Daily Archives: August 21, 2011

This Friday we headed down to Soldotna in Kenai Peninsula and stayed there over night at a motel, on our way to a tiny town of Ninilchik.

Jason and I had been talking about halibut fishing for quite some time, and finally booked our fishing trip with Ninilchik Charters. Friday had been a stormy day on the sea — charters couldn’t even go out, and the weekend started by rain. If I had only known how the sea can be in the aftermath of a storm…

Anyways, we left the motel bright and early, well before 0500. And grabbed some breakfast items at McDonald’s to go. My first (yeah, I don’t care about fast food places) McDonald’s breakfast experience ever was not so great. Coffee tasted simply bad horrible, oatmeal & fruits were tasteless like paper, and a plain biscuit was edible but too greasy. So it was my first and last fast-food breakfast. Luckily we had our own snacks for the boat trip. We made it on time to the fishing charter office, met our captain and headed to the boat launch site. There were four guests on the boat in addition to us.

Boat ride to the fishing spot was bumpy. Seriously bumpy. Jason nor I have never gotten motion sickness anywhere so wasn’t too worried about that even though one of the guys started to look rather pale as soon as we left the boat launching site. The first fishing spot had giant waves — no chances to stay there, and captain decided to follow his Plan B. Ocean wasn’t very calm but it was tolerable. For half of the fishers. All three guys on board got seasick, and one of the girls looked rather pale. I felt so bad for Jason, especially when there was nothing I could have done. I didn’t even have any kind of seasickness medicines on me since didn’t expect him or myself getting sick on the boat. What a horrible wife, right?! Well, next time I will add the motion sickness drugs onto my packing list. Just in case.

However, since he is such a trooper, he kept his chin up, and we had a good time while fishing. The halibut spot was great, everyone on the boat got the limit, and rather quickly. So by noon we were already back on the dry land with the catch. The daily limit for halibut is two per fisher in Alaska. It was definitely an eventful day, and at the end we were heading back home with over 20 lbs of halibut fillets in the cooler.

In addition to great fishing, we also saw a few puffins. Of course when I didn’t have my professional photo gear with me! And one of the girls caught a little shark. The shark was pretty cool, I didn’t even know that there were sharks in Alaskan waters. So despite some rough seas it was a great trip, and we happy to have some tasty fish for the winter.