Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  ‘You know what, Ned,’ I said. ‘I think we are skunked.’

  ‘Skunked? Grandpa, what does that mean?’

  ‘It’s what Canadian anglers say when they are not getting any fish. It’s the nearest we get to swearing.’

  ‘What do they say in other countries, Grandpa?’

  ‘They are more polite and they just say they had a blank day.’

  We then wended our way back through the swamp and along the trail to the cabin. Ned’s dad had just made some tea.

  ‘How did you do?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘We had a blank day,’ said Ned.

  11

  Teaching a Boy to Fish

  The secret of teaching has always been not to let it be too obvious. I was fortunate because I had some of the best teachers in the world. Most of these were academics who came straight from universities and, luckily, had never been trained to teach. Instead they mumbled to themselves, grunted and were absent-minded, but they were generous people who knew their subjects better than anyone else and they patiently answered questions. I wanted to be like them.

  Today it has become possible for people with no real knowledge of a subject to teach it. Administrators like this idea because it is more flexible, but having teachers desperately trying to stay ahead of the brighter students is not the way to go. It is no wonder that under this more modern system students are learning a lot less.

  When I was a boy in a single-sex school the teachers I admired the most were all enthusiasts for their subject and I learned my lessons because I wanted to not because I was being told I had to. My teachers never seemed to care about anything much, but it was clear they loved their subject and they passed the information on without any obvious effort. In short they never tried to force anything into my brain, instead by their actions they drew things out that were already partly inside. They polished these ideas with discussion and made them shine. Every young brain is full of thoughtful but often slightly crazy ideas and needs constant reassurance.

  Lastly, it is important to recognise that there is a difference between the sexes. Boys need to like and admire their teachers. Girls, on the other hand, have the ability to learn in spite of teachers. This is probably why nowadays with much poorer teachers girls are pulling ahead of boys. In a perfect world every person would have the right kind of teaching.

  With these thoughts in mind I decided never to show Ned how to do anything unless he asked. As the days passed on the river I would sit down on a log and start fiddling with my tackle and notice that he often watched what I was doing out of the corner of his eye. I would say, as if talking to myself when tying a blood knot, ‘Four and a half turns then though the loop.’ One day he asked me why I did only four and a half turns and I told him that it was the minimum number and I couldn’t count any more because it was too boring.

  He laughed. ‘Can I do five?’ he said.

  I told him that was a good idea because three or four turns probably weren’t quite enough and six or seven didn’t make the knot any better and were a waste of time. The effect of this was that Ned would never forget the four-and-a-half-turn blood knot.

  ‘Why is it called the blood knot, Grandpa?’

  I told him it was invented by surgeons when they were doing operations like removing an appendix. It had to be a good knot, I said, because they didn’t want to have to cut someone open again because the knot came undone. Ned asked if knowing the blood knot would make him a doctor and I told him he would have to catch a fish first and learn how to gut it properly.

  ‘Medicine is a bit like fishing,’ I said. ‘There is a lot to learn and it takes a lot of time.’

  As often happens when teaching someone else how to do a thing the teacher learns something too. I threaded the line through the eye of the hook to tie the blood knot under the watchful eye of my grandson and I started to wonder how Juliana Berners fixed her imitation stonefly to the horse-hair line. I remembered that she specified the hair had to come from the tail of a stallion because a mare’s tail hair was weaker, but she said nothing about tying on the hook.

  Then I remembered the eye didn’t appear on hooks until probably late in the nineteenth century, so the abbess, our ‘Father’ Walton and the wonderful Russian writer Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov all tied their hooks to the line some other way. My mind went back to Aksakov’s classic Notes on Fishing and its epigraph: ‘I venture into nature’s world, the world of serenity and freedom.’ I wondered how those words got past the strict Russian censorship in 1847.

  Sitting on this log by the Cowichan River in May 2008 I tried to recall Aksakov’s chapter on the hook. I remembered it began by saying, ‘The best hooks are English ones,’ which is still true today, followed by several pages on how to choose a good one. Then my memory kicked in again and I recalled he said something about the ends of hooks in those days having a shank with a little nub at the top whose ‘shoulders must be wide and not sharp’, so obviously the hook didn’t have an eye until after he wrote this. Fishers then must have used a different kind of knot and I would have to try to work out what it was. My small grandson had got my brain working. We were each good for the other.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Grandpa?’ Ned asked.

  I told him a bit about Aksakov going fishing in Russia and that he was a great writer. The next best thing to fishing I said was reading about it, and reading was marvellous because there were so many great books. Then, the knot having been tied and questions answered, I got up from my log and we went further up the river.

  The bush was thick and the trail meandered a lot so it was extremely difficult to get near enough to the water to fish. Young Ned’s tackle irritated me because it was too short, but the boy persisted and that was the most important thing. His rod was only a metre long and the reel was a cheap fixed-spool reel with a very light nylon line. True it was easier for him to cast with this American-style rod, but it was too short to poke through the bushes and reach the places close to the bank where, in conditions like these, a fish might choose to lie.

  The emphasis is all on casting nowadays and nearly all anglers stand right at the edge of the river or, worse, enter the water in order to cast. In some rivers wading is necessary to present the fly correctly but the angler is usually better off avoiding it.

  I decided that I would have to make sure to buy Ned a longer rod fitted with a more appropriate reel at a later date, after he had caught his first fish. It would have made a lot more sense to do it immediately but the last thing I wanted to do was criticise Matthew’s choice of tackle. Instead I tried to set an example by trying to poke my three-metre rod through the bush then muttering that it was a bit too short. Ned and I never talked about it but I could tell that he realised he would have been better off with more rod.

  At one stage he did complain that both our rods were too short and I told him how, when I was his age, I lived very near the famous River Lea where Izaak Walton did most of his fishing. I told him it was much slower than the Cowichan but about as wide, and when I was a boy many anglers didn’t have reels and used rods that were about twelve metres long. They tied their lines to the end of the rod and removed sections of the rod from the butt to bring the fish in.

  ‘Didn’t anyone have reels in those days, Grandpa?’

  ‘Some rich people did but most of us couldn’t afford them.’ I told Ned about my first rod, which had no rings so it couldn’t be used with a reel. It was called a ‘boy’s rod’ and was made out of bamboo. It was five and a half metres long and broke down into about six pieces. It cost me two shillings, about a penny a foot, and I bought it at the nearby Avenue Cycle Store. I was digging potatoes on Edward’s Farm at the time because all the men were away fighting the war and for this hard work I earned five pence an hour so I had to work for nearly a day to get the money to pay for it. I tied five metres of cheap cotton line to the end and fished with that. I used to lash a cotton bag with the rod inside it to the crossbar of my bike and ride to the river with a
tin of maggots in my pocket to catch perch and roach for there hadn’t been any trout or salmon in the Lea for hundreds of years.

  Ned was curious about the different kinds of fish that we could find in this Canadian river and I told him that there were two kinds. There were the resident fish who spent their whole lives in one small part of the river like the pool we were looking at, and they were trout. And there were the visitors that came in every year from the sea in order to spawn, and they were salmon. I also explained to him that there were half a dozen different kinds of salmon but the biggest of all came in when the current was strongest like it was at this moment and that was in the spring.

  ‘Maybe I could get one of those salmon,’ he said.

  I explained they were as long as his rod and at least twice as heavy as he was and they would pull him in. ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘the best ones to eat are the ones that fit into the frying pan and just fill a plate.’

  He thought about this for a moment. ‘If we catch a big one we can cut it up and put it into tins.’

  I told him how years ago, in the year men landed on the moon, I had been at Campbell River and thought the same thing and tinned a lot of big salmon myself.

  ‘What was it like, Grandpa?’

  ‘Not as good as a smaller fish straight out of the river.’

  We continued our way upstream looking for a place to fish, but everywhere the river was too fast to sink a fly and, even if we’d had any worms, we didn’t have enough lead to get one down into the kind of places where the trout would be hiding. In the end, after a walk where we mainly just looked at the water, we gave up. Probably most fishing is like this: you go for a walk along a river. But books, and especially magazines, don’t tell the reader about the blank days; instead they are full of pictures of trophy fish and triumphant anglers.

  Amazingly, young Ned understood the importance of this quest. When we reached the cabin he turned to me and said, ‘You know, Grandpa, when we do get a fish, because we know how hard it is, it will be even more exciting.’

  I smiled ‘You are right. I think you are a fisherman already.’ This was true education, I thought to myself.

  Often when we were staying in the cabin or walking along the river we told stories. They came from both of us, but Ned asked so many questions that many of the stories were mine. That is the chief purpose of the old: to tell stories and to keep them as close to the truth as possible. Some of the characters in these stories came to life for Ned and he began to ask me questions like, ‘What would Big Arthur do here?’ or to say, ‘If we see a cougar we had better call Donny Palmer.’

  Gradually, perhaps because of my bias towards steelhead, he asked more and more about this magnificent fish. I told him about places like the Lost River where Big Arthur once took nineteen fish and how on the way to Steelhead Rock he would run seven metres across the slippery log over the deep canyon of Wolf Creek in his caulked boots and laugh at me slipping around on the log in my rubber-soled climbing boots.

  I told my grandson about the huge Douglas fir forest above the canyon. The trees were giants and were so big no light came through. The forest had a completely bare floor covered with nothing except a carpet of millions and millions of flat, sharp-pointed needles a couple of centimetres long. But now sadly the great firs have gone and the forest that had been above that river for more than ten thousand years has been replaced by the small fast-growing Pinus radiata plantation trees from California. It is the classic fairytale of the Aladdin swindle when the wicked peddler gets the magic lamp from the poor ignorant boy by offering him new wares for old. I thought about fairytales and wondered if Ned knew this one, but I didn’t ask him—it was too sad even thinking about the loss of those giant Douglas firs.

  We were now most of the way through our week in the cabin and all we had managed to do so far was look at the water. Fishing can be like this. What one is really doing is exploring, learning about a place and hoping to find a good place to fish. In Australia it is the same except the emphasis is different; there the first thing one has to do is find some water. The greatest rivers in Australia, the Snowy and the Murray, are often barely flowing so one is forced to go higher and higher into the mountains and then, even after walking a long way, the tiny creeks are often also dry. Fishing in fresh water in Australia takes a long time. Here in Canada, during the spring at least, there was too much water and it was pretty obvious the Cowichan could not be fished for at least another week.

  Few Australian rivers are youthful; a river as young as the Cowichan possibly does not exist there. Australian rivers wander slowly, eventually leaving cut-offs that poets call billabongs and geologists refer to as oxbow lakes. In dry periods these rivers dry up completely as the water-table drops and all the water seeps underground. Rivers I had fished in the fifties in Australia, the Snowy River being the obvious example, had lost so much water that the land around them had almost died. It was hard to imagine something similar happening to the Cowichan; it was a rough, bare-knuckled and brawling stream. Yet because of the development I had seen and the small number of salmon in the run, I sensed the river’s days were numbered.

  I was the first to wake the next day and so as not to disturb Ned and Matthew I walked down to the river for one more look just in case it had calmed. The snow on the nearby mountains was disappearing fast but the river was just as high. So I decided the best thing for us to do that day would be to fish the westward-flowing Robertson River. I had told Ned about the cougar I had seen crossing the old logging bridge all those years ago. It was quite shallow there, a good place for cutthroat trout. Not far below it was Bear Lake where I had caught my record cutthroat. I walked back to the cabin where the fire was out and the stay-in-beds were just getting up.

  It is easy to fritter time away in a log cabin deep in the woods so, feeling rather like a tour guide, I made an announcement. ‘Today we are going into Lake Cowichan for breakfast, then we will go to the tackle shop to see if there is anything we need and then we will fish the Robertson River.’ I waited while they washed the sleep out of their eyes, and we walked down the trail to the car.

  We ate breakfast at the Riverside Inn and the food was excellent: eggs done anyway you wanted, bacon and pancakes with lots of real maple syrup, much better than the ‘maple flavoured’ stuff you often get in Australia. They kept bringing pancakes until we were full and I noticed young Ned ate more pancakes than his father and probably three or four times as many as I did. He also drank lots of orange juice while his father and I got stuck into the bottomless cups of good Colombian coffee you get when you have breakfast in Canada. Awake and alert, everyone was ready to fish so we walked across the town bridge and looked at the river. We saw the odd sign of the few salmon occasionally rolling near the surface. Then we entered the main street.

  The town had changed quite a bit in forty years and there were a lot more shops. The old tackle shop was not there, but on the left-hand side of the road going towards Bear Lake we found a new one and went inside. Tackle shops are founts of information about the state of the rivers in the region, and most anglers usually need some simple things like a couple of new leaders or a few extra hooks. In return the owner is always happy to show the angler the latest reels, rods and other more expensive pieces of tackle and the customer often ends up making a purchase.

  I was pleased to see that this excellent store sold natural bait and had some really good free-running centre-pin reels. With the tremendous increase in fly-fishing these days modern anglers seem to hamper themselves by using heavier reels with a permanent click, often a large arbour and an adjustable drag. They are deluded; the older type of centre-pins are much more versatile because they can be used in many different ways: with the check on when fly fishing for trout, and with the check off when free lining for salmon or ‘long trotting’ for coarser fish. You only need to buy a single reel. In most places simple on-off regulators on reels seem to be disappearing, but this store had some of the best reels I had seen for year
s. Lake Cowichan anglers had not abandoned them for fixed-spool reels or special fly-reels like anglers everywhere else. Perhaps there were some experts like Big Arthur still around.

  Juliana Berners and Izaak Walton did not use line-storing devices at all—when a fish was too big to land right away they were forced to throw their rod into the river and hope to retrieve it later when the fish was worn out from towing it around.

  Since then, anglers have learned it’s a good idea to store a bit of extra line in places where the fish are big and strong, and the more knowledgeable ones know the simple winch is the most practical way of doing it. Unfortunately most modern anglers seem to believe fishing is mainly about casting further than anyone else and so they tend to use shorter, stiffer rods and environmentally hazardous monofilament line cast from mechanically complicated fixed-spool reels. This line, a petroleum by-product, casts so easily, but it ‘remembers’ it has been tightly coiled and consequently often forms huge tangles. Because it is so cheap it then gets thrown away. Usually it ends up in the river where it traps the feet of birds and generally threatens wildlife for years. Many nature lovers as well as an increasing number of anglers think that this dangerous and nearly invisible line should be banned.

  Wandering around the tackle shop in Lake Cowichan I found a glass cabinet full of second-hand fishing tackle and the first thing I noticed was an old polished leather leader wallet about twelve centimetres square that looked very much like the one I had bought in Scotland and lost when I lived in Meade’s cabin all those years ago.

  Inside it there were the usual felt drying pads and three parchment pockets with a small collection of what Americans call leaders and the British call casts. They are short pieces of cat-gut that anglers formerly used between the end of their thicker fishing line and the hook. They were still in their envelopes. One was from the great company of Allcock’s who made the Aerial—the world’s best reel—and the Wallis Wizard rod. The red leader envelope still had the price sixpence halfpenny written on it neatly in ink. Of course I had to have this old wallet for it was exactly the same as the one I had lost. Now that I have had it a while I have convinced myself it is the same one. The price was only twenty dollars so I paid the man and now we had an excuse for examining all his gear.