This weekend was a mixture of work and fun. On Saturday the staff set out on a halibut trip. It was tough fishing… the tide was running strong, making it hard to keep our bait on the bottom, but we managed to pull in 5 halibut, ranging from about 20 – 35 lbs. We’ve almost got the halibut boat figured out now… we can run it at 3/4 throttle for about 20 minutes until it overheats, then we have to keep it down at about 9 mph the rest of the way, making for approximately 1 1/2 hours of travel time one way. It’s not the best, but at least it’s consistent. It’ll still catch fish!

Addie has been keeping up with the family tradition as well…

As most of you know, there’s always something that needs to be done at Fish Camp, and thankfully we have enough staff to keep things going! We currently have 9 staff members in camp this week: Tracy, Mark, Jim, Patsy, Mike, Ed S, Ed C, Hannah, and myself, and we’ve all been busy. But we enjoy it… it’s great to be serving God in such a beautiful place as this!

The third camp came in last night. Most of the men are veterans, and are already catching loads of fish.

thanks for your prayers

We’ve just finished an amazing first camp. The first of two groups from the Church of God of Pendleton, Oregon came up this week, and we were very blessed to have gotten to know the “Band of Brothers.”

The fish are loaded in the bay! Many of our campers limited out over the last five days, and brought in a huge number of silvers. We’ve even had two new additions to the six before six club, Tom and Nate, who, along with Dewey from the building crew, have managed to bring home six salmon before six A.M… Tom’s was even earlier than 5! The salmon have been smacking lures for the most part, so nearly all of the fish were caught by the mouth.

In addition to the great fishing, Pastor Dave Caudle from, Calvary Chapel Palouse, WA, has been giving a great series of messages about building relationships with God and spouses, along with some great worship times with help of Karen (on staff) and myself.

Halibut fishing has been tough, in more ways than one. Most of you remember the questions raised about our fish camp by the Alaskan State Troopers last year in regards to our nonprofit status and guiding. Since then, some new Troopers have taken office and have interpreted the laws a little differently. Long story short, we are no longer allowed to accompany the campers on the halibut boat in any way. Please understand that we are not angry at all with the Troopers about this ordeal. It is very frustrating, because being a nonprofit organization doing what we do puts us in a bit of a gray area, but the Troopers are just doing their job, and we appreciate it.

Thus, we have decided to bare-boat-charter the halibut boat to our campers, which basically means that the campers rent the boat and equipment and take it out themselves. We began this week, with the guys taking out the boat twice, and bringing in a total of 8 halibut for the week, ranging from 15 to 40 lbs. This and the salmon added up to us nearly running out of freezer space!

Our new cabin has been working great as well!

here’s the group photo:

left to right, back row: Rick, Marty, Mike, Matt, Jared, Nate, Tom

Front row: Josh, Jim, Steve, Mike, Nate, Patsy.

What a great bunch! Thanks for an awesome week guys!

One more note to those of you coming up… bring bug spray!