Another Lovely Day on the Water

March 18th (Wednesday) 

After some Spanish practice we walked over to the post office to give Dorothy our next letter with the blog stories, to go out to my parents. We also eagerly told her about our day yesterday, and she was very interested in the Basket Star, which she had never seen before. It is always fun talking to her while petting Tiger, because Dorothy is so interested in our adventures. Unfortunately Tiger has been out of sorts of late, not eating all of her breakfast, and she has also thrown up a few times. Hopefully she feels better soon.  

We headed up to work, but only for a few minutes so as to put some fairing filler on the area around our dryer vent hole repair. Then we headed out fishing again. 

It was another gorgeous day, and it was actually even warmer than yesterday. 

While we were fishing the wind completely died off, and the whole area out from Wallace Bay became glassy calm. It was the stillest, and warmest, that we had ever seen it there. It was spectacular.  

As we fished we watched the glistening water as birds splashed and dove for fish. We watched two guillemots in particular that were fishing very successfully as a team. They had a small school of bait fish, which we have not seen since last fall, and they were taking turns diving down and keeping the fish up at the surface while they fed from below. This activity of fish on the surface attracted a couple of gulls that dipped in and enjoyed the easy food. Spotting the two gulls, more gulls soon arrived, and an eagle was close behind. It came swooping down and grabbed right in the middle of the small ball of fish. Fish went flying, glistening in the air as they went, and then he flew off, probably with one or two fish in his talons. Not long after that the whole little frenzy was over, and the water was back to a glassy mirror.  

We noticed that the Guillemots were starting to get their summer plumage. In the winter they are mostly white with some darker, almost black, areas, but in the summer they are almost completely black with only two white patches, one on each wing. We noticed that their snow whiteness of winter was becoming sooty coloured, as the feathers change from white to black. Yay spring!

With our lines out, Jason using bait, and me with the jig, we drifted along. Our drift was very slow because there was absolutely no wind to push us, so we simply drifted with the tide. Jason got a good bite and the fish fought, pulling out his drag. When it came up to the surface we were excited to see that it was a lovely-sized Pacific cod. It was 24” long. We kept it in the boat and kept fishing.  A while later Jason got another good bite, and this time it was a nice 27” halibut; one Pacific cod and one halibut in one day, pretty awesome.   

We went ashore to clean and fillet the fish, and then headed back towards home.  

On the way home we stopped to pull up our traps. Unfortunately in our prawn trap we only had two prawns. One of them was quite small so we let it go, the other one we kept, and we each got a bite of it as a pre-dinner nibble. Mmmmm, juicy, sweet prawn.

In our crab trap we were surprised to have only females. We had five large girls with eggs, and a couple of smaller ones. We reset the trap in a slightly different area, and headed home.  

In the evening we went to the pub, as we had been invited and the owner had offered to come and pick us up. Extra people also came to the pub because we had said that we would be there, and we had a nice visit before going home for an awesome fish feast!