Day 36 Cannery Cove to Red Bluff Bay

June 25  Red Bluff Bay

We definitely had a good mud hold on our anchor last night. It was a muddy mess on the bow after hauling up the anchor in the morning. My job is to hose down the anchor and the deck and this morning was a challenge. Once on this trip, I had to grab handfuls of mud off the anchor because it was a sticky goo and would not wash off. Always fun.

It was a six and half hour cruise today so we listened to a book on tape which seems to make the time pass more quickly. It is always a treat when we have a wildlife sighting and today we caught sight of a whale in the distance, dolphins surfing our bow and three rather large otters floating along on their backs looking like they did not have a care in the world.

Tossing seas met us in Chatham Channel. We motored through the narrow route to Red Bluff Bay which opened up to deep bays connected by narrow, shallow passages around blind curves created by multiple islets. The depths to our anchorage ranged from 50-300 feet. Our spot for the night was really tucked away and once anchored, again the winds and rain found us.

We were told that in the deeper bays, the shrimping was good, so we prepared our traps with cat food and bait which looks like Kibble dog food. The traps were dropped in depths of 250-300 feet. We were trying to be optimistic when we went back in the morning hoping that our second attempt at shrimping would be more successful than our last catch of 5 prawns. It was not to be. The only prawn we saw was one hanging on to the side of one of our traps. It made a hasty retreat as our trap surfaced.  Drat! It’s a little harder working with shrimp pots because you have 300 feet of line to unwrap and rewrap. But we now have a pot hauler on our skiff (large pulley) that really saves muscle when you have a pot so deep to haul back up.

While getting things ready to lower the skiff and take off with our traps, I looked down into the water and it looked like pebbles to me. I called to David and asked him to check it out. He, too, thought they had to be small rocks. I got the long pike and poked it into the water to see if we hit bottom. Luckily, no. We knew that we were in 50 feet of water but this looked like we were staring down at a rocky bottom. We don’t know what was floating just beneath the surface that got our hearts beating so fast, but it was floating throughout the bay not just beside our boat.

Dave and I are tied in our Cribbage Tournament. He usually runs away with it, but I now see a chance to win it all!