I finally got to do some fishing. My boys and I went out into the Pacific Ocean from Chetco Bay, which is the harbor in Brookings, Oregon. We only caught a couple of blacks, but that was enough for dinner since they were pretty good size.

The weather was great and water calm, so I let the boys jet around at about 25 to 30 mph. There are lots of sea stacks and underwater rocks here where fish lurk, so we covered a lot of territory both south and north of the harbor. I was more interested in how the boat performed this trip, since the gas in its tank was a couple of months old. That’s how long it had been since I last went fishing.

The biggest fish got away. It was a large black Robby hooked. Jake asked him if he needed the net and he said no, then lost him as he tried to pull him on board. “I didn’t know he was that big!” Robby complained afterward. Oh well! We used the net after that.

We stayed out about four hours. I caught nothing, but lost four rigs on the submerged rocks. Jake caught the biggest fish, a nice black rockfish. We bleed them as soon as we catch them by slitting their throat and gills. That way the meat tastes very good.

When we got back into shore, some fishermen were busy cleaning the tuna they caught. One guy went out 46 miles to catch them, and he did it in a river boat a lot smaller than mine. I’ll have to study the weather forecasts pretty thoroughly before I go offshore 46 miles with a river boat, especially with my three boys. If I had another boat to go out with me, maybe I’d do it on a good forecast. You never know when something can go wrong, and I don’t feel like having to call the Coast Guard to bring me back in.

When we got back it took us about an hour to hose the salt off the boat and flush the engines with fresh water. Those are essential tasks for a boat that goes in salt water. I put the prop of my small motor right in a barrel of fresh water and run it for 10 minutes. My big 200-hp has a hose adapter, and I run water through that for another 10 minutes.

The boys cleaned their own fish. That’s Mom’s rule. They are very good at it and enjoy the process. We froze the heads for later crab fishing, and we gave some fish guts, plus some leftover anchovy bait, to the chickens.

Lenie then made a nice dinner from the blacks, complemented by string beans and a cucumber from the garden.

Should we do an e-issue?

We’re investigating the possibility of bringing back the e-issue. The technology is now available that presents the magazine in pretty much the same format as the print issue, but it’s memory intensive, taking between 60 and 70 megs per issue. That means the e-issue would take too long to download for anyone with a dialup connection, and it is even kind of inconvenient with my high-speed satellite connection. Maybe some of you reading this could give me some feedback (just click on the COMMENTS button below) on what kind of internet connection you have, since it appears this new technology is really only suited to people who have a cable connection.

We’re only thinking about an e-issue at this point. It all depends on cost, how we can recover the cost, how much work is involved, etc. I’d appreciate input form anyone who has an idea how we can do this. In the old days we did have an e-issue done in pdf format, but we had lots of piracy problems so I don’t think I want to go there again. The new technology makes theft of the magazine e-issue much more difficult.

An e-issue would obviously expand our readership overseas, since it is now prohibitively expensive to send a print issue to an overseas address.

Share or Bookmark

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Fishing, Publishing BHM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.