Baker Inlet to Kumealon Inlet

Just like coming in to Baker Inlet, you have to time Watts Narrows when leaving. Our choices were 8:44am (low water), 3:19pm (high water), or 8:41pm (low water. We went with the afternoon option. The journey to Kumealon Inlet would only take an hour and a half, not counting stopping to pull up our shrimp pots. I had mapped out the timing from weighing anchor to pulling both shrimp pots and getting to Watts Narrows close to 3:19pm. We needed to be underway by 2:00pm to have a buffer.

I am always tempted to fish at low tide, so I convinced Don to go out with me and see if the bite was on. Well, it wasn’t, but someone said that is why they call it fishing. We keep pulling up these slimy sacs of something. Need to do some research and find out what they are.

Back to the boat we went for breakfast and down time. We had eggs, potatoes, and smoked pork belly. We need to use up our potatoes and garlic before heading back into the U.S.

At 2:00pm we warmed up the boat, weighed anchor, and set off for shrimp pot #1. This is the first time we’ve left our pots overnight for shrimp. We would never do that in the San Juans, but I guess it works here. Success! Between the 2 pots, we hauled in 41 spot prawns (some of the largest we’d ever seen), 8 coon shrimp, and a variety of other critters. Four strange tiny crabs had made their way in, as had a sea urchin and a hermit crab. The hermit crab was out of his shell, but his shell was big enough to be stuck in the shrimp pot, too. We put him in a bucket of sea water with his shell and sure enough he made his way back inside. When they are out of their shell they look like a sea scorpion. We did some googling on the strange small crabs to make sure they weren’t the invasive European green crab…even though the weren’t green. Come to find out, they were “”graceful decorator”” crabs. There were 3 males and 1 female. We let all the extra creatures go and made our way back out to Grenville Channel for a quick trip to Kumealon Inlet.

Kumealon has an outside anchorage, but we wanted to stay at the head of the inlet and hoped to be able to get into the adjoining lagoon with our dinghy. You have to be very careful in this inlet and its anchorages because there are rocks everywhere. After we were happy with our spot for the night, we watched rocks uncover one by one as the water levels receded.

I cleaned the shrimp, which is a bit of a gruesome process, but must be done. Stop reading the rest of this paragraph if you don’t want to know. To ready the shrimp for the pan, refrigerator, or freezer, you twist their heads of and swish the rest of the body in salt water to get rid of any remaining guts. Don cleans the crabs.

Nothing beats fresh spot prawns for dinner! Well, except maybe fresh ling cod. That is a hard call.

After dinner, I convinced Don to take the dinghy over to the lagoon. I thought we might catch slack water for an entry and further exploration, but that was not the case. Lots of raging water and foam told a different tale.

Tomorrow we will journey to Prince Rupert where we will get some fuel for our crossing into Alaska. We may pick up a few items from the store, but plan to do most of our provision in Ketchikan when we get there on TUESDAY!

Still can’t believe we are doing this. God is so good to us. We are blessed beyond measure.