Our fishing charter (Whistler) left at 12:30, we travelled 25 miles out (about 1 ½ hours) and by the time we got there, the sun came out and it was lovely out.
We had two terrific young guys helping us: Josh and Max. They showed us what to do, baited our hooks, brought the fish up with a gaff, and filleted them for us on the way home. We had three pound weights on our lines, big circular hooks and frozen fish chunks for bait. Halibut are bottom feeders so we had to let out about 180 feet of line, until the weight hit the bottom then just lift it up and down until we got a bite.
I barely had mine down when I got my first hit. However, my technique wasn’t quite right and I lost the fish and my bait, too. The next two hits I was successful landing and within the first 15 minutes of fishing I had my two halibut. They were 15 – 20 pounds each.
Reeling in the fish was REALLY hard. It took a lot of strength to handle the big pole, three pound weight and the current. When I was got my limit in the first 15 minutes, I was initially a little disappointed that my fishing was over. But, then I remembered just how hard it was to reel them up and didn’t mind. Since my fishing was over so quick, I had time to take pictures of Fran. In the next one you can see he's working pretty hard to reel in a fish.
In this picture, Josh has just brought Fran's nice halibut on board.
There were 16 people on our boat and everyone got their two-halibut limit, even the two young girls. Quite a few people caught Ling Cod which were thrown back, as were the small halibut. Fran threw back two small halibut and one cod before keeping two nice sized halibut.
The four largest fish were displayed for picture-taking. Two of them were ours!
We kept one huge fillet to cook for supper and gave the rest (21 lbs) to the local processing plant to clean up, package and freeze. It will be ready tomorrow morning.
After the sky had cleared up, the views were gorgeous. We could clearly see the four volcanoes in the area. This is Mount Iliamna (directly behind the boat).
All four of these volcanoes, part of the ‘ring of fire’ have been active in the past 20 years. Hope they don’t do anything until we’re gone!
We were in sight of land all day and there were lots of other boats out fishing. The ferry to Kodiak Island went by a couple of times:
I thought the sun on the wake of the boat on the ride home with the seagulls following, hoping for some more scraps was pretty:
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