AND THAT'S A WRAP!
After an exhausting but bountiful season, the crew of the F/V Courageous fished it's final day on July 27th. Mike wanted to fish longer, but after several very slow tides, he decided to end the season. Forty fish a day and fighting off hungry seals that eat the fish right out of your net makes it a little easier to call it a season and head back home.
If you thought the fishing season wasn't exciting enough, wait until you hear about the journey home! In order to get back, they battled intense wind, fog, and 12 foot seas. They traveled from Ugashik to Naknek on the 28th, and tied up some loose ends there. The trip back to Homer is not an easy one, and getting up the Kvichak River is the trickiest part. The river is braided with sandbars and is notorious for damaging boats. To add to the challenge, Mike's depth sounder quit working.
He ended up running up river with our friends Lila and Nate on the F/V Selma Lee. They hired a guide that led them through the river, to Iliamna Lake. En route, the saw a bear swimming, and a pod of around 500 beluga whales!
Once they reached Iliamna Lake, the wind kicked up and they had to anchor behind an island for a day. It finally calmed down enough to cross the lake, a 10 hour trip. They had to stop in the middle to anchor again, due to rough weather.
They reached Pile Bay on the 31st, where they waited with 20 other boats to get hauled across a road on a huge trailer, and launched to the other side of the road, into a holding pond that dumps them into Cook Inlet. From there, it's a 16 hour trip to Homer.
Our boat goes around 6-8 knots, and late in the day Sunday, I had a crazy idea to hire a friend of ours to take us into the Inlet in his fast boat to meet Mike, so that we could finish the last few hours of the trip with him. His boat cruises at around 25 knots. Equipped with a set of GPS coordinates from Mike's Garmin inReach (a device that texts from anywhere), we set out into the Inlet (a huge body of water) to find him. We expected to find him after an hour, but had no such luck. I called Mike and asked him to send us his GPS coordinates from the boat GPS, since I knew that would be accurate. Turns out we were around 20 miles north of him! A long ways off. Getting ahold of Garmin is on my long list of things to do, as the inReach is also used as an emergency locator and being 20 miles off doesn't do much good in case of emergency.
After traveling for another hour, we saw two boats that looked like gillnetters. As we approached the first one, we could tell it was him. He had just turned over the wheel to Bhajan, and was going to start packing up. Bhajan saw our boat and said "Mike, there's a little boat approaching, and your family is on board!" We all ran on the deck and Mike was surprised to say the least. Owen had been asleep and was in shock when he saw Mike on the boat!
The crew got off the Courageous and rode to Homer on Forrest's fast boat (they were relived to be going faster, I am sure). We got to Homer around 2am. Whew! What a night.
We are so happy to have Mike and the boat home safe and sound.
Since he's gotten home, we've been able to reflect on the season a bit. It was a tough one. A new boat and fishing new districts. On top of that, our small processor's fishing limits hurt our overall catch quite a bit. We couldn't fish when there were fishing jumping everywhere, and had to sit out two days in during the peak- this is a huge deal for a season that peaks for a week. They also quit buying fish on July 29th, which is fairly early. Mike had hoped to fish longer, but the weather was bad and the crew was done. We'll do things a bit differently at the end of the season next year.
We are extremely grateful to those of you that have preordered and for those that plan to order later this year. On years like this, your business is truly what makes commercial fishing sustainable for our family.
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