Fishing in Cousins Inlet

January 20th (Monday)

In the morning it was actually calm, not just quiet calm, but truly glassy calm.  The rain also stopped mid-morning, and it was much warmer. We started doing projects around the boat, including getting the deck all cleaned off, the tender into the water, the outboard on, and ready to go. 

In the afternoon we headed out to try some fishing out from shore. We had heard that at certain times of the year there is good fishing in Cousins Inlet, but no one seemed to have tried fishing in the winter, so it was up to us to find the hot spots, if there were any. We spent a few hours drifting through an area that was marked on the charts as gravel and sand mix. We were hoping that this would be an area that we could catch a Pacific Cod. It was close the marina, and so it would be a perfect spot for us. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a single bite, and we came home when we got cold. Next time we go out, I guess we will have to try going further out into the inlet, and hopefully we will have better luck.

January 21th (Tuesday)

It was another beautiful day. The winds were light, the sea was calm, and the weather was a mix of sun, cloud, and showers. We headed out fishing in the morning, and went to a more outer area of Cousins Inlet, off of Wallace Bay.  

When the winds remained light we would both fish, Jason using the baited hook and weight, and I trying jigging. When the winds would blow, as they did on and off throughout the day, we would drift too quickly and our lines would get pulled out on a steep angle. When this happened I would reel in my line, and one of us would row into the wind so as to keep the fishing line on a more acceptable angle.  

As always, the biggest issue with fishing is that once your hook is down at the bottom it becomes hard to know if it gets twisted or if the bait gets lost. With jigging it is often possible to feel when the hook gets fouled or twisted, but when fishing with a weight and a baited hook it is impossible to know if the bait gets lost. It is always frustrating when we reel up and find the bait gone, where does it go? We always wonder, did we miss a bite, did a small fish or crab nibble it off, or did it get caught on the bottom and fall off on its own?  

The first fish that we caught, I caught on the jig, but when we got it up to the boat and in the net, we saw that it had the herring off of Jason’s hook in its mouth. It must have smelt J’s bait and swum over and managed to get it off the hook without disturbing the line, then it probably saw my jig, got greedy, and came chomping at my hook, which worked out well for us. That is one advantage to both of us being able to fish with two different techniques; we figure if a fish does pass by, one of us should get it. In the end, after about three hours of fishing, we had only caught one more fish. Luckily the second fish was 32” long, so we managed to put four good-sized meals into the freezer, plus dinner for the night.  Yay fresh fish!  It had been a long time since we had that.  

The views of the mountains and remaining ice were quite beautiful out in Cousins Inlet. We followed the shoreline on our way back home in the afternoon, and looked at all of the frozen waterfalls. Because of the high tideline, the ice came down to a very defined straight line, which made it look quite odd when the tide was low. As we were coming back, the tide was down about 10 feet, so all of the ice and snow ended abruptly on a perfect line ten feet above the water level. As we rounded a point of land we saw a family of five river otters scampering up the rocks. They stopped to turn around and look at us before continuing up into the bushes.

When we pulled up our crab trap in the afternoon we had nine Dungeness crabs.  Unfortunately all of them were females. Since being back home nine days ago we have only caught one male crab, but many females. We put in one of the fish carcasses from today as bait, and are trying yet another area.