Time for a quiet moment
By lunch the cold and cloudy weather had me shivering. We stopped on another sweeping corner in light rain, the mist taking the beauty from the landscape. I immediately put on my rain coat for
more warmth, I think it was the first time that I had used it since starting the trip. The rain continued to fall as we ate lunch making it a cold miserable affair. We shivered whilst eating our noodles and in an effort to try to keep warm we paced up and down the shore. It was such a pleasure to finish lunch and get back on the water and paddle again to get some warmth back into our bodies.
We continued rounding the long sweeping bend in cold cloudy weather, but by the time we finished rounding it, it was brilliant sunshine. A large shallowing sand bar at Dog Tooth Bend had us paddling a lot further than we would have liked and being a little fed up we decided to have another quiet moment and drift. It was great, there were no mozzies, no gnats and a warming sun and it felt like paradise again. It didn’t take much to make us happy.
Our quiet moment had to come to an end, so we paddled on hoping that the next left hand corner, which was a sharp ‘U’ bend before Pilot Station, wasn’t affected by sandbars. Thankfully when we approached the corner it was deep, so we cut it, no extra paddling this time. Some people in a fishing boat ahead had just thrown out a net. We paddled towards them and within minutes they were dragging the
net back in. It seemed too short a time to catch any fish but as we got within earshot they shouted to us, “Would you like a fish?” What a question! We berthed beside them in no time!!
There were two men and a woman from the fishery department collecting stock data. The women told us that they put the net out for eight minutes, and in that time they hauled in fifteen good sized fish.
She went on to say, “This is nothing. You should be here when the fish are really running”.
She handed over a good sized Chum Salmon. We thanked her and I popped it in a green garbage bag and put it between my legs. We were so excited about having a feast we paddled like Olympic paddlers towards the nearest beach to fillet it. As we jumped out of the canoe, the mud under our feet moved
like a giant waterbed. If we stood still, it felt as though we would sink out of sight. We walked across the wobbling mud to the dry sand where a log was just waiting for Ed to use it as a filleting board. Ed was in his element, a keen fisherman and a lover of fine foods, and without question he was eager to accept his role as the expedition fish gutting and fillet specialist. With a big grin on his face he placed each fillet neatly in our cooking pot to cook later when we stopped for the
night.
