Winter Harbour

We have promised ourselves to visit each of the sounds on the west coast of the island. Hearing all of the fishing stories about Winter Harbour and the lousy fishing at Telegraph Cove this year, we decided that Quatsino Sound was a good place to start. We trailered the boat on the twisty turny, hilly horrible road to Port Alice. A wonderful hour run out to Quatsino Sound had us in downtown Winter Harbour (pop. 10). We stayed on the gov’t dock and spent the evening getting our fishing tackle in order. For our first day of fishing we planned to follow the guide boat out to the hot spots. At 5:00 am we woke up to find we were the only boat left in the harbour. With coffee in hand and the boat wide open we caught up to the pack. The water was rough but we pressed on with eager anticipation. It was a Coho extravaganza…with double header after double header and all of a sudden it stopped and we hadn’t kept a fish. We decided to pull our prawn traps on the way in for lunch. The traps seemed to be cemented to the ocean floor….after Stephen hefting on the ropes we tied it to the boat. 280 hp of Volvo diesel couldn’t move it either so the decision was reluctantly made to salvage the buoy rather than rip the cleat off of the boat. At 4:00 pm after finally locating the fuse blown by the prawn puller putting us down to one down rigger, we dejectedly sailed home to the gov’t dock in winter harbour, the only boat with no fish aboard.

The next morning we were determined to change our situation. We headed to locally famous Solander Island at the end of the Brooks Peninsula. This is supposedly where the big butts hang out….hali-butts that is. We were not there long until Laurie hooked a big one. Within two hours we had landed a 50 lb. halibut, a 25 + ling cod and some red snappers. We happily headed back to the harbour to clean our fish and head back to Port Alice.