The secret life of the black crappie

It was a fine spring day and the boat was still attached to the tow vehicle, so I started it and drove to Opinicon Lake for a bit of crappie fishing.

I couldn’t find the fish in their usual haunts. Flowing water and schools of minnows weren’t attracting them today. I picked my way around Deadlock Bay, unwilling to give up. Eventually I found a few scattered fish around submerged stumps. Usually once you have found the first fish, the next dozen come quite easily. I have caught as many as 76 under a single stump. But not today. Two strikes on each stump, and that was it.

Eventually fatigue and a threatening storm drove me off the lake, but not before I spotted a group of people on the dock at the Queen’s Biology Station, so I swung by to say hello. These three were from Carleton University and didn’t know anybody I knew. I mentioned my few crappies. The alpha-male student told me that there are lots of crappies around. They’ve been netting them. Perhaps they’re not biting today.

That’s when it got interesting. I told him that I could only find them on stumps. He said that’s because they spawn on stumps, sticking the egg masses to the top of a horizontal root. Then the male guards the egg mass, though he takes off when the eggs hatch, rather than guarding the fry the way bass do.

It immediately became apparent to me that I had sinned, taking spawning fish off their nests. Oops. Sorry, fish. I didn’t know. He also said that, “They’ll be all fryed out in another week. Then they’ll school up and start feeding.”

So I left the QUBS dock a wiser man. I’d better stay away from the stumps for a week or so, but then I should be able to find some crappies in their usual haunts.

(When I cleaned up the fish they were all males, and none had anything in his stomach. Seems the guy knew his stuff.)

Shiner fishing

My family moved from a backwoods farm into the village of Westport in the fall of my ninth year. Hockey dominated my winter. Jimmy Sherwood, the local electrician and hardware store owner, sold live bait as well, so the enterprising merchant built a rectangular pond on a lot across the street from his house. At about a hundred feet in length, it made a perfect rink for the neighbourhood kids.

The Westport Lions Club sponsored minor hockey at the municipal rink as well, so every kid scraped together skates, sticks and equipment and got started on his way to the NHL. I still have the miniature hockey stick Maurice Richard autographed for me at my first Minor Hockey Night at the Tweedsmuir Inn. Needless to say we were pretty impressed with the hockey legend.

But the highlight of my first year in Westport came in April, when I heard classmate Terry Thake announce, “The shiners are running! My brother caught two dozen last night.” No one could actually tell me what a shiner was, but soon I noticed older boys walking up the street carrying stringers loaded with silver and green fish, flat on the sides like bluegills, but larger and better. These were the shiners.

When I looked up “shiner” in the encyclopedia I found a small, bony minnow, but the fish I saw on the stringers and willow branches corresponded to the name “Black Crappie” or “Crappie.”

My friend Dale Derbyshire’s father owned the Western Tire store just down the street. I had been looking at the fishing rods in a rack beside the twenty-twos and shotguns in the corner. Dale’s older brother Elwyn set me up with a fishing rod, spin-cast reel, and some nylon line, as well as a pack of hooks and a carton of worms.

Off I went to catch a stringer of shiners.

Everything worked except the worms. Oh, I caught fish with the worms, all right. Couldn’t keep them off the line. But they were all bluegills and pumpkinseeds. These trophies just got laughs from the older boys who lined the docks, shoreline, and hung from boat-house windows during the height of the shiner run.

So I began to watch how the best fishermen did it. I didn’t know all of their names, but two surnames stood out, Marks and Cawley. The various Marks brothers, Jimmy, Johnny and Mike, each caught more than the rest of the crew on the dock combined. The Cawleys were pretty good, too.

They cut “shiner bait” from the throat of a dead shiner. A nick just behind the chin freed the flap of translucent membrane. A pull from a knife clenching the flap against one’s thumb would tear the skin back to the gill cage. Hooked carefully, this bait would flap in the water like a pair of bloomers on a clothesline.

Shiners like to sit motionless in the sun, a couple of feet below the surface. The skilled angler would fly-cast this light bait over the fish, then try to retrieve it over the target’s shoulder. A strike would often occur just as it entered the fish’s strike zone and the fight would be on.

Other times the shiner would swoop up from below, engulfing the bait and startling the angler with a hard strike.

What was great fun about this style of fishing was that you could see everything, and whether the fish bit or not seemed to depend more than anything upon the skill of the guy on the other end of the rod.

I couldn’t catch anything but bluegills at first, but someone gave me a piece of shiner bait, so I found myself a spot and began to cast with that strange fly-casting motion. The bluegills ignored this bait. So did the shiners. An occasional perch took it, and a bull head, but that was about it.

The first solid personal goal in my life (apart from becoming an NHL goalie) took form in my mind. I wanted to be the best shiner fisherman in the cove below the fish sanctuary where the crappies schooled. Then later I wanted to be the best shiner fisherman wherever there were fishermen. By the time I moved away from Westport at sixteen, I had become a lot better at catching shiners, but I was still far from the best on the dock.

Later on in life I discovered crappie fishing at lockstations in the Smiths Falls area. Generally I was as good as anybody at the dock on a given day, and usually better than most. But then I saw this willowy teen-aged girl who caught three fish to my one. Her stance, one hip high, rod tip down, reminded me of Johnny Marks from the Westport docks, twenty years before.

I looked over at her: “Are you from Westport?”

“My father is.”

“Are you a Marks?”

“John is my dad.”

This lovely woman has haunted my fishing trips around Smiths Falls ever since. She’s flat-out better than I am. The shiners go to her by the dozen, and I’ll only be left with her rejects.

In nearby Delta I found the stream out of the Old Mill supports a healthy crappie run. Most of the locals fished with bobbers and tube jigs, with middling success.

One man fished shiner bait with the characteristic Westport jigging motion. Turned out Dave Ross grew up with me on the docks in Westport, and now lives in Delta. But I could always outfish him.

When we bought WYBMADIITY II we soon found her a slip at Indian Lake Marina. This place was heaven. It boasted deep, clear water adjacent to excellent cruising, shady trees for afternoon reading, and best of all, crappies schooled under the docks in early morning. Outstanding crappies!

And best of all, as a member of a private club I didn’t have to compete with any of the Westport crew. Dave Ross’s sister Maureen showed up on a Carver with her husband a few years later, but Maureen wasn’t that keen on fishing, so I was able to earn and keep the title of best crappie fisherman for my entire twenty-year stay at Indian Lake Marina.

And that, to a kid growing up on the waterfront in Westport, is success of a sort.

Out on the ice, finally

The first step out onto the magical surface of a frozen lake has to be a high point in the year for all who survive it.

This year the ice information on my blog has been a series of warnings about dangerous conditions, but the fun of the first ice fishing expedition of the year is breaking through all of the barriers that have gradually entombed you over the three dead months.  Instead of huddling indoors and stepping fearfully from sand patch to sand patch lest you fall, you dig out those heavy clothes, enormous boots and mitts, even a helmet with face shield, and like an astronaut you launch out onto this strange, forbidding, frozen world.

Snowmobiles and ATVs are the preferred space ships in that they allow you the unworldly experience of extreme cold.  After a day of chill factors approaching -50 C, the lurch from car to mailbox doesn’t seem quite so bad.  The risks and strains associated with a trip on the ice jolt fishermen out of their timid, practical approach to winter into the adventurous side of their personalities, where they are open to the wonder of the winter landscape, the pristine quality of new ice and snow and the amazing clarity of the air on a frigid day.  It takes a heroic foray like this to appreciate the sheer beauty of the lake in winter.

“What if the Ranger doesn’t start?…  What if I get stuck in a snowbank?…  I wonder if they have opened the dam at Bedford Mills and weakened the ice?”  Thoughts like these get the adrenaline flowing so that ANY safe return to shore becomes a great success, defying the odds, fate, and Murphy’s Law.  The real appeal of the annual fishing derby is that it puts lots of people (and potential help) within sight in case something goes wrong.

While ice fishing you even get in touch with your own body, keeping track of the various muscles which must tear if you are going to get this hole twisted through the ice, and the yoga of directing blood flow to freezing fingers through sheer effort of will after every dip into the minnow bucket.  And there’s the steady, slow calculus of your toes gradually turning to ice.

Of course there’s also the surge of excitement if something tugs at the bait.  On slow days this usually occurs when a fisherman has finally succumbed to the call of an aching bladder and must watch, trapped by biology, while he hopes that the fish doesn’t drag that expensive reel down the hole before he can re-assemble himself and leap into action.  I’m sure it is in anticipation of this thrill that fishermen bring lots of coffee and other beverages with them.

Tony and I entered the Newboro Ice Fishing Derby Sunday morning and had ample opportunity to test that hard ice.  Three holes through the 16” barrier were enough for the batteries of Tony’s cordless-drill-powered auger, though my Armstrong unit performed as well as could be expected, considering that the arm turning the drill was attached to yours truly.

The hungry largemouth bass kept us busy all morning so everybody within sight had a great time patting the beautiful, winter-placid fish on the head and letting them go, though our only potential entry in the derby was a 1 1/2 pound pike Tony managed somehow to bring up through the hole.

I talked to Kemptville residents John Gorman and his wife Cindy who were fishing near our spot.  John’s a lake trout fisherman, still tickled about a 9 pounder he caught and released on the Big Rideau yesterday.

With one of the four northern pike frozen in the pail outside her shelter, Cindy Gorman held the early lead in this morning’s derby, but heard by telephone just before we arrived that a larger fish had come in.

At the weigh-in station, organizer Helen Burtch greeted us from the back of a pickup truck overloaded with packages.  I asked, “How did you get so many prizes?”

“We phone people and go around and ask them.  Fishing poles, tackle boxes, clothes, pop-up tents, tools, minnow buckets: you name it, we get it.  The only thing we don’t take for a raffle is kids or pets.

“As nearly as anyone can tell, this is the fourteenth year for the derby. And the community has contributed 85 draw prizes for the adult tournament and another truckload for the 50 kids who were on the ice this day.

“It’s a lot of work.  Doug and I do it.  Bobbie French helps, Ronnie Thompson, Greg Shillington, Mark Phillips, Cory Taggart, and Roger and Connie Norris sell tickets and provide sponsorship because it’s just fun for the community and we like doing it every year.”  Helen hosted a happy crowd in the bright sunlight at the weigh-in.

Pat Kenney caught the pike which beat Cindy Gorman’s promising entry down to third place, and Ron Thompson had the large perch.  But everybody who broke out of the winter doldrums was a winner on this magnificent February day.

Late-season shallow water largemouths

Last week on an evening fishing trip I was skunked for the first time this season, so I concluded that the bass must have moved to deep water and that would be it for fishing with heavy tackle and artificial worms for this year.  But after catching nothing on Sunday, Tony limited out on Monday afternoon in shallow water.

He sent me specific directions to a spot with bass, so I ventured out at noon today, and surely enough, he had left me a fine three-pounder under a clump of weeds fifty yards from shore, just as he had said.  I worked around that area and picked up ten fish, of which I kept another four.

But then when I tried to top up my limit at a couple of other spots, I discovered that there weren’t any more fish to be had, anywhere.  All of the likely-looking weed patches were empty.  Not even a bluegill would bite at my bait.

This was an expedition for the table, so I kept the five largemouth and cleaned them up.  Then came the big surprise.  They were all empty.  The only stomach contents I could find were a parcel of leg bones from a bullfrog in one bass’s gut.

I have always thought bass went deep to avoid the cold.  Maybe it’s to find food.  These stragglers hadn’t done very well in the last week.  Of course they might have just gone off their feed because of the full moon.  Must study this further.

The second annual Possum Lodge bass tournament

As Sir Paul McCartney once famously said, “Merely to succeed is not enough.  Others must fail.”  Hosts Tony Izatt and Anne DesLauriers must have had this in mind when holding the event during a full moon.  They couldn’t have foreseen the stiff northerly wind, though.

Tony had scheduled the thing to begin at 7:00 a.m.  What fish is awake at such a ghastly hour?

So there we were around the gas dock at Indian Lake Marina at the crack of dawn, waiting for the only sane members of the crew, Jeff and Greg, who had apparently slept in.  Eventually they came slumping down the dock.  We were a motley crew, but the fishing tackle was good.

As the designated “ringer” for this event I realized that my duty was to bring my particular skill to the tournament: the ability to make the fish stop biting whenever there is any pressure of any kind for the anglers to perform on cue.

So I dialed up CONSERVATION mode as Les Parrott, unsuspecting, joined me in the boat.  The others apparently decided their best bet was to get as far from me and my jinx as possible, for at the start they all blasted off to various points of the compass.  I moved over to A-dock on the trolling motor and began to cast.  Fishing in the morning is best off A-dock.

Surely enough, a chunky largemouth waited for my worm, immune to my jinx.  I stored him in the live well for his own protection.

Then we fished our way around Indian Lake.  Lovely body of water.  Perfectly fishless this morning, as well, until Les found another largemouth just off the Pagoda which had apparently missed the memo.

Hiding from the wind, we worked our way up Indian, across Mosquito (fish very well protected there by the jinx) and into Pollywog Lake.  Pollywog bass are notoriously independent and a bit suicidal, if provoked.  Most of the belligerent ones tore our bait off the hook and tangled us in weeds, but a couple of the unlucky ones ended up in the well.

Then we moved through Bedore’s Creek onto Newboro Lake and the jinx cut in with full force.  We cruised around more exquisitely clear water, cast a variety of choice weed patches, and had a few strikes best characterized by their inaccuracy.  Some occurred as much as 3′ from the actual bait.  According to Les these strikes say: “Get out of here and leave me alone!”

But no Newboro Lake bass were unfortunate enough to land in the live well.  My jinx seemed to work well enough on the north side of Scott Island.

To put it to the test we moved over to the bay known as “The Boathouse”.  Tony and Jeff were already there, straining the weeds frantically with long, looping casts.  Tony tried to wave me out of there, but  I lobbed a cast under a tree on the outskirts of the bay.  A solid largemouth took the worm, fought valiantly for a while, then tossed the hook back past my ear.

“I’ll bet that just cost us some money,” I muttered to Les.  The jinx continued.  An inaccurate cast under another tree led to a missed strike and a lost worm, then I took into a run of tangles in trees which led to the exploration of a lot of overhanging limbs while I removed a series of hooks from branches.

Back at the dock Tony conducted weigh-ins with a large plastic pail and digital scale.  Things proceeded normally until a protest from the group forced the host to drain the water out of the pail in which he was weighing his team’s catch, reducing the weight from 22 pounds to seven.

Turns out my jinx had been pretty effective after all.  The five bass we had put into the well for safekeeping weighed a total of 9.9 pounds and turned out to be the catch of the day, beating the entry of Morgan Pickering and Brad Wilson by a half-pound.  The fat laggard from under A-dock at 2.8 pounds won the largest fish by a couple of ounces, as well.

So Les and I faced some baleful glares, but we got to hold the Bob Steele Memorial Trophy for photos and have the right to display it in our homes for the winter.

Maybe I’d better ease up on the jinx next year because a passing cottager complained that the mouth of every bass on Newboro Lake seemed to be sealed up Saturday morning.

Host Tony Izatt presents Bob Steele Memorial Trophy

How I mistook a humpback whale for a loon

From the time I first arrived in British Columbia until my return home from the trip, my sense of proportion was out of whack.  Trees in B.C. are huge.  Everyone knows that.  The fish are huge.  That’s good.  But blackberry stems are as wide across as my thumb, and the thorns would tear you apart if you tried to push through them.

The Fraser River is an immense, roaring engine tearing its way through the heart of the province.

Even small local mountains have snow on them in late June.  As far north as the Haida Gwaii it didn’t get dark until 11:00, and it was bright enough to read by 4:00 a.m.

The mouth of Naden Harbour lay just to the north of the Queen Charlotte Lodge – a run of a bit over five miles.  The fishing spots were five to seven miles further along the coast.  That amounted to at least twenty-five miles of ocean swells to leap over just to go fishing and get back to base afterward.  No wonder a fishing trip usually took 11 hours.

As a lifelong boater I have an interest in all floating vessels.  I asked our guide how long the tugboat where we had lunch was, 65 feet?  “Uh, the Driftwood is 135 feet.”  Ulp.  Are my perceptions that far off that I underestimated the size of a large boat by half?

Then came the group of humpback whales a mile or two out to sea from our fishing position.  I was delighted to see them, more than anything so that I could cross another line off my bucket list.

But then I lay myself open to no end of ridicule from my boat-mates when I looked over the stern and yelped, “Hey, there’s a loon!”

Brian immediately turned to look, as loons are unheard of in the North Pacific.  He let out a hoot.  Apparently my “loon” was some part of a humpback whale, seen from over a mile away.

Well somehow the thing configured its tail or its flukes to imitate the v-form of a loon’s wings when it raises them from the water to warn off a fisherman or another bird.  It’s a familiar, characteristic loon move, and I thought I saw it in that glimpse of the water at the stern of our boat.

Brian was a bit relentless in his teasing about my loon, and I mentioned this embarrassing incident to Roz. She thought about it for a bit and then sent me a copy of an Edgar Allan Poe story she remembered reading as a kid: “The Sphinx.”  In it the narrator, a nervous, superstitious fellow, becomes convinced he is seeing a monster running up and down the mountain as he gazes through the window of the house where he is a guest.  He sees it as an omen of his impending death.

Eventually his host gets wind of this apparition, asks probing questions, then locates a description of the monster in a book.  He explains gently to his guest that he has been observing, not a 75-foot monster dwarfing the trees on the neighbouring mountain, but a tiny spider spinning a web on the window pane at the tip of his nose.

Perspective is everything, and mine didn’t recover from the shock of British Columbia until I had caught and released several dozen largemouth bass on Newboro Lake.

Rod and Tony take on the Pacific

Coming at the end of our most successful fishing day in memory, the run out of Naden Harbour into the Pacific was less scary than it would otherwise be.  We knew the boat, having fished about forty hours in it over the last four days with our ace guide, Brian.  But now we were in command.

Brian had moved the sturdy 22′ centre-console workboat around to the outside of the boathouse at the Queen Charlotte Lodge on the pretext of adding fuel.  I think he wanted to avoid complicated maneuvers among the other boats.  There’s no sense in embarrassing guests.

Tony backed it out smoothly, then jounced me around the swells until I came back to stand beside the console and hang on.  Railings on the boat are well-designed for this purpose, but if you think gloves for fishing in June is a dumb idea, take note:  the gloves are for hanging onto metal railings on the boats as they leap over swells.  The water’s 48 degrees and the wind chill is pretty cool, as you are moving about 25 mph, and it’s often 12 miles to a fishing spot.  That’s the role of the gloves.

We had our usual arguments about where to fish – a process which amazes observers in that the only place we can agree upon at that time often produces good results.

We worked our way along the coast to the west of Naden Harbour, until the spot known as Bird Rock II looked about right.  An afternoon swell had come up, so the boat took some controlling.  Tony set the downriggers.  He must have watched Brian more carefully than I had, as he operated them smoothly at first try, remembering that the left one had to be handled differently than the right, something about the automatic switch.

He also cut the herring bait with confidence, even mimicking Brian’s characteristic flick of the egg sac behind the boat with the tip of the knife.  The 10’ mooching rods with their long leaders were a real handful for an inexperienced crew.  Nevertheless, Tony got the baited line onto the clip next to the cannon ball and let the port line down, then started in on the identical process with the starboard rod while I tended the helm.

Fortunately we have combined many hours of practice with downriggers, so nothing tangled, broke, or fell overboard.  Then we found ourselves trolling into the breeze, with no idea if this would work.  Was the bait cut correctly?  How quickly must I troll?

As we watched, our travelling companions, professional river guides Dean and Chris, hit onto a massive Chinook.  For the next while it was chaos on their boat, but Dean managed at length to boat, photograph and release the fish while Chris kept the vessel out of trouble in the rip tide.  They had their four Chinook each already.

No strikes so far.  Salmon don’t seem to volunteer.  I failed to avoid tangling with a chunk of kelp, so up came one line.  Tony handled it like an out-of-practice veteran, not a newbie.  Several more repetitions of the kelp removal process and we decided to fish a little further from the weeds.

Then Tony suddenly whipped the starboard rod off the holder and set the hook on a decent Chinook.  The thing took off like a tugboat, leaving Tony a bit shaken by its power.  It turned downwind of the boat.  I got the downriggers up and the other line in.  There would be no trying for a double on this initial fight.  The fish sounded, then tried to pass under the boat.  This made Tony a little frantic.  To say the shift lever on the 115 Mercury outboard was a little balky would be an understatement.  The boat’s lurches while moving out of the fish’s way did nothing for Tony’s aplomb.  Eventually I figured out that if the boat were sitting downwind of the fish it would drift away from trouble and Tony could then play it at his leisure, rather than engaging in a pitched battle on the last thirty feet of line over access to the boat prop.

The fish was still pulling like a freighter.  I glanced down through the clear water and found the reason:  it was lightly hooked on a belly fin.  Imagine if you were going to mount a trailer hitch on a salmon to give it the ability to exert maximum pull.  That’s where Tony had set the hook.   There would be no leading this fish to the boat:  it would have to dragged in by main force.

By this point Tony was whining about sore arms and he was staggering around the boat a bit, but he persevered.

The fish wasn’t enjoying the battle either, so it came to me to boat the thing with this ten-foot landing net which had been lying around underfoot.  As usual I had been preoccupied with reeling when Brian landed my fish and running a camera when Tony had the occasional salmon on.  So I didn’t know how to use the big net.  Fortunately Tony was forthcoming with instructions:  “Don’t stab it!  Get the net into the water.  Now reverse it:  the net has turned inside out.  Hold the end out of the water.  Don’t stab it!  Now put it in front of his head and I’ll pull it in.”  The fish had other ideas, but the line held.  Next time the chinook had run out of luck and I captured it in the net, then we lifted it into the boat.  Tony took a little break to get his breath back and I dug out the camera.

The fish went back into the Pacific in fine condition.  I must say that this was the prettiest salmon we landed on this trip, and certainly the most memorable.  We were happy enough to head back to dinner at the lodge after this single fish.  We had proven our point.

Fishing the shear tide with Brian Clive

At Naden Harbour the water’s about 48 degrees at this time of year.  Salmon migrate away if it rises above 55 degrees.

Thursday dawned clear and calm, the start of an extraordinary day at the Queen Charlotte Lodge fishing ground.

Guides and guests pay close attention to a running total of the fish brought in for processing, as this fish is flash frozen, packed up and shipped on the plane with us back to Vancouver.  Everybody wants to load as much salmon and halibut as possible into his package.  Four Chinook, four coho, two halibut are the mainstays.  The various less desirable groundfish include rock cod and lingcod.

Chinook are both the most desirable and the most abundant species available at this time.  Cohos are smaller, more delicate, and much harder to find.  By the last day Tony had two coho on his list, but I had caught only Chinooks.  It had made me feel a little strange over our first three days of fishing to watch Brian release 17 and 18 pound salmon as casually as I would slip a 14” bass back into the water.

Then I hooked a 26 pounder.  There seems to be a tipping point with salmon where the energy of the fish suddenly doubles.  The 22 pounder the day before was a magnificent fish, but the 26 pounder wore me right out.  It ran, sounded, shook the line until my biceps ached, then headed for bottom several more times.  While I haven’t caught one yet, I’m told the sheer power of a fish of tyee size, 30 pounds, reverberates in every muscle and tendon of the angler’s body after the fight is over.

But this day we needed cohos and the sea was calm, so Brian took us out about two miles offshore.  Hauling in large salmon is great sport and excellent tourism, but time spent with a knowledgeable instructor and a square mile of water is to open a world of wonder.

We were running slowly along in the boat when Brian suddenly perked up and pointed down into the water.  It was littered with tiny, iridescent spots.  “Scales.  Birds have been feeding on a baitball here.”

“Plankton is the basis of all of the life in the water.  It’s fragile and the wind  beats up the organisms close to the top of the water column and reduces the food supply.  But when a calm day comes like this, the sun produces an almost instant bloom.  This turns on all of the other life forms to feed on the plankton, so the bait fish, the birds, the salmon, all become active.”

There we were out there with nothing around us but water.  And birds, a lot of birds.  And apparently a river, because on the calm sea a stream came flowing by us like a sharply-defined river in the middle of nowhere.  It carried pieces of kelp broken off from the beds on shore, as well as enough algae on the suface to make it easy to see.

The birds, helldivers and gulls, congregated in great numbers around shoals of needlefish forced to the surface by the helldivers.  Brian called them baitballs.  The gulls could swoop in and grab mouthfuls of the tiny fish, they were that tightly packed at the top of the water.  “Of course a humpback whale will eat the whole ball.”  The feeding frenzy continued for several minutes until the birds gradually filled up, drifted away, and the baitfish were allowed to disperse.

So at 10:00 Thursday morning we set the downriggers for coho after hauling in Chinooks near shore for four hours.  “Coho are hard to find, but we’ll try out here for a while.”  Before long my rod twitched, so I ran through the routine Brian had drilled into me over many lost fish:  “Lift the rod off the holder.  Tip it over so the reel is down.  Reel in to the clip on the downrigger.  Feel the fish?  Jerk it off the clip.  Reel up to the fish until you feel it.  Set the hook! Still there?  Let him run.  Bring back line when you can.  Hold your right hand on the bottom of the reel to control the drag.  When your left hand tells you, let him have line.  When you can get line back, pump with the left, reel with the right.  When the fish comes near the boat, don’t worry about that.  Just play the fish.  The guide will get the lines and the downriggers out of the way and move the boat so that the fish doesn’t foul the motor.”

Brian expertly predicted each fish’s moves.  His coaching and seamanship were vital to our fishing success over the 11-hour days of the trip.  My part?  Once a fish was hooked, I didn’t lose it.  Getting to that stage was hard for me, though.  The unfamiliar mooching rod looks like a fly rod, and that turn-the-reel-over stage kept confusing me at a critical time.  But after enough repetitions muscle memory took over.  By the fourth and final day I found I could whip the rod out of the holder, flip it over, wind-wind-wind, flip the line off the clip, chase the fish down with the reel, then stretch its neck with a strong, smooth hook-set motion.

Brian commented when I set the hook on the first Coho:  “I’m surprised it can still swim.  I thought that hook-set would have fractured its neck.”  The eight-pound coho surged to the surface where it ran and rolled on top.  Brian told Tony and me that Chinooks will use the whole water column it a fight, often diving straight down 100’ or more.  “Cohos take to the surface when hooked, often jumping behind the boat before you can get the line off the downrigger clip.”

But that was our last coho of the day.  We couldn’t keep the blasted Chinooks off the hook.  Today the things were everywhere, and we were treated to the spectacle of fighting 16-26 pound fish in water so clear we could see every iridescent scale when the fish turned thirty feet below the boat.  When we brought them to the boat, Brian would reach down with the gaff and gently slide the unbarbed hook out, and away would go the fish.

But this is the land of the midnight sun.  We brought Brian back in at 4:30 to look after the fish and to give Tony and me a chance to do what we had been itching to try:  catch a salmon on a downrigger on our own.

Stay tuned for the next part of the saga.

 

The Orca

The orca raised a tall black dorsal fin and followed the salmon in towards Bird Rock where about a dozen boats were fishing.  One guy had a salmon on and you could tell the orca could hear it, but he passed in the wrong direction and came towards our boat.  The fisherman hastily hauled his salmon out of the water.

The creature surfaced close to our boat, opening a big hole in the water, then he slid out of sight for a few minutes, to appear a hundred yards away on his side with a slashing motion which left one pectoral fin high in the air.  Brian, our guide, said that that slashing motion with his head is how the orca kills salmon, though he can’t understand how they catch them.

It wasn’t that the orca wasn’t aware of our presence.  He had sought out the concentration of fishing boats and salmon coming in to feed on the tide, and he acted utterly fearless around man.  I realized that for the first time in my experience I wasn’t the top predator in this environment.

I had asked Brian if I could see some whales yesterday.  A half-hour later he pointed out a humpback whale about a mile away.  Another rose.  “I think there are four or five in that group.”  Surely enough, they were soon all around us, though they kept their distance as we jigged for halibut.

Ten minutes before he appeared I’d asked Brian if we would see a killer whale.  Then this one appeared.  But the orca was different than the humpbacks.  He sought us out.  Brian told us he’d done the same thing on Sunday, taking a salmon from a bemused fisherman.  This time he came into 50’ of water, right near shore.  No wonder people worship these creatures.

After the orca left Tony and I hit into our first double, with a pair of chinooks knocking the lines off the downriggers at the same time.  We released the fifteen and seventeen pound fish to keep room on our limit for “better” fish.  I was a bit skeptical about this, but deferred to Brian’s opinion.  He hasn’t been wrong so far.

Then I hit a good one.  I’d landed a 23 pound Chinook the first day, and this fish looked to be the same size, but it had easily twice the strength, energy, and endurance.  Things got quite busy at Bird Rock as Brian and Tony tried to keep lines and cables out of the “wanna-be-tyee’s” way.  I had thought the tyee title for a 30 lb. or heavier fish was just tourism.  Now I wasn’t so sure.  The fight went on and on, but the fish tired first – most likely because of the superb mooching rod on which I was playing him.

This fish wasn’t much heavier than the one on Monday, but it was in another order of magnitude for sport.  I could now see what Brian meant by “waiting for a better fish.”

Then we ran out to 184’ and dropped herring to the bottom to fish for halibut.  Brian clearly dislikes bottom fishing, but allowed Tony and me one each to fill our limits.

An innocent abroad in British Columbia

Mallards are unsentimental creatures.  The flock through which I had to wade to get to the Pacific couldn’t care less about hygiene, so my first mouthful of salt water had a rather feathery backtaste.  Where did this custom come from, anyway?  This proved just the first of several initiation pranks my vacation destination held in store for me.

In planning this west-coast expedition Tony included a day for a tour of Vancouver.  First up was his favourite spot, Deep Harbour.  I had to agree with him on this choice,  for this calm harbour has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.  The trees, the plantings, the floating marina in mid-bay, all combine to make the place perfect for the photographer.  Tony took me to the memorial bench the family have established to commemorate the fondness his father, mother, and uncle had for this spot.

We also had to try Trolls, his favourite fish-and-chips restaurant in Horseshoe Bay.  The double portions of halibut were delicious.  From the elevated dock across the street I spotted two young men weighing live prawn, so I made a death-defying descent down a long ramp (low tide, eh?) and relieved the fishermen of a kilo of live shrimp.  The guy dumped them into a bag which they promptly made into a net with repeated puncture wounds from legs and spines.

The next lesson the west coast offered: no impulse buy goes unpunished.  Tony reminded me that we had to complete our tour and get the prawn home in the back of a borrowed Cadillac without getting prawn-scent on the upholstery.  Off we went shopping until we had come up with a bag of ice and a Styrofoam cooler.  Turns out the Caddy has a cargo net in the trunk which might have been designed in answer to this question.  It held the cooler in place and no upholstery was injured in the making of this column.

Today I discovered what it’s like to fish on a river which flows at a minimum of twelve miles per hour.  Dean Werk owns Great River Fishing Adventures.  He took Tony’s sister Sharon and niece Amy with us in his Customweld jet-driven riverboat.  Powered by a 6.2 litre supercharged GM engine, the thing felt as if it could out-accelerate a 737 up to fifty miles per hour.

The first time Tony sent me a picture of a sturgeon he had caught with Dean, I accused him of photo-shopping the shot as a prank.  There was no way he could casually hold a 150 pound fish in his arms in the water like that.  He decided that at first opportunity he’d get his own back by watching me deal with a beast which tried to tear my arms out of their sockets on a strong and unpredictable run.

And unpredictable the sturgeon proved to be this day.  While eight of them picked up the baits tethered to the bottom by lead weights behind the boat, none took the hook.  But they weren’t especially shy.  Several did noisy rolls on the surface and one monster blasted out of the water right at the stern of the boat.  I bit my tongue out of tact.  It was Tony who muttered:  “We gotta get a bigger boat” in tribute to the Jaws moment.  Nine hours later when we were too numb from the cold to care, another jumped so close to the bow of the boat that it almost landed in the chain locker.

But the day was in other ways quite a success.  The Fraser River provides the photographer a wonderful look at the mountains which surround it.  These aren’t hills:  they’re the real deal, mountains.  Even though they are covered with inviting green foliage, everyone I asked agreed that you couldn’t climb one.  The vegetation is too dense to move through it for any distance.  It’s a jungle on a 45 degree angle.

I easily confirmed this estimate of one mountain’s slope just by looking out the window.  It was easy to trace the mountain’s line diagonally across a square window panel.

The first thing I had done upon awakening on my first day in this time zone had been to go outside and hug a tree.  This turned into a very interesting session, squishing around in the rain among the towering cedar trees on the property.  Cedars here look very much like eastern white cedars in Leeds County, except that these western variants have had long, wet seasons and no frost to inhibit their growth.

I noticed fewer species here than at home, but they grow in rich profusion.  Wild blackberries, for example, are so successful here that highway departments have hired brush-cutting machines to clear the roadsides of the thorny fruit-bearers.  Too many berry pickers have come to grief by falling from cliff faces onto busy driving lanes, or parking unwisely on tortuous mountain roads.

But the evergreens rule in B.C.  They’re huge, tall and straight.  They dominate the landscape and comfort and enrich its inhabitants.

Tomorrow we’re off to Masset by 737, then over to the Queen Charlotte Lodge by helicopter for five days of salmon fishing.