The good news is that we did harvest over 5000 lbs of coho this summer! Not nearly quite that much sockeye, but still enough for the season. Otolith has also purchased additional sockeye and coho inventory to assure availability of our extraordinary wild salmon products.
Summer salmon fishing highlights include teaching Andre' how to set gear for salmon trolling and paying Bella for her splendid work cleaning and icing salmon. Bella was a full share, as they say in fishing!
With two children in tow, I arrived Sitka on July 8, 2015. Captain Aritan and the fishing vessel Onyx had just commenced the annual spring king salmon harvest, and we joined him as he delivered his final harvest of king salmon until the fall. He welcomed the opportunity to have three urban landlubber deckhands onboard to assist him with the summer's coho salmon harvest - probably because he is my husband and Bella and Andre's dad. After restocking the necessary provisions, we gladly set toward the ocean to fish off the Cape of Mt. Edgecume. According to ADF&G and many harvesters, outside waters of the eastern Gulf of Alaska are where most of the early season salmon are harvested. The mighty Onyx is 34 ft salmon troller and fishes mainly inside waters of southeast Alaska's bays, sounds, straits and coves due to the limited opportunity for fairweather fishing off the ocean in Alaska. As luck would have it, we had tolerable weather (winds less than 20 nts) for the first four days of our season to fish outside the cape. Being unlikely that our good weather would continue indefinitely, it was then time to venture south to lower Chatham Strait and continue our work in the region known locally and by the NOAA National Marine Weather Forecast as South Chatham Straits. We traveled the inside passage through Olga, Neva and Peril Straits and then traveled south through Chatham Strait until we began fishing once again at Deep Bay. The further south we fished, the better the harvest so we kept traveling and hauling gear until Table Bay.
Our landings, aka fish deliveries, occasionally coincided with visits to nearby Port Alexander where we could use the town's one public pay phone and access to the internet. Lacking in cell phone service, Pt. Alexander (PA) still seemed like an oasis to us after weeks at sea because it has a post office, dock, and a small café where we could reconnect with other fishermen. Our groceries were ordered in PA by phone and delivered to us by another boat that made frequent trips to Sitka to deliver our fish.
Still early in the season, just after out first month, the weather on the ocean started to look good again and we headed north up the coast on the outside to catch some coho in the ocean. We made it as far as Whale Bay before the weather started changing from good to tolerable and NOAA forecast issued small craft advisory for the near future. Not wanting to get trapped in Whale Bay due to weather, we raced to Sitka at full speed and arrived at Goddard Hot Springs in a day's travel just as the wind began to blow at a gale's force (35 nts or greater). Goddard Hot Springs is beautiful and remote nature hot spring that has been upgraded to include two enclosed private bath houses with fully regulated hot and cold water from both the hot spring and local mountain runoff. Each house has a landscape view of the surrounding area and anchorage. While the shore is only accessible by boat, it is quite far from the nearest city of Sitka and requires a larger boat to get there and then a smaller boat to beach up onto the shore as there are no docks at Goddard. It was an ideal location to hide from coastal winds because of its convenient geography in the lei of other islands and of course the hot spring. From Goddard, small vessels can travel in between small island passages to escape high winds and meander all the way to Sitka in foul weather. Such was out trip the following day.
After a month at sea, it can be exciting to look forward to returning to a real city/town, but for me it has always been bitter sweet because I am fascinated by the ocean and take great pleasure in living in the moment away from my digital life and my awareness of pending activities. We arrived Sitka on a Monday and departed again that Saturday traveling on the outside again, north this time, toward Salisbury Sound.
Weather forced us into Salisbury and up through the inside toward Icy Straits. This time we fished north through upper Chatham Strait into Icy Straits and onto Hoonah Sound. We were glad to find more coho in Icy Straits but our daily average dropped precipitously upon the arrival of a large trawler dragging for salmon. The trawler was named the Northern Explorer and his VHF radio broadcasts mentioned that he had been dragging for over 20 years in Icy Straits at the pleasure of NOAA employed to harvest juvenile salmon in the name of data collection and biological research. Perhaps FOIA.gov will shell some new light on this annual trawl harvest occurring in what is proclaimed to be one of the few areas of our oceans off limits to trawling.
Still in Sitka, I shall post more upon return to Philadelphia. I look forward to the CSS distribution and returning to the Headhouse Market. Have a Wonderful Labor Day!
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