Halibut Fishing in Homer

Saturday, July 10 - We woke up to raindrops this morning, of course, but got our act together and headed to Tim's.  It was a really long day, but we got to catch some halibut.  And would you believe I got seasick!!!  That fits nowhere in my schedule of life!  Mazie wore a patch behind her ear, just in case, but I was so sure I would be fine that, of course, I did nothing.  The ride out was fine, although it was probably 2 hours and pretty choppy.  But once we stopped, I started getting nauseous pretty quick.  I ended up puking my guts out 3 times, but other than that it was a fine day.

This is the Homer harbor.  It was pretty calm here, and not too busy.

We saw this good-sized starfish right by the boat ramp while we were waiting for Tim to back the boat trailer down. Boy, does he have a day ahead of him with this motley crew!

Tim has a wonderful boat.  Joe and Mazie are trying to figure out how to convert it for crappie fishing at Roosevelt Lake.  It was very comfortable, and the back deck was great to fish from.

He got the boat in the water and here he comes, ready to take us out.  He's still sort of smiling at this point.

We saw some sea otters, just floating on their backs.  One we saw had a shellfish or something he was holding.  We also saw a few whales, but we were never able to find them to get a photo.  We got on Tim's case for losing the whales all the time.

So after about 2 hours of bucking the waves, Tim stopped and got Joe's line in the water first.  Joe caught a halibut immediately.  In fact, he wasn't sure if he was just hitting the bottom, or if he actually had a fish.  He was fishing with 2-lb. weight, and it is hard to tell the difference.  But he landed the first fish, which was a great start to the day.  Paul, I'm sorry I didn't get a picture of it on the end of Joe's line, but you can still get the idea.

This was Mazie's first time to go halibut fishing, and she was thrilled.  She missed a couple fish before she finally brought one in, but she was so excited when she did.

Tim did not get to do much fishing.  Between baiting our hooks, getting our lines untangled, checking our lines to confirm whether we really had a fish, and getting our catch into the "fish hole," we kept him pretty busy.  You can see him hitting the fish with a bat to settle it down so it wouldn't flop around so much.  With temperatures so low up here, they don't have to keep the fish alive, or on ice, so they put them into these "holes" in the boats.  The hole is under the metal plate you see in the picture.  This is Mazie's fish he's beating on.

Joe caught the first two fish, then I brought one in, but they were all pretty small so we let them go.  Mazie questioned us on that, and when she brought in her first one, she told Tim to "keep it!"
She was very proud of herself for being able to land it.

Fishing with a 2-lb weight really makes that pole heavy, so it's a fight, even though the halibut don't give you a fight.  They are mostly dead weight, with maybe a little pull every once in a while when they jerk their head.  We were fishing 132 feet down here, so it takes a while to get the line reeled in.    Throughout the day, we fished somewhere between 125 and 220 at different times.  I had a hard time getting my line to go straight down, so at one point Tim blessed me with a 3-lb weight.  I gave him a hard time about that the rest of the day.  I told him I wanted a push-button retrieve on my pole so I wouldn't have to do all that reeling.

The second fish I brought in I kept, because by then I was feeling pretty rotten.  Shortly after that I quit fishing for a few hours, spending my time throwing up instead.  Yuk. 

As I said, we kept Tim busy.  During my "down time," I was bat girl and gaff handler for Tim part of the time.

We moved to different spots drift-fishing as the day wore on, trying to be in the right place for the tide change.  We never anchored anywhere, but sometimes he would have to start the boat up and take us back where we had started from, since we drifted a long ways pretty quick.  Wendy, this picture is for you.

Mazie landed another fish.  The three of us each caught 3, but Joe threw 2 back, and I threw 1 back.  My last one was a flounder though, instead of a halibut.  I'm not sure how many Tim caught, I guess just 1, because we brought home 6 halibut plus 1 flounder.

Here's Mazie working hard, trying to reel in her fish.  Our arms were sore by the time the day was over.  It was also pretty chilly out there.

We finally moved to calmer water and I started feeling human again.  Tim fixed me up with a different set-up and just had me jigging (with a light weight on).  I landed a flounder.  Tim wasn't sure he wanted his picture taken with my flounder, but we talked him into it.  I guess he thought his reputation was at stake.

We finally gave up on fishing and Tim took us around some of the bays to do some sightseeing.  We spotted another whale and some sea otters during this ride.  Finally, we went back to the harbor to load the boat and clean the fish.  There was an old eagle presiding over the harbor.  It let me get pretty close before it flew.  It seemed to think it was in charge of this area.

So here's our catch, and Tim giving Joe a cleaning lesson.  Joe wasn't too sure about this, and it was 8:30 at night, we were tired, and it was cold.  But being the trouper that he is, he stood right there and helped Tim with every one, including the flounder.

By the time we got done and headed to McDonald's in Homer, it was 10:00 p.m., and we still had a 1 and 1/2 hour drive to get back to Tim's.  The good part of that drive was that we saw 8 moose along the way.  Joe kept telling Tim not to point them out because he thought I would have him out driving every night between 10 and midnight, looking for moose (or bear, or whatever).

It was a long day.  We got to Tim's at 6:30 a.m., and we got home at 12:06 a.m.  It was 47 degrees, and we were exhausted.  But Tim was absolutely great.  He's a really nice guy and was fun to get to know.  I'm not sure he would say the same about us, but hopefully he would.  (He also has lilac bushes blooming in his front yard, but I was too tired to pick any.)

But here's the best part.  Tonight (Sunday), David fried up some of our fresh halibut and we had a wonderful fish dinner.  See that bite David is just about to put in his mouth -- it was delicious!

Friday in Soldotna

Friday, July 9 - Tomorrow we get to go halibut fishing with Wendy's brother, Tim!  We are so excited.  We have also decided to try our luck fishing in the Kenai River on Sunday, which is right beside our campground, so we went over today and bought some fishing tackle (hooks, weights, etc.).  We finally decided on 3-day fishing license for now, knowing we might have to buy again if we get a chance to fish again.  The 3-day license is $35 each.  But being right on the Kenai, we thought we just had to give that a try.  We watched someone yesterday across the river pull in a king salmon, and someone on our side of the river brought down a beautiful red salmon to the cleaning station where we were standing.  Here's the walkway from our campground, and the river itself from our walkway.

We will probably try on the other side on Sunday, maybe just down from where these people are fishing.  They don't want you standing on the steps or the bank here at the campground, you are supposed to stand in the water to keep from eroding the bank.  I don't know about that!  My boots are not that tall.

Here's the red salmon from Thursday.  Another lady was cleaning one this morning, she said she caught three pretty quick.  Paul, sorry we don't have one on the end of our poles to show you yet.  Maybe tomorrow with a halibut.  Although they are silver on the outside, the meat itself is quite red.

We drove around some today.  The mountain in the middle of the picture, in the background is Redout, one of Alaska's active volcanos.  Fortunately, it is not spewing forth right now.  The second mountain is Spur Mountain.  These are part of the beautiful Alaska range.

We drove down to the Cook Inlet as well.  They do some quad riding in the loose sand here.  Tomorrow dip-netting season starts, which we hope to go watch sometime this weekend.  It is only open to Alaska residents, though.  Us "foreigners" are not even allowed to help.

Joe was interested is finding where the Kenai River dumped into the Cook Inlet so we drove around Kenai Landing, and then Kenai and finally found access to it.  You can see the mouth here where it goes out into the Inlet.l

We tried to find Tim's house but finally gave up on that and headed back to the campground.  There is a good Brenda rock here at the campground, but we just couldn't figure out how to get it in the box for Brenda.

David grilled steaks for us tonight, so we had a great dinner.  Hopefully, we'll bring home some halibut tomorrow for David to cook for us all, since he seems to be the grill chef.  He's getting the cold that we have all had this week, so he has opted out of our fishing trip tomorrow.

We have added to our traveling zoo so I thought it was time to show them again.  Okie, our lead dog, is our latest addition.

We have also added a musk ox, a baby moose and a reindeer.  We are still in the market for a wolf, beaver, and and a big old grizzly bear to go with the baby grizzly we have.

Soldotna-Kenai

Wednesday-Thursday, July 7-8.  An ex-co-worker of mine, Wendy from the law firm, has a brother who lives in Kenai.  I had contacted him before we left Arizona, and I sent him an e-mail last weekend.  He asked me to call him over the weekend, so when we talked, he offered to take us halibut fishing this weekend, in Homer or Seward, weather permitting.  So we left Wasilla and headed to his stomping grounds.  We just heard on the tv that Willow had a 5.3 earthquake last night, which is only about 20-30 miles north of Wasilla, so we got out of there just in time!

We are actually staying in Soldotna for the next few days, 10 miles from Kenai where he lives.  The drive through Anchorage was interesting -- it has grown a lot since our last visit.  Once we made it down to the Turnigan Arm, the scenery once again was breathtaking.  This is one of the prettiest drives in Alaska, I think.  We stopped at a rest stop and had a view of mountains, with snow striping them still. 

Then we turned onto the Sterling Highway and came through the beautiful Kenai River area.  It is sort of emerald colored, and is very pretty.

We finally found a campground in Soldotna, after several phone calls.  The second run of the reds, I believe, is about to start, so this area is really busy.  Thursday, we took a drive through the town of Kenai and on to the end of the Kenai Spur Road.  Mazie and I decided we needed to dip our toes again, this time in the Cook Inlet, which is the Pacific Ocean.

We are always on the lookout for wildlife, and we got to see a moose and her calf across a little lake.

Alaska is just full of pretty lakes, creeks and rivers. Of course, we think every one of them should have a moose in it!

I thought this tree was pretty awesome.  There were several around this lake that seemed to grow together.

We stopped at a picnic area with a great view of the Cook Inlet.  From here, we could see some boats and some oil platforms out in the water.

We crossed a bridge where some people were standing with their macho cameras out.  They said we had just missed a mama moose and calf in the water there.  We took the next side road to see if we could still see them, and came upon this really pretty river (Swanson River).  To me, it looks like it would be a good jigsaw puzzle picture.

Then we stopped at Bishop Creek, which feeds directly into the Cook Inlet.  We got to see some fish (red salmon, we think) working their way upstream in the water that was often only about 6-8 inches deep in places.  We could see them coming, one by one, by the splashes in the stream.  We got to watch some of them as they rested in one spot for a while, before heading further upstream against a pretty good current.

Here is one place they have to work a little harder, but they seemed to find a deep spot and swam right on through.

We headed on back to Kenai for a late lunch (we were all starving) and found another moose and calf.  This may have been the same one we saw earlier, but it was on the other side of the road, so we don't know if it was or not.  The mama looked a little gray around her head, so we don't know if that means she is older or not.

You notice we still are wearing jackets and raincoats most of the time.  We are keeping our fingers that Saturday cooperates and we get to go fishing for halibut.