I just got back from a boat based bear hunting trip out of Homer, Ak. We went with H.O.C Marine formerly Homer Ocean Charters. Roark the owner sold the day trip portion of the business to focus on the week long bear, deer, and research trips. The mothership is the 86ft Valiant Maid, it’s an older boat but is more than capable of traveling the coast. We had 6 guys bear hunting and 9 guys total on the boat. 7days 6 nights, food and crew were great. Sleeping arrangements/state rooms were tight but what I expected on boat.
Of the hunters, 3 guys brought bows and 3 brought rifles. I was the only one that filled my tag. My buddy shot one in some extremely dense deadfall that we couldn’t find and another guy who was bow hunting had one at 60 yards and couldn’t get drawn in time. So we had 3 bears in range between 6 guys and saw about 11 bears total between us. We spotted the bear I shot from the big boat about 3 hours into the trip. I was ran ashore with a skiff to put on a stalk and ended up killing it at 200yrds. Overall the trip was great, ended up catching a 150lb halibut and lots of other halibut, salmon, lingcod and other rock fish.
I plan to go on another trip with the same transporter to hunt black tails on Kodiak, the only thing that could have been better was the time of day we were bear hunting. We typically wouldn’t get dropped in the field until after breakfast ~9am and had to be picked up about 30 mins before dark. I feel like we missed out on first and last light… the best times to hunt. We also spent a lot of time in an area were there weren’t many bears. Not the transporters fault, we gambled on a new area and it didn’t pay off.
All in all we had an amazing trip and would definitely do it again. I’d probably opt for a spring hunt, when the bears are more out and about. We hunted salmon streams for the most part and if the bears are coming down to eat salmon it’s tough. I got spoiled and killed the only bear and caught the biggest halibut but everyone on the boat got the ultimate Alaska experience.
