Prince Rupert
And some clever quip...
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Prudhomme Lake
Prudhomme Lake seems like it was made for
people on road trips. It's 20 minutes east of Prince Rupert
and tiny - 24 camp sites. It's on a beautiful little lake
but quite primitive - hand pumped water, no sani-station, no
trails and beach access is quite tricky. We met the camp
attendant (employed by BC Parks) and apparently this is the
wettest campsite in BC. He is actually from Smithers and
this was his summer job. Like other BC Parks, there would
normally be a lot of international tourists visiting and a lot of
locals using this camp site as a summer camp. This year, it
was almost exclusively locals. The job was pretty
reasonable, but he was expected to take camp fees, keep the place
tidy and enforce quite hours. He did a superb job.
We had a few days planned for Prince Rupert. Our first day
was a fishing trip! Our kids have talked about fishing lots
before, but they haven't had much luck doing it. We got a
sports fishing charter for the day and met at the dock at
6am. A five am start was available, but we didn't have a
huge fridge so if we missed a few fish, we were okay with that.
We met up at the dock, reviewed our fishing licenses and safety
procedures and then got underway.
As we came out of prince Rupert we found it has many of the same
ingredients as Vancouver or Seattle - docks and cranes for
container ships, pilot vessels to help the freighters come in and
a massive grain terminal. Most of these products will leave
by rail and they have thousands of km left to go before they hit
markets. The city quickly fell away as we went out to the
outer islands for fishing.
I am the first to admit, fishing isn't easy. We were using
down riggers to get the hooks down and the hooks were setup for
the intended fish - flasher and a plug. We joined a slow
cycle of other sporties trolling around a steep bank into the
ocean. We waited for the nibbles, but sometimes it was the
line cutting a jellyfish and the whole thing had to come up so we
could clean up and re-set. I know how to do none of this.
Sure enough, we get a hit and it's time to reel it in.
The fish pull hard enough that the kids
can't hold them, but they can help reel in the fish. We lost
roughly half of the fish we pulled in and one of the fish we
caught was too small to keep. We caught (and kept) 3 spring
and 1 Chinook. Our 4 licenses would let us keep 16 fish, up
to 8 of them Chinook but we had no place to keep that much fish.
The kids were interested in what the fish ate and how they were
cleaned. New to me - our guide cut their gills to help them
bleed out quickly. His boat was clearly setup for salmon
fishing - the fish disappeared into fish holds and when they were
cleaned, much of the waste was bound for crab traps.
After we fished our capacity, we moved to deeper water to try and
catch a halibut. Different gear, different hook and much
deeper water, we had a fish on the line in minutes and it was time
to haul it up 100 feet of water to the surface. We took one
halibut (85cm) because that was all we could fit in the RV.
After a bit of clean up, we decided to do a bit of sight seeing.
Having just caught fish, we had fish heads without much
purpose. (The rest of the fish were used for crab
traps). The eagles know the sport fishermen have fish heads so
they are attentive to things thrown overboard.
The guide had a few
traps out from the night before and he kindly gave us two crabs to
go with the rest of our haul.
We had another day in Prince Rupert so w decided to do a bit of site
seeing. We visited the museum (nice collection), watched the
freighters and tried to find a place that solid ice cream (the
magazine store was just setting up their ice cream counter and had a
handful of flavors available.
We drove out to see the Federally Cannery in Port Edward, but they
weren't opening this year.
The weather was getting wet and the prediction said wet for more
days after that so we headed West.
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Tags: freighter(2), dock(2), totem pole(2), lighthouse(2), crab(1), moth(1)
People: Claira(1), Helen(1), John(1), Nara(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > John's Overnight Page > Prince Rupert Road Trip > Prince Rupert
From: John Harvey Photo > John's Overnight Page > Prince Rupert
Last Modified Sunday, January 29th, 2023 at 21:05:03 Edit
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