This first map segment shows the general route from Bar Harbor out to Marguerite Bay. It is in Traitors Cove, which is in Behm Canal. Behm Canal is the body of water that runs completely around our island.
This second map segment shows a little more detail of the entrance to Traitors Cove, and shows the location of the lake. I've never figured out why the navigational charts show it as Marguerite Bay when the land maps show it as Margaret Lake.
In any case, I pulled out about 7 AM on Saturday morning in cool, calm, and partly cloudy weather. Winds were light from the NW.
On the way out an alarm started sounding. On a boat there are numerous things that can generate an alarm, none of them good. I started searching all over to try to locate the source of the alarm. Was it low engine oil, high engine temperature, high water in the bilge? No, when unpacking the groceries and stowing them I must have hit the button on the kitchen timer. That's about the only alarm on the boat that generally signifies something good.
Here are some ferries sitting at the shipyard docks. All the ferries are named after glaciers (no, I don't know why.) Also notice the bright orange life boat on the ferry Tustomena. It is one of those totally enclosed, self-righting life boats. Having never been inside one of them I must assume that the pilot sits in the raised section aft (near the back), which is where the small windows are.
I had a beautiful but uneventful run through Clover Pass and on up into Behm Canal proper. Water conditions were excellent.
As I approached Naha Bay I decided to drop my personal use halibut skate on the halibut hole out in front. AK Dept of Fish & Game allows a personal use halibut skate of 2 hooks only to be dropped as long as you are not rod fishing while it is down. Basically it is a small anchor on the bottom, a long line with 2 hooks attached, and a buoy at the top. I have yet to catch anything worthwhile on this, but it is easy to set and to pull so I continue to try.
I have been told that halibut like to feed on shallow plateaus that are surrounded by lots of deep water. Check out this shot of my GPS unit. It shows the current depth at over 1000', and the depths around waypoint #72 to be around 240'. A waypoint is a fixed location on the ocean that is marked and identified by latitude and longitude. I dropped my skate right near WP #72.
Since it was so calm out here I took this opportunity to prepare and bait my shrimp pots so that they'd be ready when I got into Traitors Cove.
Oil pressure in my port engine was reading a little low, so I shut down the engine and went down to the engine room and added oil to the engine. That made it much happier.
I got safely inside Traitors Cove and dropped my 3 shrimp pots. Then I prepped and baited my 2 crab pots and also dropped them, then went in to the dock.
Not a bad place to spend the night, don't you think? Looks like I have the place to myself.
I have to warn you about this next shot. It is a shot of wolf "scat," so if you are sensitive to this type of photo you might want to skip over it quickly.
There was a lot of wolf sign on and near the road. Ever since I ran into that wolf in January (see my Shelter Cove trip posting) I have been more aware of their presence. For this trip I loaded more rounds into my pistol magazines and made sure they were more accessible than in the past.
In any case, it appears that wolves cannot digest fur, or bones, or in this case, claws. I've been trying to figure out what he ate that had claws like that.
I walked up to the first bridge, which is a little over a mile I think. I know I have posted pictures of the lake from here before, but it was so clear and so sunny that I cannot resist posting just a couple more. This time I remembered my polarizing filter which I have been told "puts the blue back in the sky," and so I hope they look just a little better this time.
My original plan had been to walk along the side of the lake until I got past the lake outlet area and do some fishing. But as you can see the main part of the lake is still iced up. So I fished in the outlet area for about an hour. My biggest catch was about an 18 incher, hemlock I think, but could have been spruce. I don't really know my woods like I should.
On the way back to the boat I took the detour down to the Margaret Creek Bear and Fish Viewing platform. This is like a poor man's Anan Creek (see my Anan Creek posting from last summer.) I rarely come here in the summer and so I rarely see either bears or fish here.
I came across this great "Bear Bread" fungus on the hike down to the platform.
I took a few shots of the fish ladder. For those uninitiated in the ways of the salmon, a fish ladder is a man made detour around a particularly difficult section of river or creek, usually a falls that the fish cannot get over or around. The fish ladder allows the salmon to bypass that obstacle and thus gain access to the creek or river or lakes that are above it for spawning.
It is a marvel to me that the salmon find their way to the fish ladder, but it is obvious that they do.
In this last shot you can just see the end of the fish ladder (mostly hidden by trees) as it enters calm man made pools, which continue to work their way around the obstruction.
It sure is nice to have a few more hours of daylight to work with now. In the dead of winter I'd have to be back at the boat by 3:30 or 4:00 PM. Now it is staying light until 7 PM or so.
I made my way back to the boat and was rewarded with just a beautiful evening in the bay. Check out this sunset.
I had a quiet evening on board, spent playing guitar, reading, doing cross words, etc. I always bring lots of "diversions" with me so I never get bored.
It was very quiet night with the stars out. In the morning I was greeted with ice around the dock and around the boat. Not heavy ice, but ice nonetheless.
Some docks are more prone to ice than others. The Naha has the strong current from the river there so we rarely have ice around the dock. There is a river (creek) here as well, but it is further away from the dock and there wasn't much wind overnight, so all around the dock and the boat was a thin layer of skim ice.
If the ice is thick enough it can damage a fiberglass hull. It didn't look that bad to me and I wasn't planning to leave for a few hours so I wasn't worried about it.
Another small boat came in right before I pulled out, and they cleared a small path through the ice. They were headed up the road for a short hike.
I pulled out about 10:15 AM and immediately pulled the 2 crab pots. The first pot had 7 crabs, but only 3 of them were legal size. A couple were very very close, but I tossed them back anyway.
The second crab pot had only 1 crab in it and he was clearly undersized, so back in the water he went.
Some of you may recall that I follow boats all over the world, and one of them blogged that while his readers want high drama, close calls, etc. he just wants everything to run calmly and smoothly. Here is where some drama kicks in.
I went to pull my shrimp pots and had a lot of trouble. There was a very stiff breeze blowing in the bay and that makes it very hard just to come up to the pots and hook the line. When I am by myself and the boat is blowing all over the place I cannot pilot the boat and hook the line at the same time. I cannot take a chance on running over the line with the boat and getting a line in the prop so I have to be overly cautious. I would rather miss hooking the line 100 times than snag a line in the prop even once.
When I finally did hook the line I threaded it through the pot puller (see my previous blog on how I go after shrimp). I immediately saw a problem. The pots appeared to be hung up on rocks or something because they weren't coming up through the puller. In fact the line on the puller was being put under more and more tension as the wind blew the boat.
I reached out to try to get the line out of the pot puller so I could tie it off to a cleat, and while I was doing this, the downrigger base to which the puller attaches failed and the whole thing went over the side in a big hurry! I was just lucky that it didn't take my finger or my hand with it.
I threw the buoys over..
I considered my options at this point. I could try to snag the line again and run up wind and try to free the pots from whatever was anchoring them to the bottom. But in this wind to do that maneuver by myself didn't seem too likely, so I decided just to leave them and to come back with help ASAP to salvage whatever I could.
The pots have release mechanisms on them. These are sections of the webbing that are tied with a piece of cotton twine that will deteriorate in salt water in "x" days (don't know). When that happens a panel opens up and the shrimp can escape.
Needless to say this was very discouraging. The pots themselves are a little over $100 each, and the pot puller was over $500. After that I sort of lost my desire to take any more pictures so I just ran for home.
Nothing on the halibut skate, again, but at least I got it back.
In the stall about 2:30 PM with about 55 nm for this trip.
If you take enough trips, eventually some bad stuff is going to happen. I'm glad I didn't get injured and there was no damage to the boat itself.
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