Leaving Fry Pan Bay, we decide to take the back route around Penrose Island and exit through a cut known as “ Slaughter Ally”. This is the site of a massacre in the mid-1800’s of the local Oweekeno by the indigenous Heiltsuk of Bella Bella. We scouted this route yesterday in our dinghy for uncharted rocks but none the less ease through very cautiously as our charts show depths of only a few feet.
We have a nice passage up Fitz Hugh Sound seeing only the BC Ferry Northern Adventure and two other pleasure craft.
Our anchorage for the evening is Codville Lagoon. We are hoping to get some BC Spot Prawns in the bay. The commercial shrimping season opened last week and “Miss Molly”is already in the outer bay with her multitude of bright orange floats. Hopefully she has left some shrimp for us.
We have accumulated an assortment of new fishing gadgets over the winter. The 400 feet of line needed for shrimping gets to be a handling and storage problem. Jeff found a nifty bucket with a reel mounted inside to wind and unwind our shrimp lines.
We also installed a Scotty plastic line puller to aid in the retrieval process. Many boats have electric shrimp pullers but our pullers are left arm and right arm.
After a calm night at anchor, we are out at 7 am in a light rain pulling our traps. We haul the two crab traps first as they are closer to the boat and are only in 30 feet of water. As they are slowly pulled to the surface, we find two big male Dungeness crabs snacking on our bait. They are soon in our catch bucket. We venture out into the lagoon to retrieve the shrimp traps. Hauling these traps are more work as they are in over 300 feet of water. We are rewarded for our efforts with over 100 BC Spot Prawns. They sell these for over $40 lb in the stores around BC. Yea….. we will enjoy a nice dinner tonight.
We get to try out another new item, our Crackin Crab Cleaner that our friends Ron and Michael on the Krogen 48 Spirit Journey had sent us. We traveled with them last year back from Alaska and will miss their company this year. The crab cleaner made cleaning the crabs much simpler.
It’s now time to continue north. We still have 283 miles to Ketchikan, Alaska. Thanks for following along.