Saturday morning came early with the Shamahawk crew meeting at the harbor at 5 a.m. sharp. We warmed the engines 
and pre-rigged the boat as we waited for the sun to come up. 5:50 a.m. we slowly head accross a calm Bellingham bay in low light as the sun was just starting to rise. We got to our spot at 6:30 a.m. and got the gear working right away. 5 minutes in my rod gets ripped from the downrigger! Fish on, and it's a good one. As we run the boat and get our gear up, this lucky fish spits the hook and it's back to work. 30 minutes later after some early morning razzing, Eric Pedersen boats a beauty on a hoochie that we think may be a contender. About this time we start recieving phone and text messages from our good buddy Mike Campion. He says he has the derby winner, and it's only 8 a.m. on day one.
We continue to work our first spot and hook and release one more native in the 14 pound range. We cruised to Waldron Island to hit one of our favorite spots and boy was that a good move. As we made our first pass, we drifted in on the reef and dropped off the backside as it deepened from 65 to 110 feet. Smack, an 18 pound native that we release. Run back up and make the same drift in the same spot and rip a 14 pound native. Next pass, another 14 pound native that we release. On our final pass before the tide picked up we nailed a 25 pound lingcod. We hit a few spots along the way to the weigh station in Anacortes with no further action. Our fish weighed in better than expected and ended up taking 7th spot out of 1,100 fisherman, not bad. We ended up with a Scotty downrigger for our efforts. However, our good friend Mike Campion and his crew ended up taking the top spot and the $15,000 
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