2025-08-11 Shelter Cove with Tyler & Megan

This was to be the second "consolation trip" after our planned run up to Wrangell to see the bears in Anan Creek was canceled due to weather.

The plan was to do some trolling on the way out, spend the night at Shelter Cove in Carroll Inlet, and then do some bottom fishing on the way back home the next day.

Here is a map snippet that shows where we fished in the Mountain Point area. I was watching the charter boats and occasionally heard them on the radio discussing their catches. I tried to stay in line with where they were fishing. They are out here every day, and they know what they are doing, much more than I do.

Finally, Tyler managed to land a nice Silver. He really wanted to catch a salmon and I'm so glad that he got one.

While landing that fish was nice, it turned out to be the only one we got before we had to pull the gear and head to Shelter Cove.

The run from Mountain Point to Shelter Cove is quite long and it will take several map snippets to show our approximate track. Here is the first, where we leave the Mountain Point area where we were fishing and run up and into the southern part of Carroll Inlet. You have to go through sort of a dog leg to get into Carroll Inlet.

Here is the second part of that run to Shelter Cove in Carroll Inlet.

And the third part.

Here is a more detailed view of just Shelter Cove itself. It is nestled in a little "nook", and you cannot see the dock until you are right in front of it. I circled in blue where the USFS dock is located within the cove.

Carroll Inlet is a dead end. Up at the far Northern end of the inlet is the Swan Lake dam. It is a huge dam operated by SEAPA (Southeast Alaska Power Authority.) You cannot see the dam itself from the water but there is a dock there and several buildings.

We arrived at the Shelter Cove dock in very heavy rain at about 5 PM. There were no other boats there.

Someone has set up what I would call a "hunter's camp" in the small clearing at the top of the ramp. Deer hunting season starts on August 1st and runs until Dec 31st. Hunters like this area because there is a system of logging roads here and they can get on 4-wheelers or motorcycles and hunt the road system.

The camp was quite extensive with several vehicles of various sorts, a large tent, a couple of covered areas for cooking and eating, and lots of gear of various types laying around, like crab pots, fuel, fishing gear, etc. Here are a few photos of the camp.

Tyler and I took the short hike through the woods over to the humpy stream, but the tide was very high, and we could not see any fish in there.

Spaghetti was on the menu for this evening's dinner. I cooked it on my Coleman stove on the back deck. The electric cook top in the galley is kind of "wimpy", and it takes forever to boil a large pot of water, so I usually use the Coleman stove if the weather allows for it.

It was too rainy and wet for a fire on the dock this evening. Tyler and Megan availed themselves of the Starlink WiFi and watched some movies on TV.

In the morning, I was up early, and it wasn't raining so I took a walk for some photos.

I went over to the humpy creek but the only fish I saw was in the mouth of the black bear that I saw just briefly in the creek.

I walked around to the log sort yard and got some good video of a doe along the road. She was unconcerned with my presence as she munched on some greenery.

Once the rest of the crew got up and moving around, I made preparations for departure. We pulled away from the dock at about 10 AM.

It took about 2 hours to get down to the area near Mountain Point where I wanted to bottom fish. Around noon I anchored in about 180' just NW of Cutter Rocks which is near Mountain Point. The blue X shows approximately where we anchored. The weather was nice for a change.

I set both Tyler and Megan up with "mooching" rigs. This is a salmon rod (as opposed to a heavier bottom fishing rod) with a very light 4-ounce lead and a double hook salmon rig with a small whole herring on it. The way to mooch is to very slowly let the rig down to the bottom, and then very slowly bring it back up.

Over the next few hours together we got 5 halibut. None were very large with the largest perhaps about 20 lbs. But they had a lot of fun catching them.

This trip ended well I have to say. The weather was great, and they caught some fish.