Coastal Black Bear in Southeast Alaska
This Hunt was one I had been looking forward to for a while. Not just because I knew it was going to be a lot of fun, but because my wife was going to come along with me. She usually comes on a hunt with me every year and this would be her first time going to Alaska. I love spending time with her on hunts and the fact that I have a wife that supports my addiction to the outdoors and will spend time with me doing it is pretty special.
Our trip started from the Atlanta airport 2 1/2 hours from my house. The Atlanta Braves are my favorite sports team. I watch them more than any other team and I have since I was about eight years old. With that said, I hate Atlanta with a passion. We planned on being at the airport two hours ahead of time. When we got there the parking garage we needed to park in, and all of the other ones were full….on a Tuesday. So we had to circle around and park in a lot where we would ride a shuttle to the airport. Of course, the shuttle dropped us off on the opposite side of the airport from where we needed to be but luckily there wasn’t a line for Alaska airlines check-in. That was the only good break we caught. The line for tsa was insane. The longest line I have ever waited in at an airport. When we got to the gate they’d already closed the door. The plane was still sitting there and continued to sit there for about 10 minutes but once the doors closed the doors closed.
They put us on another flight to Seattle that was supposed to depart at 7:30 PM. It got delayed by over two hours, of course. So we arrived in Seattle about midnight. I booked a super fancy night at the motel 6 that was about 10 minutes from the airport. It should’ve cost about 50 bucks a night, but the city of Seattle is really knocking it out of the park with cost of living and it was $110. Our flight to Alaska was the next day and we arrived around 2:30 PM. We took the ferry across and my buddy picked us up. We swung by Walmart for some supplies, the sporting goods store for locking tags, then headed to his boat where we would be spending the night for a few nights.
My buddy fishes commercially out of Ketchikan, and last year he bought a used 34 foot vessel that he uses to catch salmon. He’s been working on it a lot and he offered to take my wife and I out hunting. We would stay on the boat and use his 14 foot skiff to look for bears and run crab traps. We made it 4 1/2 hours to the location. We got to the spot we were going to hunt without spotting any bears. We saw a lot of deer, eagles and seals. This wasn’t a good sign because he said normally he sees a ton of bears going through this area and we knew that our opportunities might be a little limited due to an earlier green up then normal. Originally we had talked about coming up earlier, but my trip to New Zealand would not allow that. We put out the crab traps and settle down for a short nights sleep because it feels like it’s dark for about two hours this time of year.
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Originally Posted by drwilly
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