Joe Cove and Shoal Harbor

Hello and welcome back! In the last blog post we had enjoyed a break in the rain at Booker Lagoon. This post starts with us leaving Booker Lagoon, bound for Joe Cove. The maps below will show you our route in red.

Our travels can be seen in red. The distance we traveled between Booker Lagoon and Shoal harbor is approximately 18.2 nautical miles which took us about 5 hours.

Video highlights from Joe Cove and Shoal Harbor

After two great days in Booker it was time to leave. In order to exit Booker Lagoon you need to traverse the narrow inlet at slack tide and when it was time for us to leave the fog had set in thick. We cautiously and slowly made our way through a tangle of islands. How people did this stuff without chartplotters and GPS is a mystery to me.

Due to the fog we opted to make a short sail over to Joe Cove, resetting our shrimp trap and crab trap on the way in. At this point we are starting to get a little smarter about fishing- why make a separate dinghy trip to set traps when you can set them from the mothership en route to the anchorage? We pulled into Joe Cove, finding this anchorage empty of boaters as well... cruising the Broughtons in September is ok by us!

Evening tour on the dinghy

Jenny on our evening tour

We fished and relaxed in Joe Cove setting our second crab trap by dinghy after we had caught some fish to bait it with. We probably could have stayed another night in Joe Cove but we were too excited to check our shrimp and crab pots we had set on the way into the cove. On our way out of Joe Cove we pulled our pots and boy howdy we hit the jackpot!

Our crab trap had a large male dungeness crab and a large red rock crab! That's dinner right there! And the shrimp pot.... FILLED WITH SHRIMP! OMG it felt like we won the lottery! The pot had 130 shrimp in there!! Wooo! Once the shrimp trap was up, we continued on our way. It's nice pulling the pots from Maya because then we can clean up the lines, and stow the traps all while we are underway. Those tasks take an good amount of time so if we do that while we are motoring to our next anchorage it's like we are multitasking.

Look at that fresh shrimp!

That's a lot of food!

From Joe Cove we headed towards Echo Bay and Shoal Harbor. En route we passed the Fox Group of Islands. Seeing that it was dead calm and there were lots of pretty islands around we decided to do something we've never done before.... fly the drone while underway. Scary! Anywho, you can see some of the shots below and in the video clips. What is not shown is the perfect landing aboard Maya while moving- not easy to do! Maybe there's a future for me as a helicopter pilot..... or maybe I'll stick with boating.

Here we are traveling through the Fox Island Group

Maya moving slow by steady

We continued through the channels and arrived at Echo Bay. We threw out the shrimp pot into deep water and then made our way to a deserted Shoal Harbor- another anchorage all to ourselves! The sun even came out! With the amount of rain we had seen on our trip it was so nice to see the sun.

Our boat is great for sunny days, however since we don't have any sort of cover in our cockpit makes things a bit uncomfortable when the weather is crappy. If we have bad weather at anchor it basically means we are stuck inside. And if we are underway we are wet. A very popular style of boat up here is the Pilothouse. That style of boat has a cabin that kind of sticks up and has windows all around- that allows for the captain to drive the boat from inside... while wearing slippers. We love Maya, but these rainy and windy 50 degree days have us dreaming about a pilothouse. We have plans this winter to create shelter for us in the cockpit by way of an arch of some kind in the back and some sort of canvas enclosure. I plan on continuing the blog posts through the winter so I'll detail that then.

Fishing in Shoal Harbor

Jenny filleting her big greenling

ANYWAYS! This area has quite a bit of history- logging, fishing, and native people. Just around the corner from our anchorage in Shoal Harbor is Billy's Museum. We made a short dinghy trip over to the museum and met Bill himself! Bill is an 83 year old guy who has lived in the area his whole life. He has seen incredible changes throughout time and is the unofficial historian of the area. He has written several books detailing the characters, and happenings of the area. We purchased two of his books and devoured them- it's so cool reading about all the rich history of the area as we are traveling through. And after reading these books, let me just say that logging back in the day was absolutely insane. Guys would go out into the deep wilderness by themselves and be cutting down massive trees. The stories in the books are just insane. Book details below if anyone is interested.

Billy and Jenny

So we got to the museum and met Billy. And he gave us a tour of the museum where he has all the items he has found beachcombing in the area. Everything from old native tools, beads that first explorers of the area traded with, among a million other things. We were the only people there so we got a personal tour through all the buildings. It was very nice to meet Bill and the museum was very interesting.

Post museum field trip we weren't feeling motivated to move the boat anywhere so we decided to stay another night. The sun was shining so we spent the rest of the evening fishing with Jenny pulling in the biggest fish of the trip. We didn't have a scale, but it was probably an 8 pound greenlin (looked like a scuplin). That fish fried up nicely and provided us with a ton of crab bait which we put to work right away. Fresh fish and sunshine made for a great evening.

A float plane buzzed us!

Pretty cool!

At this point of the trip it had rained a bunch of days in a row and any sunshine we got we cherished. We had gotten a break in the weather at Shoal Harbor and were hopeful for more sunny days coming. Unfortunately, the next morning it was pouring rain again. The storm continues.... in spite of the gloomy, wet weather we decided to explore a nearby inlet- Simoom Sound.

Thank you again for stopping by and reading about our adventure. Sorry this post was a little light on the photos- I think we were focusing a bit more on the video side of things. There will be more photos in upcoming blogs.

As always, please feel free to leave a comment or a question. Cheers.