Warm Spring Bay and Cannery Cove
(July 27th, 2017)
Waking up in Red Bluff on the 25th before slack water, Devon wanted to get outside the bay for some halibut fishing before the current picked up. So we pulled anchor and headed out through the channel, and then nestled into the cove outside the channel. After finding our 170ft depth fishing area we pulled out the frozen chunks of octopus we had been given yesterday in Kake and dropped it to the sea floor on our line. We jigged for a bit and pretty soon we caught something.. big. We wrenched it up and boom!!–there on the end of our line was a large halibut, 3-4 feet in length. I was so surprised I got a camera to take a picture, and radioed the fleet, after which I finally got a net and subsequently watched the halibut shake the hook and dive away before I got the net to the water. Crap!! Never count your chickens before they hatch I guess. So we dropped the hooks for a while longer, drifting over the same area a few times. We bought up a two foot sole (or flounder, we aren’t sure), and then a nice little starter halibut, both of which we landed successfully. Yay!!! We had actually caught a halibut.
During all this, a humpback whale was bubble feeding a hundred yards off in the weeds and rocks for an hour, providing quite the show. The rest of the fleet emerged a bit later for some short bottom fishing and then we all started trolling for salmon northbound as we headed for Warm Spring Bay. We added a Pink salmon and a rockfish to the stash before we stopped fishing and sped up.
Devon filleted the four fish on the cockpit floor en-route. Once we arrived in Warm Springs we met the fleet boats that had skipped Red Bluff. The dock being full, we rafted to s/v Glendora, a Hallberg-Rassy 37.
Being Warm Spring Bay, the girls went with mom to check out the public bath houses, which are pretty cool. There are three rooms on a deck over the shore, each with a private bathtub, a drain, and constant stream of hot spring water to fill the tub. You drop the plug in, let the bath fill, and then take your bath while observing the bay, waterfall, bears, and boats through the curtained window. When you are done, you pull the plug, brush out the tub, and let the hot water stream out until the next person comes by. There are more “natural” pools up the hill a ways but you need to watch for bears, as they are constantly around. One brown bear literally walked around the village boardwalk in front of people and another was on shore for several hours catching and eating fish, just 50 feet from the dock.
The 26th was a lay day at Warm Spring, with the entire fleet together, we rearranged the boats to get all but two on the dock, which luckily put us on the dock, with s/v Zephyr (a sexy Sweden 45) rafted to us. Meanwhile, the fog was preventing the expected seaplane arrival bearing new crew for Ruby Slippers. Jim took Ruby out of the bay several times to get a cellular signal to call the airline for status, and by noon they still had none. Three hikers who had walked over the top of the island from Sitka to Warm Spring were running out of food and propane due to having to wait for the fog to lift for their flight out. We, along with several other boats, offered food and propane which they were excited by, but Jim offered them the best thing, a boat ride to Kake, where they could get a plane back to Sitka, along with being fed on board Ruby while en-route. Jim had decided to go to Kake to exchange crew there since the fog wasn’t affecting that area. Ruby Slippers would meet us the next day in Cannery Cove.
That evening we had a small potluck with the crew of Sea Otter who supplied oysters, shish kabobs, and we played Liars Dice for a few hours over cocktails and wine. It was a great evening!
On the 27th the fleet departed Warm Spring in a very organized manner, since every boat was either rafted or had a rafter and were only inches fore and aft from each other. Luckily the current from the waterfall was gently pushing the boats out of the bay, so we exited from the end of the dock, rafted boat first, then docked boat, then next rafted boat, next docked boat, etc until everyone was safely away.
Cannery cove would be a crabbers dream but for one thing… The crabs are all female! Several boat crews put out crab traps and pulled their pots every hour or so, many times coming up with 20-30 crab, but only 1 or 2 males they could keep. It seems commercial fisherman have harvested nearly all of the males there.
Since the Clark family (with two young girls) was Ruby Slippers new crew, our Morgan and Ellie asked if we could raft to Ruby in Cannery Cove, which everyone agreed to. With Jim right there, we went to work on the Jim Rard BBQ-Smoker retrofit. I had purchased the necessary propane torch in Craig, and after looking at our BBQ, there was a perfect hole already existing in the side, through the outer and inner walls. Taking the tip off the torch, drilling the hole slightly larger with my stepped drill bit, the super-conveniently-perfect-tool-that-I-had-no-use-for-before, and reassembling the torch provided a perfect fit, holding itself solidly in the BBQ. We smoked a bunch of salmon that Jim had caught and brined that night and in the morning it was awesome! The stepped drill bit was also passed around the fleet for their modifications over the next couple days.
Tomorrow we make a slightly longer than normal passage to Tracy Arm anchorage, a bay at the mouth of Tracy Arm, from which we can jump to Sawyer Glacier the next day.
