When he thinks about fishing, John Beaton doesn’t visualize dozing on the bank of a river, a fishing line and bobber attached to his toe. He likes to be far more engaged than that.
The president of the Mid-Island Castaway Fly Fishing Club doesn’t doze and his mind doesn’t tend to wander. He’s too busy looking at what’s going on around him.
“With fly-fishing you are very much in touch with your surroundings,” he said. “It’s all about the mystery of water. You don’t know what’s under the surface and you never know what’s going to happen. You might see a fish plunge at your line or you might feel it. You’re very much a part of nature and you’re constantly engaged, thinking about what’s happening, how the fish are behaving, what insects are around, how the bait fish are behaving and what the weather’s doing.”
That engagement, he said, has kept him passionate about the sport of fly fishing for a long, long time.
“I started fly-fishing when I was five-years-old and I’ve never tired of it,” he said.
Beaton and others in the club want to share that passion with others in Oceanside who may not have been exposed to the sport in a special course set to begin on Sept. 23.
“The course will take beginners and teach them all they need to know in order to take advantage of all the wonderful fly-fishing we have here on Vancouver Island,” he said. “The main thing beginners need to learn is how to cast a fly, but the course will also teach about the equipment you need, what knots to know, the rudiments of tying flies, basic information about how to get started and information about river-craft and how to read the water.”
That water, he noted, often has lots of fish in it, with people pulling pink salmon, coho salmon and cutthroat trout onto local beaches, along with steelhead trout and other species in local rivers and lakes.
Although he said steelhead is his favourite fish, people enrolled in the course shouldn’t get their hopes up too high in that regard.
“It’s my favourite to go after but I’ve been fishing all my life,” he said. “They’re not the fish to start with, because they’re very difficult to catch.”
The biggest fish Beaton has landed locally, he said, was a 37-pound chinook salmon, while the biggest he ever reeled in was caught off the coast of Panama and weighed in at 50 pounds.
There are two levels to the course, so both beginners and those with at least a basic knowledge of the sport will be able to take home some valuable information from the classes, to be held at the Qualicum Beach Civic Centre.
“The course is on Sunday afternoons in two-and-a-half-hour sessions,” Beaton said. “The cost is $50 for a club membership and $20 for the course. Families can enrol for $60 and teens $10. For more information, visit www.midislandcastaways.com and follow the links.
