Thursday, August 12, 2010

Update from my folks at sea...

From an email Mom sent a couple of days ago. (So you know - Harv is my dad, the Captain. Pepper is my folk's black standard poodle.)

Hope all is going well onshore. I guess inland it's been really hot. We sure hope it cools down, as that heat creates winds out here.

This is day 8 on this trip. So far this summer the weather has been really rotten. Small Craft Advisory always, except on those occasions it's gotten stronger and was blowing Gale force. Big swells, big wind chop.

When weather's like that I think it's like riding down a gravel road in the back of a dump truck. Bouncy & noisy.

Harv was saying today we've not seen sunrise or sunset for two months ... overcast always ... no sun or patches of blue sky. Day just goes from black of night to grey of day and then back to black. Some foggy, foggy days. TODAY, though, it's only blowing 15 or so and we saw a bit of the sky and had a couple of hours of sun!

Before we left the dock both Pepper and Harv wound up in the water. A boat was pumping out its fish hold and created a layer of foamy bubbles on the water and Pepper mistook those bubbles for something solid, I guess. He just stepped right onto them and of course wound up going down thru them.

Harv was getting off the boat and his foot caught on a cleat, twisted his leg and he wound up falling backwards between the dock and the boat. He hit his head HARD on the boat but luckily wasn't knocked out, so he surfaced and a guy on another boat ran over and he and I pulled H. out. Pretty scary. If he'd been knocked out I'm not sure what would have happened.

Fishing's been slow since the beginning of this trip but better the past couple of days. We've been getting some 12 lb fish which are the size we want to take home.

The past couple of days there have been sharks around the boat in the mornings ...a group of 10 footers one day and somewhat smaller ones the next. Harv thinks they were blue sharks. We haven't seen any of those huge Humboldt squid.

A couple of days ago we heard there are big scores about a thousand miles offshore. We pointed our bow that way a couple of times then turned it back. It'd take us a week of day and night running to get there ... with only two of us on the boat, that's pretty exhausting.

If we had a crystal ball & knew the fish would stay there we'd probably go. Since we don't, unfortunately, we're not going, I guess. Some friends took off that direction and we wish them luck ... and wish us luck here also. We're only a hundred or so miles from the coast.

Re: big scores. Since there are only two of us on the boat, and some boats have 4 or more people, I figure a 4-person boat has to catch twice as much as us to be even with us. right? As a friend said to us, "You guys do great for an old man and a midget." I guess he was intending that to be a compliment. :-]

Got a call yesterday and Dad said they'd be in to Ilwaco in a couple of days.

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