Freezing Rain and Fishing

January 19th (Sunday)

Yesterday evening our snow turned to freezing rain, and it continued through the night. Then in the morning the freezing rain turned to rain, and the temperature started to climb, but the ice remained. It really was too bad that it did not continue to snow, because we would have had a lot. Even with it changing to freezing rain last night, we still had a surprising amount of new snow, all of which was then armoured in a layer of ice. Because of the warming temperatures, everything was starting to get heavy, and we went out to clear the snow and ice away. I worked on cleaning off the top of our enclosure, so as to protect it from damage, and Jason worked on clearing us a path up the dock. 

Our entire boat was covered in ice; all of the stainless steel rigging wire, the edges of our sail bag, every stanchion and handhold, even the blades of our wind generator. In order to remove the snow from the enclosure I had to break the crusting of ice, and then lift the pieces off in chunks. 

All of the trees along the mountains were encased in ice, and it was quite pretty. 

It was really too bad that it was raining, as it would have been beautiful if the sun had come out for a bit, and everything would have sparkled like crystal. 

The wind was the lightest we had had since being back home, so we decided to try some fishing. We wanted to try fishing off of the dock to see if we might get lucky and not have to go too far afield. It was still too windy to go out fishing in the tender, but it was doable from the dock, except for the wind chill. Jason tried fishing with bait, and I tried jigging, and neither of us got a bite. However, I did catch a poor bird, and it was the first bird that we had ever caught. I was jigging in about 90 feet of water, and I jigged up and then waited for the weight to pull back down on my rod. However, my line stayed slack. “That’s weird,” I thought.  I started reeling in, and it took a while for my line to tighten at all, and when it did, it felt like I had a small fish. We sure were surprised when I pulled up a poor little diving bird, I think it was a pigeon guillemot. The poor guy must have swum by to check out my jig, which of course would look like a fish, and I must have jigged up on it. I had caught the bird by the feathers in its bum. I held the bird, while Jason unhooked it, and then we let the frightened little guy go. There is a first time for everything!