After three long days paddling, we sat down on the beach to take a day off. I tried to use some of the time to go fishing, but never caught anything. I got a few nibbles and discovered that some fish had eaten all the plastic tentacles off my squid-like lure. I switched to another lure but something REALLY BIG grabbed it and snapped the line instantly. I switched back to the nibbled lure and improvised the missing tentacles with a piece of kelp. While trolling the line behind the kayak I got a bite with that rig and pulled in some sort of mackerel. It slipped off the hook before I could get it on board. Unlike the day before, I could not see schools of fish in the water even when it was calm enough to see the bottom. Most of the day the wind prevented me from seeing into the water anyway. I have heard that the fish don’t bite on windy days, and this seemed to confirm that.
The wind was blowing from the north all morning, so I paddled into the wind to get back to the “ship rock” area. I brought my diving gear and put on full wetsuit, booties, fins, hood, and mask (I left my gloves back at camp by mistake). I had made myself a “rock belt”: A divers weight belt with nylon pouches instead of lead weights. Before I got in the water I filled up the pouches with the densest rocks I could find. This worked remarkably well, and I was able to stay down near the bottom as long as I cared to hold my breath. On the surface I had a lot of positive buoyancy and felt reasonably safe. The 3mm wetsuit wasn’t quite up to the 60 degree F water and I got pretty cold swimming around. Under the surface, the strange rock formations continued and it was an interesting place to explore. I poked my fishing spear at a few fish and got the impression I could probably get one if I tried long and hard enough. I managed to break one rock scallop off a rock with my hands. But when I opened it up later it had about 3cc’s of meat in it, not worth the trouble. It occurred to me after a while that I was 100 kilometers from civilization, two kilometers from my friends back in camp, four meters under water with a bunch of rocks tied around my waist. Totally insane. I headed back to camp without doing any more diving.
