Cruising Adventures of the Red Witch

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...

November 20th (Wednesday) The forecast was for light winds in the morning and picking up from the southeast near noon. We headed out early to do some fishing, hoping to take advantage of the calm winds. The one fish that we had always wanted to catch, and never had, was the Halibut. We had never really targeted them, and so we decided that here would be a good area to give it a try. Halibut like sandy, gravel bottoms, and Burke Channel has a lot of both.  There are several ways to fish for Halibut, and the one that we chose to try was the one that seemed to have the best rate of success. You put a piece of bait, we used herring that we bought in Shearwater, on a hook, and about a foot back from that you put a weight. You drop the line down to the bottom and keep the weight either just off of the bottom or just resting on the bottom, with the idea that you can still feel what’s happening. Then you wait until you feel something -- that’s the hard part. We definitely lost a few ...

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 ...