June 22, 2017

An eventful day today! We pulled up anchor around 9:30 to head over to Anna Bay and the "famous" Bear Observatory. It took us just under 2 hours to get there. It is also "famous" for not being a great place to anchor and the recommendation is to leave someone on the boat when you go ashore. But the conditions were near perfect and Kim was going to stay on Reiki Master anyway since "she doesn't do bears" and so Ken, Emily, Greg, and I all went ashore, leaving Bella to guard Spellbound.

It's not actually open yet as it's a bit early in the season, so we didn't need a permit yet. Ken spends a lot of time in the "back country" and has a "bear gun" and he had that with him. Greg and I had our weapon of choice - whistles. It's about a 1/2 mile trail along boardwalk to get back to the area of the river and the viewing platforms and Ken recommended that we keep talking and making noise along the way. Wouldn't want to surprise a bear. We got to the end and unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there were no bears there yet. But the sun came out and it was a beautiful blue sky and warm and an incredibly scenic location.




Back to the boats and Kim had prepared chicken soup for everyone for lunch! (She keeps feeding us!). We pulled up anchor and headed down Ernest Sound towards Blake Channel. This is also the "back way" that will eventually take you to Wrangell. We had decided to anchor in Berg Bay for the night. We went into the head of the bay and there is another USFS float and cabin here. There is apparently a trail and a hike up to a lake (that's nice).

After watching Kim fishing of the back of the boat while at anchor yesterday, Greg decided it was time to pull out the fishing poles that we had brought and see how they work. We just had some squid for crab pot bait so pulled one of those out and cut it into a few pieces to put on the hook of our "jig". Neither one of us are remotely knowledgeable about fishing and didn't really know what we were doing, but hey, ya gotta start somewhere. There were certainly things down there as they were able to pull on the bait and take it, but not get caught on the hook. We fed the whole squid, plus another herring that Greg dug out, to whatever was taking down there. And we caught a piece of bark too. That's it.

In the mean time, Kim and Emily are fishing off the back of Reiki Master again while Ken is ashore with Chibby. We hear a lot of excitement at one point, and we see Kim struggling to bring in something heavy. We both pull out binoculars to watch the action. The fish comes to the surface and Emily takes the pole from Kim. All of a sudden the net goes away and Kim goes to get the "gaff". Then she starts back to the back of the boat and then goes back in again. We hear a call on the radio to Spellbound - "It's too big! I need help!". So Greg jumps in the dingy and heads over. She has a very large halibut on the line and she gave Greg the gaff while she reels it in again. No, Greg has never been that close to a halibut in his life and has no idea how to "gaff" it. She told him to get it through the gills. Greg places the gaff in that general area but it slides into it's mouth/jaw, which promptly rips open and the hook and the gaff slide right through and the fish sinks nicely back down into the water. Gone. Greg felt just awful. Kim was just fine with it. She was so excited that a halibut that big was in this bay! Keep fishing.

Ken came back with Chibby and he started fishing too. About half and hour later, we hear some hooping and hollering and we watch through the binoculars again. Ken brings the line to the back of the boat and reels it in. There are some more whoops. Kim takes the rod and Ken grabs the gaff. They have caught another large halibut and we watch to see how it's done. When it gets up close to the back of the boat, Ken uses a full swing "I'm chopping firewood" kind of motion to try and gaff it. He has to try several times to get it as he misses in the heavy swing. There was no chance that Greg was ever going to get the first fish after watching Ken with this one. Finally, after more reeling in and swinging, he get's it and slides / drags it up the couple of stairs onto the back deck of the boat. It's huge and it starts thrashing around wildly. Kim stands behind it so that it can't slide back off the boat. At this point we can't see anything and just listen to a lot of whooping and laughter. Once things have calmed down, we hop in the dingy and head over to see the action up close.



They had measured the length of the halibut which then gives you the weight - 77 lbs. I think it was 54" long. The same table says that a fish that big will give you 58 lbs of meat! Oh my! No one more than Greg was so happy that they caught another large halibut. No, this is not a place where you would expect to catch halibut. This is the largest one that Kim and Ken have ever caught too!



After "bonking it" and "bleeding it", they just left it in that big cooler while we had dinner. Kim had already pulled some halibut and yellow eye out of the freezer to make fish and chips for dinner (we brought the chips). So we did that and then everyone pulled up their socks to start "processing" the fish. Ken and Greg did the filleting, then Kim skinned the fillets, then Emily cut the giant fillets into 2 person serving sizes. Then I ran their vacuum sealing machine and made a little bag for each serving, put the fish in, then vacuum sealed it up again. The whole process probably took 1.5 hours with the 5 of us. I'd estimate that we made over 70 packages of fish. Greg and Ken kept the leftovers in the cooler as we were going to package up some of it to use for crab bait. Kim started labelling the fish and putting it in their freezer. Then they gave us a shopping bag full of little packages for us to put in our freezer.

Still light out, we headed back to Spellbound around 9:30 - the plans for movie night foiled.