Monday morning, early June. Clear blue sky above and Bellingham Bay resplendent in its early morning calm below my South Hill view home. A great day to play hooky from (and for!) Southside Living magazine. My buddy Alex Zecha, an Fairhaven resident, had invited Sidney and I to join him and his son Cole for a day of shrimping and fishing. Sidney and Cole are good friends and we jumped at the chance.

We met promptly at 9.30am down at Squalicum Harbor where Alex and Cole were already onboard their 19 foot catamaran, festooned with five large yellow buoys, fishing rods, shrimp pots, buckets and cooler boxes. It was going to be a good day!

Seagulls serenaded us as we slowly emerged from the sanctuary of the harbor and out onto the gently undulating waters, its manifold wares unfolding endlessly as we picked up speed.

The early morning bay was streaked with brown seaweed and eel grass which gave the water the appearance and texture of rusted corrugated iron as we scudded towards Portage Island at 23 knots. Conversation was rendered virtually impossible by the raucous thrum of the engine and so I soaked up the salty kisses offered up by the spray off the bow along with the slowly warming sunshine, beaming down unencumbered from its deep blue perch.

We hooked around the southern tip of uninhabited Portage and then motored along Hale Passage with Lummi Island looming high on the portside. Heading due west we made our way out beyond Matia Island and toward all the treasures that lie beyond.

Alex has been in the maritime industry for 37 years and has always been fascinated by boats and being on the water – he’s currently Chief Engineer with Washington State Ferries on the ferry Samish. He offered up information on the islands in front and around us as easily as our teenage boys managed to fall asleep by 10am! He’d planned our route and we were to drop four shrimp pots along the southeastern rim of Sucia Island. Using pellets and tinned cat food, Alex baited the big, weighted pots and dropped them over the side to depths of between 200 and 300 feet and once completed, our ‘shrimp farm’ was several hundred yards in diameter, clearly marked by the luminous yellow buoys.

Sucia Island lay invitingly in front of us like a bejeweled bee-hive with boats and yachts flitting in and around the fingers of her rocky islets. We drifted around to Fossil Bay and joined another four boats and several kayakers before mooring for a lunch break. I sauntered over to Fox Cove and drank in the serenity, the warmth, the tranquility. The beauty of it all, the natural perfection all around (and so close to home!) was almost overwhelming. The lulling silence was only interrupted by the gentle lapping of the waves and a seal vigorously chasing fish in the shallows.

Reluctantly we had to leave but we were excited to see the harvest of our shrimping efforts. Certainly dropping the pots was a whole lot easier than lifting them back into the boat but using a combination of teenage brute strength and a nifty motorized winch on the starboard stern we landed a huge bounty of the vibrant orange and red spot shrimp. We had two shellfish licenses onboard which allow 80 shrimp per license and after decanting them into various buckets and coolers we threw back the overages.

Alex had identified a shelf east of Matia that might be a good spot for halibut fishing and so with shrimp pots secured we headed across the becalmed water to fish at depths of around 160 feet. I once caught a single red snapper on my only previous fishing excursion on Islamarada, Florida back in ’94 and my prowess had not improved in the 25 years since. That said, the sun was warm, the company good and the ocean cooperatively indolent and mesmeric. In my eagerness to improve upon my lifetime tally of one small red snapper I raised several false alarms but after an hour we left the area and headed home, all of us drawing a blank on the halibut count scorecard.

As we motored back through Hales Passage it was tempting to look at the narrow passageway between the Lummi Marine Park and the northern tip of Portage and think you could make a clever shortcut between the two. However, at low tide you can literally walk on water and many a barely sunken sand bar lies in wait ready to ambush your boat, like dormant subterranean pirates.

We’d had a smashing day, getting out to shrimp so early in the season. Shrimping for spot prawns (a local prize) is open most of the summer in the western San Juan islands, as opposed to just a week or two in the rest of Puget Sound.

As we slowed outside the harbor walls and the growl of the engine subsided, I asked Alex about his lifetime on the water. “I’ve always been interested in boats and the water. Living where we do it really makes sense to have a boat because of the number of recreational opportunities that a boat makes available.”

And the shrimp? Alex recommends pan-frying them in lashings of butter, sea-salt, olive oil, lemon juice and garlic.