Birthday Fishing
Well it's my birthday - July 29 - I'm 56. And this afternoon, we were supposed to board the ferry and sail back to Homer to continue our Alaska adventure. However, the ferry workers went on strike and the entire Alaska Marine Highway System is grounded until the strike is resolved. The ship that brought us here on July 24 hasn't moved since then.
So, we clearly weren't going anywhere today.
As I mentioned yesterday, Steve booked an open spot on Fish N' Chips Charters this morning.

I dropped him off and walked down to the boat, the Aurora, with him hoping that perhaps someone cancelled and there might be an extra spot for today's charter. I was prepared to explore the island on my own, but since we had such success yesterday, I was willing to spring for another charter today knowing this would likely be my last charter on this Alaska trip.
Well, nobody cancelled. There was a couple from Pennsylvania and one guy from North Carolina to join Steve. Capt. Dave said he'd be happy to take me along, but the problem was he was only permitted to have four people fishing for halibut. I could go, but I couldn't fish for halibut. Still, I could fish for rockfish and lingcod while the rest were fishing for the big flat fish. Capt. Dave offered me a birthday discount, and I decided to join them.
As it turned out, the one couple was most interested in targeting King Salmon, so halibut wasn't primary on their list.
It was a little crowded in the main cabin, so Steve and I once again went up top to the captain's chairs as we cruised out. Unlike yesterday when we only went out about 20 minutes to start fishing, today we were going about two hours to get to the prime King Salmon spot near Ugak Island. It was another calm, beautiful day and we headed out in a different direction than yesterday.

We went out past some rock formations with natural arches.

Flocks of birds were out in front of us as well, a good sign for fishing.

We had rocks and small islands to our left, .....


and rocks and cliffs and mountains to our right.



We also saw whales and puffins.

Out past that last point, we were more exposed to the Pacific Ocean, and we had some fairly large roller waves, so we had to hang on a bit.
Once we got to our fishing spot with a few other boats, we trolled with two lines and then us five fishermen rotated reeling in whenever there was a "Fish On!"
A couple of King Salmon got off before they could be netted, but soon we were bringing them in. All five of us got our limit of two King Salmon each.
Here's the last one being netted.


Steve quickly grabbed it for a photo op.

We then tried for rockfish, but it was a little slow today. I caught one, and then we moved on. We returned back inshore a little bit going back by the rock formations.


Puffins were still around and I got this decent shot of a Tufted Puffin coming in for an awkward landing.

A little later, this one paddled near the boat.

And there were more whales.


Eventually, we made it to Capt. Dave's special Silver Salmon spot with no other boats around, and we were soon back to trolling. It took a little time to get in a groove, but we started bringing in Silvers (Coho). And sometimes we had two on at once.

I took a little video of Steve bringing in a Silver, ....
and he took one of me.
We lost count of how many Silvers we caught, but we ended up with a huge bag of salmon.

And we added a couple of rockfish.

Like I said yesterday, I wish that we could have hung up all the fish or spread them across the deck and got some pictures to add perspective. Our 30-something fish would have been more impressive like that.
But Capt. Dave is more focused on putting us on fish and getting them in the boat than photo ops, and we can't really complain about that.
Now one thing I think Capt. Dave should do is give a better explanation in the very beginning of how the fish will be divided up in the end. Yesterday, it didn't matter as it was just the four of us, and we knew we'd just split the fish we caught evenly.
However, today, there were five people fishing for four families. The way they do things, all the fish just get divided equally by weight, so today each person would get a fifth of each species of fish. It doesn't matter who actually brought the fish in. That's especially fair when we are trolling because none of us is actually "catching" a fish, the deckhand is setting the hook and handing us a rod to reel them in. We're reeling them in in rotation, so it's just luck as to who gets what fish, what size it is, and whether it even makes it onto the boat.
Anyway, individual fish aren't separated, and the processor can't process the fish differently for one person. One fellow got a little upset at the end when we were offloading today's catch when he couldn't claim certain fish and have them cut up the way he wanted. That probably could have been avoided with an upfront explanation before we left the dock this morning.
In the end, it was done fairly, but there was some tension when we were at Island Seafoods, the processor.


When it was all processed, packaged and frozen, Steve and I each ended up with 24 pounds of mostly King and Silver Salmon. With our 30.5 pounds from yesterday, we were shipping over 54 pounds of fish to Linda's Mom in Florida. We previously shipped 18 pounds, so we hope she still has room in that extra freezer of hers.
Unfortunately, for Esther and Steve, the processor won't ship to Canada because of the risk that the fish sits in Customs for too long and spoils. FedEx insurance won't cover anything if it's a government-caused delay.
So, they are going to ship their fish to Soldotna and buy a freezer to put in their RV. We might end up doing the same as we have 15 pounds of rockfish in Anchorage and about 20 pounds of Sockeye in Soldotna. Plus we'll be doing more fishing when we get back to the mainland, shipping fish overnight gets really expensive.
Planning To Evacuate Kodiak Island
While we were out fishing, Esther and Linda attacked the logistics of getting us off the island. Nothing could be done over the weekend, but now that it's Monday, they were able to get some people on the phone.
We all agreed that we didn't want to stay on Kodiak until August 12 when we were re-booked on the ferry. And we weren't comfortable with the open-ended idea that we "might" be able to travel sooner if the ferry workers strike ended quickly.
We definitely weren't leaving tonight, so the ladies worked it out with the property owner (who is out of town) that we could stay one more night by paying cash to her housekeeper.
Then, they found that we could put our Jeeps on a barge in a cargo container to get them to the mainland. However, it would cost $1,200 per Jeep and they would be delivered to Seward rather than Homer. We could get them in a few days or it could be a week. The Jeeps had to be delivered to the barge company by 5:00 p.m. today, so our wives drove them over, and the housekeeper gave them a ride back.
Steve and I got a ride from one of the other charter guests who had to drive right be our townhouse.
Before taking the Jeeps, they booked us flights tomorrow morning. Early in the morning, we'll fly to Anchorage and then catch another plane to Homer to reunite with our RVs.
The bad news is our evacuation is going to cost us about $2,000, more than the cost of our round-trip ferry to Kodiak and back and our lodging.
The good news is the Alaska Marine Highway System (AMHS) is refunding our entire ferry fare even though we were technically only cancelling one way. That really helped offset some of the cost of getting off the island. Assuming we were going to have to stay on the island and find lodging for at least another week, the cost of getting off the island will end up being about the same as if we chose to stay until we could catch the ferry or it could be far less if the strike were to drag on, and that was all unknown.
The other good news is this plan would get us back to Homer and back to our RVs on pretty much our original schedule being only a few hours later than the ferry would have gotten us there tomorrow if it was running. We wouldn't have to cancel our reservations at the Russian River Campground for the first three days of August.
Kudos to Linda and Esther for working all of that out while us boys were playing. They informed us our penalty was that we were responsible for retrieving the Jeeps when they were ready to be picked up in Seward. No problem.
UPDATE: The strike ended shortly after we got back to the mainland, but the ferry from Kodiak to Homer wasn't going to leave until late evening on August 7 putting us in Homer in the early morning hours of August 8. And that assumes we could have gotten on the ferry. In all likelihood, it would be full and we'd have to wait a few more days. In the end, we all feel like we made the right decision to leave Kodiak when we did. Otherwise, we would have had at least a week delay and probably more.
Having everything worked out with a plan to leave early in the morning, we cooked and/or ate everything we had in the refrigerator that we could. But the housekeeper said we could leave whatever we wanted as she has teenage boys and they'd eat anything we left behind.
She was a sweetheart and even volunteered to drive us to the airport in the morning.
Well, if we've said it once, we've said it a thousand times. It's always an adventure with Howard & Linda. It's not every day you get stranded on an island due to a labor strike. However, it could have been much worse. We're glad the strike didn't occur while we were in the middle of the Inside Passage in May with no way to get our RVs to a road system. That would have much more significantly messed with our plans and schedules.
If all goes well tomorrow, we'll be back in our RVs and back on schedule. Until next time.
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