Up in Ontario

And the World Was Silent

Winter Fishing - Two

(Please read Winter Fishing on the Upper Squamish for context, as it precedes this story.)

Now fully geared up, cb and I crossed the road to a break in the trees where a short path led down to the water of the Squamish River. We stepped into the water and watched where we stepped, careful not to walk over the redds containing the eggs of spawned salmon. The channel of water we faced was calm and shallow, flowing over a gravely bottom. On the far side of the channel the dorsal fins of chum salmon broke the surface and then dipped back under. We walked downstream to a gravel bar with a few chum already dead lying in the shallows. A few seagulls took off as we approached.

"These are recent," cb said and pointed at the eyes of the dead fish and explained that the first thing the gulls ate were the eyes. A chum that looked dead flexed its body from the gravel. We stood and watched the fish struggle. "He'll probably be dead by the time we get back." In a calm hollow of the channel another chum hovered as still as a stone, its sides and back mottled with colour. I poked at it with the end of my fly rod and it jerked to life, surged up and out of the hollow into the current and was swept downstream.

We crossed at a narrow point in the channel where the water flowed fast and I was reminded of the leak on the inside of the left leg of my waders. Snow started to fall. The cliff walls around us grew faint through the falling snow. We walked upstream over the round rocks and around the washed out trees. Floods had torn through the area only a few weeks previously. "The river's completely changed," cb said to me as we walked.

At a calm backchannel to the side of the main current we started to throw flies. I had placed the backpack under a log above us along with the two spinning rods we carried to try at a another spot we planned to visit later. The snow fell faster all around us: big, fluffy, dry flakes that only rarely fall this close to the coast.

cb and I started about ten feet apart on the shore, fishing a break that drained off into a small, quiet pool. He watched me fish for a few casts and provided instructions in how to mend the line and how to control the sink of the fly. My novice skllls with a fly rod improved measurably just from this small lesson and soon I moved upstream and he moved down. Within five minutes he had a fish on. He played it for a minute and then landed it at the edge of the shore. "It's a dolly," he said. "No, it's a bull trout." I looked down at the sleek fish in his hand just as it slipped back between the rocks and, realizing it was free, wriggled out to the deeper water. Out in the current of the river, small chunks of ice floated past, ghostly in the dark water. Two minutes later cb had another trout on, this one bigger. He played it a few paces downstream and then landed it on the rocks. This time I saw the prettiness of the fish, its flashing silver sides and pink spots with their black outline.

We cast some more but nothing else took our flies except a large chum that rose out of the murk of the deeper water like a dinosaur from the past. Its jaws were crooked and it reminded me of a snapping turtle reborn as a fish. If a fish could lumber in the water, then that is what it did. cb pulled his fly away from the chum and we reeled up. I retrieved the backpack and the spinning rods. We divided the load between us, then moved upstream.

Small channels criss-crossed the rocky shoal on the fall lines. We leapt over some and waded across others. We stopped at one and cb pointed out the formation of the bars, the patterns the water etched in the sand mirroring the patterns of wind on clouds or sand or snow. At the side of a fast-moving piece of whitewater the current had cut away a back eddy, and we cast our flies into this swirling water for coho salmon. "They're lazy fish," cb said. "They love the slack water."

I never quite got the hang of having my fly come back towards me without a clear current line to fish accross, and cb had no luck either, so we moved on upstream. We followed the main channel of the river to the far side where a rock wall covered in evergreens rose up. The snow continued to fall and our wading boots started to pick up the snow and water on their felt bottoms. As we set up at a long, flat pool faced on the far shore by a cliff, cb mentioned to me that this pool looked like a great spot but had never produced a fish.

That prognostication seemed to be prophetic. We fished up and down the pool until our hands were too cold to hold the line. We even tried the spinning rods and the gear we had brought along, which required us to estimate how much weight we would need to reach the bottom in the current. After a few dozen more casts it seemed time to call it a day. We gathered up our rods and the backpack and returned to the back eddy just off the whitewater. Walking warmed us so that when we dug into the backpack for the thermos we were able to pour out the hot coffee. I'm not sure if it's the coffee or the location or the heat of the cup in my hands, but hot coffee in the bush is one of the finest things I can think of.

We sat above the back eddy and listened to the water rush over the rocks and away to the ocean. We took turns at the bank, one of us drinking coffee and the other casting and watching. Those huge flakes of snow continued to fall and the world was silent except for the water. "Look across the river," cb said. "The snow always falls faster on the far bank."

(To be continued...)