To Go or Not to Go – Farther North

August 11

We stayed at Shoal Bay until Sunday morning.  The pink salmon were jumping all over the bay, so I had to try my luck.  I had no luck on Saturday and blamed it on the wrong tackle.  Then on Sunday morning, a family we had met were leaving and they gave me the “hot” lure and I finally caught a small salmon and got it to the net!

Shoal Bay – you gotta love a place with a sense of humor and great views as shown below:

You may not be able to read the last line, but it says, “Twinned with sister city Paris (France)”  

This is the pub.

This is the view.

Sunday morning, we went to Blind Channel Resort for fuel, to do laundry, take showers, and do some grocery shopping.  Whew!  Prices are getting higher the farther north we go!  We spent the night at a place called Beaver Inlet.  There was a beautiful yacht anchored there already and we met those folks the next morning.  The yacht owner lives in Sun Valley, having made his fortune in the coffee business in Seattle – with Starbucks!  Anyway, nice people and we traded them a salmon filet for a couple of Dungeness Crabs – yummy!

On Monday, we decided that the forecast for Johnstone Strait was too windy for us to handle.  We were headed out to Discovery Passage and south to the Octopus Islands.  We stopped at Hemming Bay – a beautiful little cove that we, again, had all to ourselves.  The harbor porpoises were working the area, as were the harbor seals.  The loons were so loud in the morning, they woke us up!  We got to the junction of Discovery Passage, Chancellor Passage, and Johnstone Strait and decided that Johnstone Strait didn’t look that bad, so we hung a right instead of a left!  In other words, we kept heading NW. 

We pulled in at the dock at Port Neville where there was one other pleasure boat and several gillnetters’ boats.  Seems they were opening the sockeye salmon season the next morning for 24 hours.  I chatted up the Canadian Fisheries and Oceans guardian who was in his VERY nice boat at the dock.  Of course, I told him that I used to be a game warden in Idaho and that gave me an “in”.  He was going up the inlet to check on the salmon run and asked if Bill and I would like to go along.  NO question!  He really opened up the throttle on his rigid-hull inflatable! 

Saw some eagles and geese, but no bears.  He showed us some pictographs on the rocks at the site of an ancient native midden:

He was a very nice guy and we learned quite a bit about the salmon fishery from him.

The store at Port Neville was run by the same family from 1894 until 1960.  They finally shut the post office down this past January.  Evidently, this was a thriving logging and fishing community at one time. 

Now there is a caretaker there who shows people around and shares the history of the place.  We ended up staying at the dock for a couple of days, waiting for the winds to calm down in Johnstone Strait.