2026-06-13 Shelter Cove with Grandkids

In the summertime the boat trips happen pretty frequently, and it is sometimes difficult to keep up with the blog posts. This is one of those times.

I had a total of 8 family members come into town for about a week and we made 4 separate trips with various combinations of them on board.

I was so busy managing the boat and the fishing gear and the raft and everything else that I gave up on trying to take photos for the blog. However, after they all had left town, I asked them to send me all their photos and videos. They did so, and now I am completely overwhelmed! It's going to take me some time to sort them out and figure out which photos and videos went with which trip, and where we were at the time they were taken.

Now, I have other family members in town, and we are starting more trips with them, so I have very little time to devote to managing the blog.

So, for now I am going to just post a summary about the 4 trips taken with the first group of family, and then hopefully, later in the summer or early fall, when I have more time, I'll go back and fill in with photos and videos from the trips.

The first trip was an overnighter to Shelter Cove in Carroll Inlet, one of my most favorite places to visit. The crew for this trip was my oldest grandson Tyler and his significant other Megan, and my second oldest grandson Bryan and his significant other Lindsay. Tyler and Bryan were just babies when I got the Faraway and they literally grew up on board. It feels strange having them on board now when they are both grown men with jobs and girlfriends.

Here is a map snippet from my Garmin InReach that shows our track for this trip. The area circled near the bottom is where we trolled for salmon. The area marked with an X up near the top is the USFS dock at Shelter Cove in Carroll Inlet where we spent the night.

Amazingly, Tyler caught a just legal size King Salmon within about 5 minutes of dropping our gear! I did manage to find a photo of his fish amongst all the photos & videos I have of their visit.

We spent the evening and the night here at the dock. I cooked spaghetti on the Coleman stove out on the dock and Bryan's SO made the sauce inside in the galley. We had a real nice fire in the fire pit on the dock. Later in the evening they took my old .22 rifle and a bag full of empty cans and bottles and went up to the log sort yard to shoot at them. All in all, it was a pleasant night spent out on the boat.

In the morning when we pulled out, we attempted to pull the 2 crab pots that we had set out in front of the dock. One of the pots was hung up on something on the bottom and we were unable to pull it. I don't recall ever having to leave a crab pot behind because I could not pull it. The other pot had 6 crabs in it and 3 were legal males, which we took home. Later, after we got home, I notified the AK State Wildlife Troopers that I had left the pot there. That's a bummer because it costs a little over $300 to replace the pot, the 150' of line, the 2 buoys, the bait cannister, the hanging bait hook, and the harness that connects the pot to the line.

On the way home we stopped and did a little bottom fishing. Bryan did hook a small halibut but my first swipe at it with the gaff missed and it slipped the hook and got away. I felt pretty bad about that since it turned out to be the only halibut they hooked.

We made it back into the slip at about 4:30 PM after logging about 69 nm for this trip.