As Jan and I constantly remind ourselves, despite being at our favorite vacation destination, we are not on vacation! However, we do normally go fishing during the summer so it’s not out of line for us to drop a line. Plus, we have to eat, right?
Jan found a skipper out of Sooke who could take us on an odd-day. Bonus, the guy lives near where we’re staying and offered to pick us up. Door to door service is a huge plus when you don’t have wheels.
Quick note — you have to get a salmon license from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, AND you have to have a paper copy. The site was built sometime in the internet dark ages, so give yourself plenty of time to get a license and print it out (we went to Staples). If you have a prior account, the login recovery is the stuff nightmares are made of, and registering someone with a different last name on your account is nigh impossible.
We hit the docks by 6:15 and by 6:30-ish we were on the water headed out to fish. The water was like glass and stayed that way all morning.
I won’t bore you “fish tales,” but we each caught our limit before 10:30. Which means we have more than enough salmon to get us through our stay in Canada, plus gift some to our host.
The really cool part of fishing in this area are the whales. It dampened the fishing a bit, but orcas from one of the local pods dipped in and out of the area looking for the same Chinook we tried to hook. We didn’t get close enough for our phones to get a decent photo, but they were fun to watch.
We split some of our catch with the local harbor seals (they got the heads) and the skipper (he got one head for his crab pot), and were back before noon.
Jan cleaned our catch and most of it went in the freezer to eat later. But not all of it…
I would guess we have about thirty or so pounds of fish in the freezer. After researching how long and how much it would take to smoke part of the catch, Jan decided we were better off ordering a stove-top smoker. Amazon delivered and he set to work smoking batches of fish.
The kitchen now has a lingering whiff of alder and hickory. We might have to go back for more to smoke.
