Thursday -
Back on the water! A bit of a
snag early in the morning with the winch again that set us back about 2
hours, but in the end, everything worked out. We finally caught
sablefish!!! Two. But still, two is better than zero. We also caught a
nice halibut that we kept for dinner.
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| A kelp greenling |
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| Not a halibut |
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| A halibut |
The coolest part of the day - we saw two grizzlies and I took the most awesome picture ever!
The
grizzlies seemed to come down to graze at low tide. The two were on
different beaches and we didn't get very close to either one. In fact,
the pictures I took of them are pretty bad. But they were neat so see.
Today was probably the nicest day of the week, weather-wise. It was
cloudy all morning but in the afternoon the sun peeked out a bit.
The
best picture ever...So, wow, this was so cool. We caught a couple of
rockfish in deep water. And the trouble with rockfish (for you
non-fishing types) is that when they are brought to the surface quickly,
their swimbladder expands and can expand out of their mouths. This
isn't necessarily fatal, (though it can be) if they have time to recover
it can usually shrink back down. But, until they recover and the
swimbladder shrinks they are unable to swim back down because they are
too buoyant. Well, one of the fish we caught wasn't able to swim down
right away and an eagle came by and scooped it from the water
right in front of us.
I was able to grab my camera and get a couple of good pictures of it
happening. After that, any rockfish we caught were allowed to recover
in our coolers before we sent them back...we felt pretty bad for letting
that happen the first time (even though the eagle was probably happy).
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| Bald eagle eating the rockfish |
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| A pacific cod. We threw it back. |
Karson, holding a sablefish that's just been tagged.
Foster has really enjoyed your wildlife pictures! ;)
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