 Hoping not to repeat the fogged-out disaster of 2022, my dad Jim, his friend Charlie, my brother-in-law Colin decided to return to Whalers Cove this year. The main draw is our awesome and trusty guide, Kevin. He was born and raised in Angoon and his family has lived in the area since time immemorial. He know the intricacies of the land and sea and is just a really nice person to be around for a week. July of 2024 was the wettest July on record for the Juneau area. The storm parade didn't want to abate upon our arrival (nor our departure) and our float plane trip to Angoon from Juneau was delayed by fog for three hours. We were very much wondering if this trip was going to be a repeat of 2022 that saw us only be able to fish for two out the scheduled four fishing days. Luckily I kept watching the webcams in the area and did some meteorologizing that was able to give me hope. Sure enough, the ceiling lifted enough to get us to the lodge by noon and we were out fishing from 1:30pm to 6pm the day of our arrival.   If we based this year's fishing on the poundage we took home, the 50lb/person places us near the bottom of the eight trips in which we've gone to WCL. But this year was very abnormal. Usually the king salmon have exited the area by the end of June. This year we all caught our limit of one "keeper" king (larger than 28") in less than one hour of trying. To put that in perspective we've only caught three total keeper kings in the seven previous years combined! We also caught and released well over 70 "short" kings and several 30"+ kings while targeting silvers. We'd never caught so many kings of any size, ever. The fight was great and made lovely memories, but by the end of the week when our fish boxes were still relatively light I said to everyone "This is fun, but we can't eat memories". Our main target, silver/coho salmon usually show up in large numbers at the end of July. Many years we visit WCL and get limits of silvers (6/ea/day) and the pink salmon are usually caught in huge numbers along with the silvers. But this year the silvers hadn't shown up in big numbers anywhere along Chattham Strait or the outside waters near Pelican and Sitka. We worked very hard to get 16 total silvers for the entire trip! The halibut slot was very restrictive this year (less than 36" or greater than 80") and no-halibut Fridays meant we only fished for halibut on one day. But our friend Charlie had the catch of the week when he caught a 120lb halibut while we were trolling for king salmon! Landing a huge fish like that on light salmon gear was an epic feat! We though we wer snagged on the bottom for a brief second before the line on the reel started peeling-off at a rapid pace. While the fishing was a bit sub-optimal, the whale watching was amazing. We were graces with several pods of humpbacks repeatedly bubble net feeding, and I may have gotten a few photos you can check out in the full photo album :-). Please view the full photo album to see ALL of the amazing things we witnessed on this trip.
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 Here are the photos from our epic three week tour visiting family in New York state and Massachusetts. The theme of this trip was waterfalls, history and family. We started our trip in Buffalo and ended in Boston. Along the way we visited Albany, Hartford, Providence, Boston and Augusta so Z could connect with several state capitols he learned last year in 5th grade. We also stopped at many historically significant sites including revolutionary war battlefields, forts and, well, all of Boston. We even added a few days to our trip so we could visit Acadia National Park over the July 4th weekend. Bar Harbor and the park were beautiful, but crowded and extremely expensive. I've organized the photos and video clips into site-specific folders to make the 800 photos from 22 days a bit less-daunting. Enjoy!
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July 2024
AuthorRyan J Hollister - Geoscience & EnviroSci Educator, Avid hiker, Landscape photographer, WildLink Club Advisor, Central Valley Advocate. |
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