Our boat is not a big boat, it's only 18', only has a 50HP Honda, so that it's legal on the Kenai River with a detune kit.  With our boat we do it ALL!  What we don't have in size we have made up for in equipment.  We carry an inflatable life raft, spare motor, EPIRB and more.  We still have to have the right conditions for an extended trip.  In August it all came together, minimum tides and a low wave forecast with nothing in the way of weather on the horizon.  I knew where the BIG halibut lived, I just needed the right opportunity to seek them and this was it.  The stars had finally aligned. 

It was off to the outer coast of the Kenai Peninsula from out of Homer.  We were joined by our friend Jeff, who had left behind his new wife of one week for some Alaska adventure.  We departed mid-day for Port Chatham.  Port Chatham is a bay full of history; it has an abandoned chromium mine, ruins of a sawmill, deserted falling down cabins and ruins of a large cannery and fish freezing plant.  It has runs of pink salmon so thick you could walk on them at the creek mouth.  Back in it's hey day there was regular steam ship service to Port Chatham.   

To top it off, Port Chatham even has its own Bigfoot stories.  Click here to read more on this subject.

August 13, 2005 - Day 1

The plan was to stop off at Magnet Rock and pick up a dinner fish. We arrived and the tide rips were kicking along with the winds. I dropped a line and ended up hanging the bottom. I lost all my bottom gear trying to pull it off. The waves were steep and the bow scooped into a wave. The bow slowly cleared and we decided to give it up and continue south. The waves improved as we left Magnet Rock. We hugged the shore, past Point Adams, previously the furthest south we had ever been, Elizabeth Island came into view, we continued past Claim Point and into Port Chatham. 

It was time to find a campsite.  The prime protected area had a sailboat sitting in it; we didn’t want to set a camp right in front of them. We checked out the point of a gravel spit, it didn’t feel homey. We headed over toward a cabin we saw on a gravel beach; it was long abandoned with a heaved floor and some kind of stinky animal crap on the floor, the windows and doors were busted and missing. People had signed their names with spray paint inside the cabin. Someone had written “Horny Charlie f***ed Big Foot in this cabin”, helping to keep the Bigfoot rumors I had read about alive.  Bear trails ran all around the cabin, so we decided to leave and went to the cannery ruin beach. The cannery wreckage, with partially buried heat exchangers sticking out of the beach, reminded me of “Planet of the Apes” movie  where they find the Statue of Liberty on the beach. Once again, it didn’t feel right.    We left there and made our home on the shore of the gravel spit. Not much in the way of bear sign there.   We settled into camp.  The ride out had been a little rougher than forecast.  We had picked up lots of spray and water on the way out.  A couple of the sleeping bags had gotten wet.  The beach was absolutely covered in drift wood and soon we had a roaring fire.  I then built a drying rack and in no time everything was dried out.  

August 14, 2005 Sunday - Day 2

Morning came early, no bears visited during the night. We were up around 8:00AM for an 8:30 departure.  We headed straight for the Nagahut Rocks and anchored.  When the anchor hung, we had a full 3 knots of current running under the boat. It was making all of us feel a little queasy. I caught only one fish at this location. The bite was dead here. I found a place called Dora Reef on the chart and we decided to head the additional two miles off shore to the new location. Wow, what a difference, the bite was HOT! The fish kept coming up as 20 lbers, it didn’t matter what I dropped, they tore up salmon heads, picking off every piece of meat on the head. My crew was weak (late night) and finally we started keeping the 20 lbers until we had a limit of them.  Headed back, we saw a small pod of killer whales, cows and calves and got some great video and photos.

We cruised back toward camp.  On the coast of Elizabeth Island we saw salmon jumping, so we started trolling and as we trolled, I gutted all the halibut. Trolling was kind of slow, but we did pick up a nice black bass and an ugly pink salmon. We kept the bass. Back in camp Jeff and I went hiking to the other side of the spit where the sawmill had been.  All the sawmill's buildings had collapsed, there were still piles of huge logs everywhere waiting to be cut and metal debris scattered about the beach. Jeff and I continued into the alder and stumbled on another old collapsed cabin. We worked our way into another set of dilapidated buildings up on the hill side, all very strange.  After icing down the halibut we went trolling in our bay, skunked, we finally gave up and went into a little side lagoon. The pinks were packed in there by the thousands, right to the mouth of the creek. We went back to camp and dropped off Shanna to start on dinner.   

August 15, 2005 - Day 3

Up a little latter this morning, still no bears. We ate breakfast tacos and headed out. The wind was blowing most of the night and the forecast was deteriorating. I headed for the an area called the “mountains”.  The mountains got their name because of a couple of peaks that rise to within 100' of the water surface in an area of 300' depths.  We approached the mountains in crappy seas that went to worse, because the mountains were creating lots of rips.  I did get a bait down and immediately hooked into a halibut. By the time I had him up, Shanna was getting concerned about the seas and as we scooped the bow into a wave, I agreed and off we went. I wasn’t sure where to fish, so we headed for a corner off Elizabeth Island. The prime place I thought we wanted to fish had a boat sitting on it anchored. We pulled up behind him, drifted back and anchored.  The tide was running full bore and we were dropping 4 lb leads to get to the bottom. The bite started off good for the 20 lbers. The fish were in a feeding frenzy, tearing the rubber tail off every lead head jig I dropped.  They shredded them.   I started giving up on big fish so we began keeping a few of the 20 lbers. My crew was complaining about the weight of the lead and wanted to wait to fish until after the tide slowed.  I steadily fished and finally my big break came when I pulled up a 58 lb halibut on a salmon head. Jeff was re-motivated so I offered him a fish head and  he accepted.  Soon he was hooked up with a fish that didn’t budge and was taking line. Jeff worked him up and when he came into view I couldn’t believe my eyes, BIG!  I harpooned the monster and she thrashed..  The kicker motor was knocked around against its stops and out of the water as the powerful fish beat it with its tail.   I decided not to shoot, instead I used my baseball bat and cut its gills for our safety.

Back to camp we went to eat some lunch and pack up, and load everything.  The boat wouldn’t get on step, so we had to fire up the kicker and run it all the way home. The waves did nothing but improve all the way in until we were in flat water in Cook Inlet. The fish weighed in on the derby scale fully bled and many hours after being caught at 155 lbs. We paid to have it filleted back in Homer by Damian the resident fish cleaning guy, $1 per fish; plus tips of course.

This fish was no record, but it was almost double the size of our largest fish in the boat to date.  This halibut was 1/3 the length of our boat.  To put it lightly, we were excited!  At the dock, everyone coming back from charters wanted their picture taken with OUR fish!  On the way home we saw the editor of the Alaska Outdoor Journal  Klondike Kid, he had us send in a photo and a short story.  He posted us to the front page of his website.  Back in Sterling I sent out the following e-mail to friends and family:

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