We’re ready to start fishing at about the same time the nattily attired, smooth casting fly fisherwoman finishes covering the long run at the top of Ray’s bar.
“I’ll bet you don’t know who the first guy to fish a two fisted fly rod on the Skeena was?”
“No, who?” she asks.
“Me,” I say, before proceeding to tell her how other fishers used to look in bewilderment at my 15-foot Hardy Favourite, armed with a Marquis #3 manufactured by the same company, and filled with a 40-yard long double tapered floating fly line, and wonder what kind of rod it was.
It’s ironic that now, forty years later, I add, I fish a single handed rod most of the year while everyone else has a double hander.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Rob Brown,” I tell her. “This is my partner, Karen Scales, and our friend, Anne Hill.”
“Kate Watson,” she says extending a hand all around.
Kate then tells us she has just hosted an angling retreat for women at the Yellow Cedar Lodge. The event lasted three days and included casting practice, fly-tying, yoga led by a qualified Yogi, fine dining, wine tasting overseen by a sommelier, and finished up with a guided day of fishing for Skeena salmon.
The cost for the three days was a little more than a grand in Canadian funds, which, when you ponder it, isn’t a lot of money for such an adventure.
Kate tells her appreciative audience of retired educators that when she isn’t involved in the entrepreneurial side of angling, she is a school counsellor in Prince George. After Kate jets off with the guide whom she is interviewing for her website, I give some rudimentary casting instruction to Anne then wade out to hunt down some humpies. There are none rolling. This is odd for a bar that lies just downstream of the river with the highest abundance of pinks – over a million most years – in the Skeena drainage. I use a pink fly, the hue that, in my experience, humpbacks prefer over any other, swing the pattern just above the bottom, yet nothing intercepts it.
After an hour, we make our way back to the truck then drive back to the mouth of the Lakelse where we see a few a pinks rise sporadically in the frog water runs above the boundary sign. Since the sluggish water is hopeless for flyfishing, I fish the faster slick below and am blanked again because there simply aren’t enough fish moving into the river.
A couple days later, I decide to check on the pink return in a few of my indicator streams. I drive to Kleanza Creek where a few hundred pink salmon return every year to spawn downstream of the first canyon to its confluence with the Skeena. I walk the aforementioned stretch of river and count pinks. When I reach the Skeena, the display on my tally counter reads 17.
Big Oliver Creek, which I walk the next day, has a dozen specimens. Both of these streams are low and as clear, so very few, if any, fish missed my gaze.
Middle Creek has a few schools of pinks and, surprisingly, no grizzly bear sign. Below its confluence with the Dasque, I tally nine calico-sided chum salmon and fifty-one pinks where I normally see a few hundred fish digging in the pink salmon-friendly substrate.
It’s two more days before I get a chance to survey the Shames River, which probably had a few thousand pink salmon before the yearly depredation of the net fisheries began. In my experience over the last three and half decades, it has supported a few hundred in lean years and a few hundred more than that in odd years, until the season not so long ago that Fisheries and Oceans Canada allowed a huge commercial opening that must have coincided with a meagre return of Shames pinks.
That year there were no bear tracks or fish carcasses alongside the stream. I walked from a kilometre above the bridge to where it joins the Skeena and counted three pinks. Two years later I counted a few dozen fish and took a little comfort in the fact that the river hadn’t lost an entire year class of fish.
This year I search intently and fail to find a single humpback. If my assessment is accurate, no humpies will return in 2020 or every even year thereafter because there will have been no adults to spawn them. Pinks work on a two -year cycle. Soon after hatching, their fry make a dangerous b-line to the sea where they feed on zooplankton and crustacea for a year before returning to fresh water in the subsequent year. Losing a year class of pinks means there will be no return on even-numbered years in perpetuity. This will be a big step toward extinction. It is a grave issue.
To be continued…
