05/10/2025
The Caribou went mono y mono against a very large S***m Whale last week. And unfortunately, the S***m Whale came out on top! It was a very humbling longline trip! The story follows…
We worked hard for a full 24 hours baiting our hooks, choosing the correct ocean topography and setting out the gear. We were working with a small weather window that only allowed us a couple of extra hours to retrieve our gear and run for cover from the upcoming storm. We managed to steal a short nap and then we started hauling our six mile ground line aboard. Just as the hooks started to come to the surface, I noticed a very large whale off to the port about 100 yards. It was one of the bigger s***m whales that I’ve seen. S***m whales have very large teeth and this whale decided to floss his teeth with our gear! He would let our ground line pass through one side of his mouth and out the other side stripping every one of our fish off the line! Twenty four hours of hard work became fruitless.
To make matters much worse, midway through the set the ground line refused to come off the bottom of the ocean. It had become tangled on an obstruction. So, the only option was for us to stop retrieving the ground line and haul it back from the other side of the set. In doing this, the whale and the current were working against us and unfortunately the groundline got tangled in our propeller. We were four hours from a safe anchorage and without the use of our propeller… we were dead in the water! No longer did we care if the whale was eating our fish. We just needed to be able to get home before the weather got bad. Kole asked me if I was going to jump overboard and try to cut the line out of the prop. At 3:00 in the morning, with an ocean that was getting rougher by the minute, there was no way I was going to jump in the water with a knife in my mouth. I got a grappling hook and I managed to grab the ground line and cut it on either side of the propeller. We had noticed the problem soon enough so not much line had been wrapped up on the propeller. We were able to clear what was there.
We lost every last fish to the whale but at the end of the day, we were able to make it home under our own power. And we narrowly escaped the storm that was hovering over the horizon.
On the way into Sitka, my question for myself was… Why would anyone want to possibly put themselves in that kind of a situation? A week later, I am now ready to try it again and hopefully things will go a little smoother!
