Back Aboard Pacific Son


Coho Salmon
The summer King season closed on the 15th so Pacific Son came back to Juneau to provision and Marirose and I again changed places. She went off for a new adventure aboard her grandparents’ 48’ trawler in the San Juan/Georgia Islands and we headed back out for 3 weeks of Coho fishing off shore.

Besides food and water for crew and fuel for the boat, we need to have plenty of ice to keep our catch cold. That means we had to go to the Alaska Glacier Seafoods ice house (who we sell most of our fish too) and fill up our totes and hold area with a ton and a half
Icing the boat
of crushed ice. Then we made the 2 day trip back out to the fishing grounds. From Juneau we head out thru Icy Straits, past Glacier Bay and into Cross Sound.

Now that we are targeting Coho we are setting lures every fathom and a half instead of 2 fathoms as we did for Kings. We are also using mostly spoons whereas we fished a lot of hoochies when we were King fishing. We are setting about 20 lures on each side of the boat – about 40 hooks in the water. We pull the gear about once every hour. It takes me half an hour to pull both sides plus an extra minute or two for every fish I land, so when we are hooking a lot of fish I can
Spoons
pull both sides and then start over again without any break in between.

Kings were worth over $100 per fish but Cohos are closer to $12. Thankfully, we land a lot more Coho then we did Kings. Of course, that means my muscles are now truly learning what it takes to fish, as I’m lifting 20 - 30 (5 – 10lb) fish out of the ocean daily and hauling them on deck. However, as my salmon sister Sarah says “it’s a good hurt”!
Tying up Hoochies


Comments

  1. UnknownAugust 1, 2018 at 8:12 AM

    You're back on the blog! We've been tracking you guys far (to me) out in the Sound. So good that you are getting into the fish - and getting strong(er). Love from us. Stay safe.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2022 Season Begins and a 2021 Recap

Image
A Good Morning in Haines Alaska  We left our beautiful mountains-to-sea town of Haines, Alaska this morning and headed out for our 20 22  summer fishing season. It was a glorious sunny  morning and the all-day trip to Juneau was smooth and  lovely.  Both Doug and I were looking forward to  getting back out on the water and pulling up those big  King and Coho salmon – especially after the 2021  season we had.  2021 Recap 2021 was a good year for most trollers – there were fish to be caught and a nice price point per pound. Unfortunately, Doug hurt his ribs right before the start of the season so we didn’t fish as hard as we usually do. We started late and had to take a couple weeks off mid-summer for healing. It was a different kind of season for us but still delivered spectacular sights and long days of wilderness fishing. We often spend much of the season fishing in the Gulf of Alaska – from Cross Sound south along Baranof Island. Due to our adjustments for the season we chose to stay
Read more

End of the Summer Season

Image
Coho salmon were not abundant this year. Other stocks did ok, and the local sockeye run was a good one, but coho numbers are what we rely on as trollers, so this was not a good year for us. In fact, Alaska Fish and Game stated that this years' coho run was the third worst in the last 40 years with a harvest 42% below the 20 year average!  We spent our last week of fishing in northern Chatham Strait. We didn't catch many fish but we had some really nice wildlife viewing. Again we had a group of whales bubble net or lunge feeding near us for a couple of days and that is always a spectacular site. There is also a really great sockeye stream in the bay we were anchoring in that draws lots of bears. It’s the classic Alaska photo op. There’s a beautiful waterfall that then streams down into the cove. At high tide the salmon can jump up the waterfall with some amount of effort, at low tide they get stranded in the rocks down below. A feast for the bears! One morning there were four be
Read more

Alaska Homesteading Update #3

Image
Our little guest cabin now has quite a sweet outdoor space with its fire pit, benches, serving counter and cowboy hot tub (heated by the fire pit). It’s very inviting and we spend as much time there as we can.  The house itself got new stain and an arctic entryway, which helped during the cold winters that we spent here during Covid isolation times.  We bought a tractor last fall and a mill this spring so we could use the trees on the property to make our improvements.  Doug dropped a few trees and milled a bunch of lumber while I was recuperating with my broken arm. We are now in the process of building a pole barn for all of our equipment. Next spring we will work on an addition to the house. It’s really fun to watch our little Homestead grow!
Read more