Wednesday, 24 August 2011 Silver Salmon Lodge - Day two

We awoke this morning thinking just how much better could today get to be!

Breakfast was fantastic with an excellent array of cooked food, this was not buffet style, but table setting with fresh muffins, eggs, hash browns and assortments, including oatmeal porridge if you wanted.

Now after all this we were asked what did we want to do, Barry and Vikki were going Halibut fishing for the afternoon and Shoeleh had the fishing bug, so we signed up for the 3 hour cruise. So we had a couple of hours to spend between breakfast and the fishing. So we headed out looking for bears… Of course we found some in no time and photo's followed.

We arrived back at about 11:00 to get ready to go fishing. This too was going to be an experience as we were heading out into the bay to find fish. The boat was moored on the beach, thankfully the bow opened into a set of steps and we were on board and heading out to go fishing. Now we spent the next hour going the 17 miles out to the fishing point. The seas were a little choppy but not that uncomfortable.

We made it to the fishing point, we then dropped anchor in 200ft of water and then Brian and Oliver started to prepare the lines and bait the hooks, Shoeleh was given the first prepared rod and then with a 4ib weight attached off the side it went. Unbelievably no sooner had the weight hit the bottom than something was on the line. Oliver had just finished baiting the hook for our Swiss friends and they cast their line. Shoeleh was still fighting with her catch and got me to start to reel in this one, I too was finding this strenuous and so Brian, then Oliver had a go. Finally we found what was on the end of the line, it was a skate it was probably 1.8m head to tail and about 1.6m across and it fought all the way to the surface before it managed to break the line and swim off.

Next Swiss had a bite and then Vikki and it seemed the Halibut were keen to be caught. We had a limit of two fish per person and so it was that Shoeleh was back in the chase for her next fish which she got in almost no time. The Halibut were so keen to be caught I even got my two, then it was a race between Vikki and Shoeleh to see if we could get the boat limit. Shoeleh prevailed as Vikki's broke off and so it was that in probably less time than it took to get to the fishing point we had caught sixteen Halibut, had our lunch, cleared the deck and were packed up ready to return.

While we were catching, can't call it fishing where every time you drop a line in you get a bite. We were visited by a sea otter, happily floating along with the current cleaning itself. We also got to see a lot of different sea birds like Puffins as well as the more regular seabirds. All looking to help us enjoy our catch, in the end all they got was some of our excess bait before we headed back in.

Now some of the other guests had headed south from the lodge and crossed the Silver Salmon Creek and the weather was now raining so we headed in to pick them up on our way back in. We arrived and picked up another eight people and head back toward the lodge. On our return we exited the boat and took our fish with us, each of these weighed between 10‑15kg. Thankfully Brian and Oliver carried the box and then set the fish up for the obligatory photo, before they skilfully filleted these fish in almost no time at all.

With all this we sat down and enjoyed a great meal of Halibut, not the just caught ones but others caught a few days previously.

Unfortunately for us we were not in a position to take our catch home with us we donated our catch to the lodge for other guests to eat over the coming months.

With all this done we packed off for another evenings rest. Now Shoeleh had the fishing bug she was looking to get up and go at 06:30 the next morning so alarms were set and off to sleep we went.

Animals Spotted: Bears, Halibut, puffins, sea otter, other sea birds.

Day Thirty nine