The Heather Rayne

We woke up excited for our dinner plans. We had invited a couple from church over for dinner and they had taken us up on it, but before we had even left the harbor last night they had instead invited us over to their home for dinner. They live on their fishing boat. It is deffinately a different take on living in a tiny house or being a “fulltime family”. After breakfast we walked up Rezanof picking salmon berries for our salad.

After that we went to Walmart to get the girls some new leggings and pants as well as a fishing license for me. It doesn’t seem real to have an Alaska fishing license, some how it seems like more of an accomplishment than an Alaska nursing license.

We then headed to Safeway to get the fixings for our salad (dark romain, feta, apples, and chopped walnuts add to that the salmon berries…I know you are all drooling. Don’t worry it was good and we enjoyed every bit of it.).

Thinking we might be out late we had Eve lay down for a nap and Hannah and Caleb rest as well. Eve was pretty excited about giving them cheese as a hostess gift. Corrie is from Tillamook Oregon so we bought some Tillamook cheese as well as Dubliners which is one of our favorite types of cheese, crackers and some cranberry jalapeño jelly. We stopped at the top of the ramp down into the harbor to pick out life jackets for the kids to wear on the boat. I loved the saying on the back of the vests.

The plan was to catch fish and BBQ them for dinner. We were going to catch some herring for bait out in front of cannery row, but the sonar wasn’t showing many down there so we only tried for a short time. The lines that we used for that had three hooks on them each with a lure Corrie would drop them down the pull them up about 2.5-3 ft then down and back up making them dance through the water. Since the sonar didn’t show many fish in the area we only did that a short time. Then we headed out into the open water where Richard found a rockfish jackpot. He showed Calwb how to do it and almost just as soon as Caleb had the pole in his hands he had a bite. These poles only had one hook with a heavily weighted lure on it. It took him about a minute to get the fish in the boat. The. He handed his pole off to Chad and Richard and I each dropped down another line also immediately getting bites. We reeled them in landing them all three simultaneously. They were all four similar in size. Richard was guessing that they were probably about 40 year old fish. It may have taken a whole five minutes to get all four fish. As fun as it was to catch them we were only planning to catch enough for dinner so we put the poles up and ducked the boat into a cove on Long Island.

Here is a video of Caleb catching the first fish.

Moses took his job of guarding the fish seriously.

This guy was my catch. He was flopping around so much we couldn’t get the treble hook out of his mouth. The spines of the rock fish are venomous so we had to be a little careful. Corrie showed us how to bleed the fish then cut off the fillet from either side of the fish. They were still catching us off gaurd flip flopping around while we were cutting them.
Now that is fresh fish!!! We pulled into a cove on Long Island where we were protected from the wind (which was blowing at 30 knotts). Caleb and Eve kept fishing even though there are very few fish in that cove.

The scales made the skin hard to cut through.

Eve working hard scrubbing the blood off the deck of the boat. After everyone had eaten their fish and salad Corrie broke out the smore fixings.
What a fun idea…snores out on the boat in a most beautiful protected code.

The time passed quickly and soon it was after 9:00pm, passed time to get home. The wind was out and the surf a little choppy. Whales were spouting around us and one minke whale headed straight for our boat. We veeredaway from him and he passed behind us. It was so amazing to watch his massive back beak the surface again and again.