Only three boats from here went for halibut today. Maybe it was the wind? I would not have gone except for the fact that it was my day off, so.. Gage decided it would be a better day to go truck shopping, and at a couple of times I was jealous. I hate fishing in the wind. It's more work and less fun. Well, successful fishing can be more work. My story: I couldn't catch bait to save my life in the hole behind Pelican Point. I saw lots of bait but they wouldn't bite. So, butt hurt, emotionally devastated, I ran back to the red barn to start a troll. It was good times for five minutes, then I ran into the weed. Holy crap. There were uncountable wads of eelgrass mixed with mermaid (witch's?) hair all over on the East side. I went West, running gear and clearing lines. Oh, this is why Gage gets so bitchy when the water's weedy! That makes so much more sense. I thought that moody teenager thing just stuck. To be fair, clearing fouling crap off of the gear sucks a lot. 

    But I caught one short and one keeper in front of Laird's Landing, 22 feet of water. Both on flukes under hootchies close behind dodgers. But then I saw the sardines. I almost filmed them, so you could see what boiling sardines look like. But I was trying to catch them, so I was distracted. Look at films of bluefin boiling. It's like that, but tinier. Once you see it you'll  not forget. Under the boiling 'dines were black out the meter schools of 'dines, and they bit. I caught seven and headed back to Hog, for the low tide was soon to turn. 

  Just before the turn I made a drift over the bar off of Pelican Point, and no sooner than I got all my lines in , bam! Hookup! And then, a second hookup! "Stripers!" I thought. "Leopard sharks!", it turns out. Big ones, but not halibut or stripers, so away they went, as did I. Back to Hog Island proper went I, and there I had three bites in three "drifts", the third one actually sticking to the hooks so I could go home about 11:00. Before leaving, I went over to John Cooper, the only other boat in the area, and told him what just happened. He had one in the box from Marshall, too, but after no bites at Hog he decided that, for one, he was lucky not to hook leopard shark, and for two, he'd try over closer to Hog. I heard later that they caught three more on sardines (and lost a few as well) by Hog. Their three largest came from Hog. My largest came from Marshall. The other boat from here fished Hog, then Marshall, and caught nothing. So. There's fish. And there's not. Your results may vary.

   In other news, Dungeness crabbing comes to a close in a few days (July 1, NO MAS) but the season has already come to a reality close. Normally the crabbing picks up at the end of the season, but this year, well, not so much. Apparently the crab that were in the bay and sustaining a season earlier this year never got a recharge. Crabbing kinda sucks. But, the Dungeness crabbing can be no better than it is now after Sunday, when Dungeness closes until the first Saturday in November. So, it can only get better!