Yesterday we sailed around Cape Cook — actually sailed with the motor off and everything. It was quite nice, and the swells don't bounce us around as much when the sails are up. For awhile we were doing almost seven knots. The wind died when we rounded the corner at Clerke Point, so John went fishing, and (big fanfare here) he caught his first halibut!

As soon as John cleaned the fish, he saut�ed the cheeks in butter for an afternoon snack, but we didn't have halibut for dinner because we had rockfish from a very large yellow-eye rockfish that John caught on the way to Klaskino Inlet. (With the other events of that day, I forgot to record the fish.) With all this bounty, John is taking today off from fishing.

We're at Columbia Cove, called Peddlar's Cove by the locals. The cove is on the south side of Brooks Peninsula, and it's still west of the rest of Vancouver Island, which runs northwest to southeast. From here we're picking up Coast Guard broadcasts from as far south as Coos Bay on our VHF. That's line-of-sight radio signals.

As John was cooking dinner yesterday evening, he heard a loud bang. Thinking we'd been bumped by a log, he went up to check. Then he heard it again, and it sounded like an explosion, so he looked outside the cove and saw a big splash. As he watched, a huge whale came all of the way out of the water and splashed down hard. He called me up, and we watched for at least 15 minutes while two humpbacks pounded the water, occasionally jumping all the way out. They were still at it when they followed the fish they were hunting around the point and out of our view. We'd heard about humpbacks fishing that way, but it was a huge treat to see it.

Sea otters, whales, puffins, and catching fish: the west coast of Vancouver Island rocks!