Last week I was up in my office overlooking Sitka Sound. The morning started with a raw wind, sleet, rain, and snow. At noon the sun came out and the wind dropped. I was about to text Captain David and suggest we go out in Papa K, a 20-foot Whaler docked at the Cove Marina, our base of operations in the summer. Before I got the text out, David had sent me one: “Should we go fishing?”  A half hour later we were underway with two jigging rods, heading to some rocky structure a couple miles from the dock.

When we got there, we metered around, found some rockfish schools and began jigging. The sun was warm, packs of sea lions, in Sitka Sound to dine on spawning herring, swam by as we fished. The rockfish were willing, as usual. They smacked the jigs with gusto, we hooked them regularly, and soon we had the raw materials for a good dinner in the bucket. We returned to the dock, David filleted the catch. Later we had a dinner of pan fried rockfish, black beans, and rice. Just right for the last official day of winter at 57 degrees north.