No Halibut and Robbed of Shrimp

We went back out on the water today in search of big shrimp and and small halibut.  It was an aboslutly beautfiul day outside.  Blue sky over mountains surrounding the sea.

Our first mission to soak some herring in about 200 feet of water.  The crazy thing was we were only a couple hundred yards off shore and we were already in pretty deep water.  We fished and fished and fished for about 3 hours with a few nibbles here and there.

Without any luck on the halibut end of things we decided to head over to try our luck with the shrimp.  We found our orange buoy floating just off shore.  We started pulling up the 400 feet of line with a pot puller and it came to a halt.  The pots were stuck on the bottom.  Uh-oh…  We pulled and pulled and were only gaining in inches.  The fuse on the pot puller burned out and we were attempting things by hand.  I secured the line while dad went in search of a new fuse.  With a new fuse installed the pot puller  was up and running again which freed up our hands to coil the massive amounts of line.  The pot puller was able to free the ocean floors grip on our shrimp pots and they were soon heading for the surface.  Our first pot empty  :(.  We had five down.  The next pot had 2 measly shrimp inside.  As the third pot came into view we suddenly realized what was causing our misfortune in the shrimping business.

Thats right an octopus was in our pot.  We think he was swimming along and found the shrimp buffet.  Now we can only assume how this went down but we believe it went something like this…..

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2007/08/octostory.mov 320 260]

So when we pulled the pot out of the water here is what we got.

We got him out of the pot and put him in a bucket.  It wasn’t long before he was trying to make is break for freedom.

We took a look at him for a little while and then let him go.

[QUICKTIME http://bbryson.com/bill/files/2007/08/octofree.mov 320 260]

Even though he cleaned out a few of our pots we were able to take some shrimp home.  Here is what one of them looked like.

It was a fun day on the water even though we weren’t very successful with our endevors.  Tomorrow it sounds like my dad and I are going to go do a little flying if the weather cooperates. Then I will be on my way back to Minnesota leaving Valdez around 9:30 PM.