Starting To Head S

Saturday, July 18. Day 14.

We had now reached the "zenith" of our 2009 trip and it was time to slowly start heading back.

Woke to clear blue skies and a brisk NW wind. For most of the night it was very peaceful. We had another very lazy morning. I made a 'scramble' of potatoes, already cooked/left-over weisswurst sausages, peppers, and eggs. It was good. After breakfast we went over to check the prawn traps in Sidney Bay. In one prawn trap - the larger one - we had 19 very large Spot prawns. Not as many as we hoped, but still better than 13. In the other prawn trap - the smaller one - we had 24 smaller prawns - a mix of Spot prawns and Coon Stripes. How strange. The large trap had large prawns, the small trap had small prawns. We got large prawns in the small trap just a few days ago so it wasn't a matter of size. The other thing was that they were set only about 100 yards apart. Oh well, prawns are prawns and at least we got more than 13.

Next we went to check the crab pots and we got a crab! Kim felt sorry for it and wanted to let it go, but I said, "No way! I'm keeping him. Besides that he's a nice sized crab." The other pot was empty. One crab is better than none, and it erased the goose egg on my crab fishing this year.

We returned to the Independence, stowed all the pots, and weighed anchor at 1123. We came out of Beaver Inlet and Loughborough Inlet into Chancellor Channel and rode the last of the flood into our anchorage just off of Greene Point Rapids, or what I call Greene Point Cove. We're anchored in 37' of water at high neap tide. There's a sailboat anchored about 50 yds E of us. We dropped anchor at 1315.

At 1430 we Zipper'd over to Blind Channel Marina to get Zipper gas, liquor, ice and a few other things. It was a short trip over and back.

For dinner we enjoyed a shrimp Pad Thai along with some fresh basil from our "garden." The wind is very brisk from the W, with a few gusts that must be over 15 kts, maybe even 20 kts. Skies are sunny with a few clouds.

Nm: 10.3 Avg. speed: 5.6 kts. Time: 1:52 Hours: 2.0 Ending hours: 5897.1