, one of the many beautiful beaches close by, with the plan of cleaning our two fish and having lunch. Because we do not have wheels for our tender, landing on the beach in the swells can be a bit tricky, and since the tide was going out and the swells were crashing in, it was not a good place for Kiki to sit while we had our lunch. As Jason quickly processed the fish, I held Kiki in the swells. As I was holding her, I heard a hissing/whistling noise and held my ear to her front pontoon in worry, and as I stood there I also noticed her front pontoon was losing air; as I feared, I was hearing a leak. When we had gotten out of the tender in a hurry in the swells, the Rockfish had been allowed to hit against the pontoon, and one of the spikes had punctured it. Worst of all, it was a fairly rapid leak, and unlike the puncture that we had had in the summer from the Rockfish, for which we had to pump up the pontoon each morning, this one required re-inflating every hour or so.
We headed back down Meay Inlet and stopped to pull up our prawn traps. In the first one we only had about ten keepers, but the second one was loaded. We ended up with 88 keepers. Yay!
Back at home we tried to figure out what to do about our tender. We decided to go ashore and try to find/construct a sheltered area in which we could do our patching. We found a suitable area, and as evening came on we worked with lights to finish our patching.
Finally our work was done, and we headed home in our kayaks, tired and hungry. We had a delicious feast of fresh, fried Rockfish, which had been dipped in egg and lightly coated in a spiced flour mixture before being fried to golden brown. We also had some fresh, fried prawns and rice. It was scrumptious!