An afternoon of Halibut fishing 8.30.09

I've been told that you haven't been fishing in Alaska if you haven't been Halibut fishing. Well we can check that one off the list!



We got a call Sunday morning - 'hey, wanna go fishing this afternoon?' SURE! It has been raining for the past 3 weeks...almost daily and today was the day the weather broke. It was still overcast but NO RAIN! So we jumped on it.



John, the owner of the business we work for, came by in his boat, Moana, and along with us, we had 5 on board: Michael, John, Captain Don, AJ (John's son) and me. We headed out to the South end at a spot we have been swore to secrecy. It took about an hour to get there, but with the super duper new engines on board, it seemed like no time.



We saw lots of commercial fishing boats on our way - fishing for salmon. We also saw whales, about 3-4 of them, and it's always so exciting and amazing to see them.

When we arrived at the spot & dropped anchor, we immediately had 5 poles in the water. It took a bit for our first bite, maybe 15 minutes or so, but after that they came up in droves.





We quickly 'limited out' as we were only allowed 2 halibut per person and caught some large ones! The biggest was about 45 lbs and we had 10 of them. In fact, as our last pole was coming up, there were two on it....which we had to let go as we were over our limit. Bummer!



Oh well, we still had a great day. We even saw some sunshine out there and it got down right warm! AJ was great at hooking up rockfish and even caught a lingcod.



All in all, not a bad day of fishing!



We came back to the marina, cleaned & filleted the fish, and put it inside a large cooler, filled to the brim with fish! The next day we went to the marina and vacuum packed it all. There were probably 35 bags of halibut all together, whew!



It's too bad we can't take any of it with us! Canada has a strict law that no fresh (or frozen) can come into the country so we have to leave it. Oh well! It was fun anyway.

And on the way back to the marina, the clouds & setting sun was giving us quite a show.



It sure is beautiful up here...

More to follow!
Rene