Sustaining the Sustainable Harvest

Dinner in Sandborn Canal was excellent! Ginger chose to sauté two large yelloweye fillets. They were dipped in egg and rolled in seasoned Italian bread crumbs and placed in the pan with garlic butter. The chardonnay was perfect and I don’t even remember what else we had!

The next morning the shallow trap gave up six big fat Dungeness crabs! I don’t think crabs really get fat, it just sounds better. We cleaned them and into the refrigerator they went. The deep trap gave up twenty big fat prawns like the ones in some of the previous posts. Life is good. Harvest of the natural resources can be a good thing. Crabs and shrimp only live for a short time so you better hurry!

The plan for today (6-23-07) was to motor to a small bight in the south shore just inside the mouth of Windham Bay. Ginger kind of picked the spot and I thought it was a good distance for our slower pace of recent days. I wasn’t really listening when she said the guide book said to anchor in twenty fathoms, that’s 120 feet deep for you landlubbers! By the time we got there we really didn’t have a good alternative anchorage.

I cruised around the tiny bay for some time trying to convince myself it wasn’t true but I couldn’t find the shallow anchorage I was desperately searching for. As I continued circling and staring at the bottom finder, I kept seeing lots of fish, the deepwater kind of course. When you find yourself without a real good plan, you just as well go fishing.

We immediately began catching dusky rockfish; I used to call them black rock bass when I would take them on SCUBA with a spear in the San Juans back when you could take rockfish in WA State. We then went out to a small island in the middle of the bay that had some interesting looking rocks to see what kind of fishing there was there. Ginger caught a rock sole and I caught a Pacific cod, firsts for both of us. The big ugly buffalo sculpins were hungry too.

Ginger made a comment about my little fish and I said you won’t be laughing when I reel in a big halibut!