2025-06-04 W Behm Canal Trip

The mechanic finished putting my engines back together on Tuesday and the weather looked decent so on Wednesday morning I took off for a couple days out on the boat.

I pulled out at about 7 AM on Wednesday morning in overcast and cloudy weather, but there was no rain.

Here is my route for this trip. The area circled in blue is where I stopped to fish for a few hours.

I stopped out in front of Naha Bay for some bottom fishing, hoping to catch a halibut (or two.)

Check out the area circled in blue.

The depths noted are in feet. As you can see the spot is between 234 and 156 feet deep, but the area all around it is over 1000 feet deep. So, this is a pinnacle that comes up from about 1200 feet deep to only a couple hundred feet. Fishing lore (and experience) says that halibut like to come up to pinnacles like this to feed. I have gotten many nice halibut here over the years, but not recently.

When I am by myself, I can no longer handle the "deep" anchor. It is not on a winch so it needs to be pulled with the buoy pull method and since I've gotten officially old, I can't do that by myself any longer. But fortunately, this day the weather was extremely calm, and I just drifted over the top of this halibut hole and fished. Of course, the boat still drifts a little with the tide even when it's not windy, so I did have to reposition the boat a few times during my stay here.

I stayed here for several hours, but all I managed to catch were a few sharks.

Some portions of these may be edible, but I have never kept them. Some guys I know actually mutilate them before releasing them because they are considered a nuisance fish, but I don't do that. I try to injure them as little as possible when taking the hook out. I have been told that sometimes these schools of sharks extend for miles. It does seem that once you get one, you end up getting more. We call these "dogfish" sharks, but I don't know if that is a scientifically accurate name or just a local name.

In any case after staying on this spot for a few hours in stunningly beautiful weather and not catching any halibut I decided it was time to move on.

I headed for Marguerite Bay in Traitors Cove, thinking that I might do some more bottom fishing near the entrance. But when I got there the wind had picked up and I could no longer drift fish like I had been doing earlier so I decided to just go in for the night.

At the entrance to Traitors Cove there is a small island which is mostly rock. Sometimes there are seals hanging out there. They are camouflaged so well it is sometimes hard to even tell if they are there - you have to look closely. This day they were there so I lingered for a few minutes at the entrance and got some photos.

I got tied up to the dock without any issues. There were no other boats at the dock. However, there was one boat anchored up very near the dock. It was named the Odyssey, registered in Anacortes, WA. I kept a close watch on it all during my stay and never saw any signs of life aboard. However, when it got dark the anchor light came on. And in the morning the anchor light was turned off, so I know someone was aboard.

I took a short walk up the logging road, but not very far. I saw a new addition to the US Forest Service cabin which is just up the road - a shower stall out on the porch! I couldn't really discern how or where the source of water was, but it is definitely a new addition to this USFS facility.

I was very surprised to see some very fresh bear "scat" on the road this close to the dock. There are many bears around, of course, but we don't usually see them this close to the USFS cabin or to the dock. There is a bear and fish viewing platform about a mile or so up the logging road. But this early in the summer there are no fish in the river yet so there are no bears there. Later in the summer tourists will be flown in and driven up the road in vans in order to go down to the bear & fish observatory for bear viewing.

The skunk cabbage is in full bloom at this time of the year. They get huge. Before the salmon are in the creeks the bears dig these up and eat the roots.

It was kind of a quiet afternoon and evening at the dock there. I had a fire in my fire pit and enjoyed that for a couple of hours before the rains returned and I had to retreat to the boat.

While I was enjoying my fire a small metal boat stopped at the dock. It was a young man from Petersburg named Wooly that was working on the repairs to the trail and the dock at the Naha. He had run up in the evening just for some diversion from the job. We had a nice chat by the fire.

I did see a couple of ducks swim by seemingly not bothered by the rain.

I had a quiet night and got some good sleep, even though the rains came in hard.

In the morning, I stowed all the gear and got the boat ready and pulled out about 8:15 AM.

I had thought I might do some more bottom fishing across on the other side near the entrance to Port Stewart, but it just wasn't calm enough to fish without anchoring. So, I just headed into the anchorage. Port Stewart is directly across Behm Canal from Marguerite Bay, just a few miles away.

For the most part Port Stewart is very shallow, but the little nook on the right which is circled in red is the only place deep enough for a boat like mine. I have anchored in here many times.

I got safely anchored with no problems.

There is a big sailboat that has been anchored in here for at least a couple of years that I am aware of. He has a small section of dock anchored there as well. It is covered in all kinds of junk and miscellaneous gear. There are a couple of small skiffs tied on as well. The deck of the sailboat is completely covered in gear. On previous trips here I have seen a guy come out from time to time, but on this trip, I saw no activity at all. At night there were no lights on, so I assume it is abandoned. It is set up very close to shore, so it does not impact my ability to anchor in this little nook.

I launched my raft and prepped and set my two crab pots in this little cove. I have gotten crab in here before but never very many.

I spent the rest of the day and the afternoon hanging out on the boat doing boat chores and working on my laptop using the Starlink WiFi. There may have been a short nap in there sometime as well.

After dinner I went out in the raft and pulled the crab pots. There were a few that were too small to keep but I did end up with two "keepers."

I filled my big white cooler on the back deck with sea water and put the crabs in there. I have read that you need to cook the crabs very soon after butchering them because toxins build up in them if you let them sit before cooking them. So, if I can't cook them right away, I usually keep them alive in the cooler.

I had a pleasant evening on board. I have WiFi so I can get Netflix movies on the TV, but I didn't even turn it on this trip. I kept busy with my iPad and my laptop and boat chores.

I sacked out about 10 PM. It was a bit windy, and the boat was horsing around on the anchor, but I wasn't at all concerned as I have anchored in here many times and the anchor has never dragged.

When I am on the anchor at night, I always leave the GPS on so I can keep track of the position of the boat. It has an anchor drag alarm that can be set that will alert if the boat moves outside of a set radius. I don't use that because I have learned that even in calm weather the boat moves enough on the anchor that the alarm is constantly going off in the night. Sometimes I set the shallow water and deep-water alarms so that if the boat ends up in water that is either too shallow or too deep it will alert, but this night I did not set these alarms. Just an oversight on my part.

The last few nights that I have been out I started a new practice - I play Apple Music playlists almost all night.

At my age I get up often in the night to relieve myself. After I sacked out the winds came up and the boat was moving around a lot. I was aware but not particularly concerned as I trusted my anchor gear.

I got up about 1:15 AM to hit the bathroom and I noticed that the boat had moved from the center of the cove to the very edge. I was sitting in about 40' of water when I should have been in closer to 60', depending on the stage of the tide. The wind was blowing a good 15 - 18 knots, with light rain, and of course total darkness.

This is what the GPS was showing.

This was concerning, to put it lightly. The blue area is very shallow, and I was very close to it. The wind was still at about 15 - 18 knots, with light rain.

This situation could not be ignored, and I had to act.

The first thing I did was to start the engines so that I would at least be able to move quickly if I needed to.

The raft had only been partially put away the night before. The motor and oars were off, but it was still sitting in the water. So, the next thing I did was to hoist the raft up into its vertical position so that if/when I had to move it was not in the way.

The GPS image implies that the boat is facing a certain direction, but I know from experience that when the boat is not moving forward that is deceptive. The boat could actually be pointing in any direction, and the GPS would still show that image.

I have a powerful handheld spotlight so I would from time to time go out onto the foredeck and use the spotlight to locate the shorelines so that I knew which way the boat was actually facing.

When the anchor is in the process of being pulled there is a brief time when the anchor is not holding the boat in position while you haul in the last portion of the anchor chain. If you have another person on board, they can be at the helm and can move the boat if needed. However, when I am alone and pulling the anchor, I cannot both be pulling the anchor and maneuvering the boat. So, I was very hesitant to try to haul the anchor in the dark when the wind was still blowing and the boat was sitting so very close to shallow water.

I decided patience was my best approach here. Watching the GPS I could tell that the anchor was indeed still holding, even if it had actually dragged earlier. The depth wasn't changing much even though it was still about an hour and half to low tide.

I let the engines run, got everything ready to go as much as possible, and then just kept checking and rechecking my position relative to the shore. I knew from being out the night before that with the moon in the stage that it was that it would be light enough to see by about 3:30 AM. So, I just tried to be patient and wait it out.

When 3 AM came around I could see the surface of the water and the shoreline pretty well without the spotlight, so it was time to act. The winds had died somewhat so the boat shouldn't move that much once the anchor was no longer holding it in place.

I got everything ready to go as much as possible and then pulled the anchor as quickly as possible, keeping a close eye on the shoreline. The anchor winch only operates at one speed and sometimes it seems to move so slowly.

But I did get the anchor up without any issues and I got the boat moved out into a little deeper water.

My GPS on the flybridge still showed my track from when I entered the cove. So, even though I could see pretty clearly by now I went up on the flybridge and slowly and carefully navigated out of the cove without any issues.

Crisis averted!

If you go out as often as I do eventually some issues will arise. You just have to have a cool head, think it through, know your boat and your equipment and what it's capable of, and make good decisions. I lost a little sleep, but other than that, no harm done.

I am still unclear on whether the anchor actually dragged, or it just repositioned with the varying and somewhat strong winds. When I got back into my stall, I noticed that there was a considerable amount of black sticky mud on the anchor. Seeing that I suspect that the anchor had indeed held, it was just that the strong winds in varying directions moved the boat over to the side of the cove.

I made my way back to town without incident, arriving at my slip at about 7:40 AM.

I logged 65 nm for this trip.