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[Bearbait]

I'm back from 10 days in the SE AK, mainly around Hoonah. We had a great time, plenty of rain but we expected it. The ocean was a bit bumpy at times but not too bad. Boy that country was full of crab, just about everywhere we dropped a pot we got king, tanner, or dungeness. We even got 3 box crab, I haven't seen one of these in 30 years. They curl their legs and claws in so that they just look like a rock. They curl up so tight that they have developed holes in their claws to allow water to get to their gill openings.
Shrimping was pretty poor where we were at, we ended up with about 30 lbs of tails but we put alot of work into getting them, I just never found much good shrimp habitat. We got all the halibut we wanted, the biggest was 55# which was fine with me, the big ones are a pain to handle, I never keep any over 75# anymore. I caught the 55# with a 1" piece of bait on a #6 hook fishing for tomcod for bait in 30' of water, this was about 15 minutes after telling my wife that it would be a waste of time fishing for halibut where we were anchored for the night because halibut wouldn't be back in that cove. I was catching tomcod on a sabiki rig another time and another big halibut hit a tomcod I was reeling in but broke the 10lb leader after 15 minutes. We came home with all the seafood we could hold in the coolers.
We watched whales feeding together on herring a number of times, it was amazing to watch 10 whales coming out of the water with open mouths all at once. I'll try to post some pictures later.