The other night I was talking to Hadley on the phone and mentioned that I was working on the follow-up post on fishing in Homer, Alaska.
"Don't even talk to me about halibut fishing." Hadley said,
"I want to go back so bad. Like we need to do it every summer." It's obvious to us that Alaska is deep in her bones. There's a good chance she'll be back there when college is over and I figured that my first trip would lead to many more. It's a tough place not to want to go back to.
If you missed the first post of
A Few Days on the Water in Homer, click the link and then circle back.
The conditions on our second day on the water were even better than
the day before. Less wind, less waves, but still cloudy. Maybe we'd
see the sun poke out but no worries if we didn't. The entire family
made it into the boat with Michelle and Esther joining us. We packed
snacks, lunches, and grabbed some extra tackle from the shop by the boat ramp since you can never have
enough. We were passing
flotillas of sea otters as we rounded the Homer Spit by mid-morning.
Anticipation of good fishing was high and we hoped to limit out again on halibut and wouldn't mind a few cod for the cooler. Where cod might not be as esteemed as halibut for the fish box to take home, it's a wonderful tasting fish. I'd happily bring back more cod next time.
Throughout the morning we had a steady bite that favored more halibut
than the day before but still with a mix of cod, several quite large, and a few pesky sculpins mixed in. Hadley was getting a kick out of catching fish but she was always keeping an eye on the horizon for possible whale sittings. She picked up the tall dorsal fin of a orca over a mile away that she quickly confirmed through her binoculars. That orca was on the outer edge with a group of other orcas. We all quickly reeled up and Bryce motored the boat in their direction until we were a couple of hundred yards away. Bryce turned the engine off and we spent the next twenty minutes watching these whales hunt and feed. One of the whales in the group fully breached and then did it again. If there was a "mind blown" moment of the trip for Hadley, this was it.
We slow motored away from the pod of orcas and then cut the engine not far away on a spot that Bryce had marked on his navigation that he thought would be good to drop jigs. For the next hour or so, we picked up dorsal fins of orcas all around us a half mile or farther away. This is not a whale that I've been around much and there is certainly a "wow" feeling in fishing the same waters they are in.
Steady catching continued into the afternoon and at one point, Bryce pulled everything out of the cooler to see where we were with our halibut numbers. We still needed to catch three more. And, over the forty-five minutes or so, we caught them.
I haven't done a lot of fishing like this, but there is an easy fun aspect to it of letting your jig hit bottom and then slowing pulling it up several feet before easing it down to the bottom in a controlled fall. Trying to imagine what is going on 200 to 300 feet on the bottom of the ocean is wild, especially when every few minutes your jig gets bumped by a fish or eaten. How many fish could be down there? Again, wild to consider.
I should have written this post much sooner, if for no other reason to say thank you to the Pearson's for the family they were to Hadley over her year in Alaska. They took her along on all of their adventures, invitations to Sunday evening dinners (sometimes weekdays, too), Bryce teaching her how to drive a manual transmission car, getting her involved in the Iditarod and then taking her up to Nome for the finish, riding snow machines and tailgating on the ice, quickie road trips, and so much more. They put her arms around her and made sure that her Alaska experience was complete.
As parents, you always worry about your children and when your daughter is 4,500 miles away, having a longtime family friend and her family to look out for Hadley was always reassuring.
Since it was the last night that the Pearson's would be camping on the Homer Spit, we planned to head in by late afternoon, clean fish, and then go to dinner in town. The communal work at the fish filet station went quicker since we all fell right into our roles from the evening before and our ratio of halibut to cod was roughly three to one.
I can't say thank you enough to the Pearson's for everything over the couple days in Homer. Hadley and I could not have had a better time and bringing home a 50-pound fish box full of halibut, cod, and some of their salmon from last year, has been a wonderful reminder of this trip.
