Well, it’s midway through week two, and for the first time in 9 days, the boats weren’t full of rainwater. But that’s not all… upon waking up this morning, every resident of 153 Fish Camp beheld a strange, somewhat terrifying sight in the sky. “It’s like…like the sky is… on fire!” remarked one camper, his face white from either sheer horror or simply the absurd lack of vitamin D. Reports of fainting have surfaced, however these are assumed to be onset from sleeping (or, lack of such) in cabins with practiced snorers, not from this strange phenomenon.

Yes. The sun came out.

It’s finally warm again! Maybe we’re just a little spoiled with our water tank overflowing all day long, but we all are sure are enjoying the sunshine. Well, as much of it as we can see anyway, when we aren’t sticking our heads into the freezers, plying for more storage space. That’s right… our freezers are nearly full, which means the fish are in hot and heavy! The tides this week are all negative, meaning that the water level drops quite considerably, transforming a section of the bay out front into little more than a small canal. The salmon shoot up and down this channel in huge schools, and some of these guys have been limiting out in record time with snagging hooks. What’s better, is that nearly all of these fish are bright silver, fresh from the ocean, and biting like crazy! Just tonight, some of our guys went out with spinners and had 2 triples and 2 doubles all in just a couple hours. It is amazing fishing, thank the Lord.

Believe it or not, I’ve been so busy this week that I’ve forgotten to take pictures! I’ll get some on here in the next post.

Two halibut trips have been out so far this week. The first one boated 3 halibut, and the second caught shark, cod, and rockfish. The boat has been working great! However, we are having problems with the lower unit of the 200 hp outboard on the back grinding while trying to shift into gear. To remedy this problem, we just start the boat in forward gear, and never take it out. This actually works quite well… in the rare occasion where we need to use reverse we can drop down the kicker and get around nicely. All in all, though, the boat has been great so far, and, Lord willing, will continue to serve our campers for years to come.

Thanks for reading. Pictures will be up soon!

 

Well, as you have probably noticed, I haven’t made a post for a while. Sorry! I’ve been pretty busy with fish camp things since Mark (my dad) has been in Anchorage. But, he’s back now, so hopefully I’ll have time to make regular posts again. 🙂

The first camp went very well! The fish definitely did not want to be caught… it was tough fishing, and the weather didn’t really help things, but overall it was a great week, and the campers managed to pull in 111 silvers for the total count.

Halibut fishing was long and slow… the guys really had to work to get them, and the boat was out 4 times throughout the week, but every group caught some. The last group only caught 2, but they still came home with a story to tell:

They did it again! Matt and Jake (if you remember them from last year’s post), along with Ted Downs, brought up another monster halibut, this one weighing in at 206 lbs! It was a long, hard fight, and the halibut was only hooked by a thread, but they still managed to heave this sucker over the side, boating the second largest halibut caught in the history of 153 Fish Camp!

Because they got so much meat off of the big one, the guys from the last halibut trip graciously donated half of a smaller halibut they had caught to the Friday Night Fish Fry! Thanks guys!

Remember how we were praying for rain? Well… we got it. Lots of it. It has been raining nonstop for the last 5 days. I guess we should’ve put a time limit in the prayer somewhere! Thank you Lord for the rain, and for the full water tank.

Because of the rain, everyone stayed inside for most of Friday. The fire was going, the pinochle cards were out, and everybody had a great time.

One thing that wasn’t hard to catch was crab!

Not everything went completely smooth though. Despite the rain, we still ran out of water one time! We also lost two of our Tohatsu motors due to water in the gas. It took three days to get them fixed, so for a while the guys had to paddle.

All in all, though, it was a great week. A little light on the fishing, but everything else was fantastic. Thanks guys!

Here’s the group photo:

Top row, left to right: Dave, Arney, Floyd, John, Pete, Tom

Bottom Row: Matt, Jake, Richard, Ted, Luke, Gary, Dan, John.

Thanks for a great week!

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