Halibut Fishing Charter

This last weekend saw us once again in Homer – this time for a Halibut Fishing Charter!

We drove down Thursday after noon, checking in to our AirB&B around 10:00 that night. That gave us just enough time to quickly put our food in the fridge and crash into bed.

Bright and early Friday morning, we picked up his cousin Chris, Chris’s wife Terri, and his best friend Mike from the campground just around the corner from us – and headed on down to the small boat harbor to hook up with his father at the charter.

Our charter was with Wild Coast Alaska owned and operated by Karl Thomas. His son Cody was deck hand, and did a very good job at it even thought his was only his third time working the boat with his father.

The boat, called the Fiskr Valhalla, was a custom-built Sea Raider 2896 with a fully enclosed and heated bulkhead. It even had a private, stand-up head – albeit a very tiny one. Captain Karl clearly takes very good care of his equipment: that boat was so shiny and clean I bet you could have eaten off the deck (well, at first you could).

Since we had chartered the boat specifically for us (we were the only passengers on board) we got to spend a good 8 hours fishing for Halibut & Salmon. We had clear blue skies and a very calm sea for the most part – which, if you know Homer at all, you know that’s fairly unusual. However, it did get all foggy and overcast for a while, then cleared up again. Not bad fishing weather, all in all.

We all caught fish, but they were considerably smaller than we used to catch, back in the day. Still, we all went home with at least 30 pounds of fish, and that’s not so bad.