The afternoon of our second day was eventful. After cruisinig
some distance, Shelby spotted a bear on a peninsula and quickly she saw
two more.
Unfortunately, the largest bear was a sow and the two smaller
ones were her cubs. They were off limits to us but we had a good
time watching them.
If you look closely in the photo you'll see one of the bears. The
cubs probably weighed 2-300 pounds. They were bigger than many
black bears I've shot.
Later in the evening we saw a single boar on the beach, a good one
according to our guide, Luke Randall. We set up an ambush for him
if he came around a lake in the direction we thought he would go.
As luck would have it, he went a different direction and we never saw
him again. Three Sitka blacktail deer did walk through our ambush
spot at 12 yards. Too bad it wasn't deer season.
The only other hunter in camp, a rifle hunter, shot an 8 foot brown
this evening. We'll see if he has a picture we can post.
The morning of day 3 we cruised a route which is beginning to become
familiar to us. We visited the whale carcass but struck out
there. I should note the carcass is such an advanced state of
decomposition that I didn't take any pictures. When I first saw
it, I thought it was a huge mass of styrofoam, it was bleached out so
badly. We're banking on the smell travelling over the valley and
bringing in some bears. Time will tell if we are right.
We saw a minke whale this morning. It's the smallest whale in the
area measuring about 25 feet in length and weighing 6 tons. Our
sighting was limited to two quick moments, much too fast for pictures.
Our hunt is 10 days long and so we have a lot of time left. This
island is huge, about 1200 square miles and the bear population is
estimated at 4-500, so we will have to have some luck on our
side. This evening we will go out again at about 5 pm and hunt
until 10:30 or so. It doesn't get dark until 11pm.
The
nights are short when you get in the sack at midnight and get up at 5
am, but that's what we expected when we took on this challenge.
We can sleep when we get back home.
