Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  Nowadays, over most of the world, access to fresh water, and consequently fishing, is being restricted more and more each year. Canada is probably the only place left where nobody would question another person’s right to fish. Everyone, even if they own land alongside a river, must have a licence to fish. On the back of that licence there is a paragraph explaining how to fish ethically, which has to be read and then signed. For senior, junior and disabled citizens there is no charge for a licence but others pay a small fee. Then anyone with a licence can fish. In places like Britain and Australia, people have first to buy a licence to fish and then get permission from a landowner to get to a river, which is often refused. Then, when it is legal to fish, we are often forced to pay another fee to fish in the owner’s part of the river or in specially constructed lakes or ponds.

  Because its water is not divided into classes according to quality, Canada is the most democratic place on Earth. South of the border, Americans, like Australians, have followed the English tradition of reserving the better rivers for the rich. Half a century ago, when I lived in Scotland, a permit for a ‘beat’ of a few hundred metres on one bank of a river allowing you to fish for a week cost hundreds of pounds. I imagine it would cost thousands now.

  From time to time towards the end of my stay in Meade’s cabin I fished many other rivers on Vancouver Island, including the river fished by Roderick Haig-Brown. The son of a wealthy English family he had learned to fish on the Piddle, an English chalk stream in Dorset where my godfather had been the vicar. He moved to the west coast of Canada as a young man and worked as a logger, and he successfully applied his angling skill to the much bigger fish that lived in the granite rivers that flowed off the great batholith. He wrote the wonderful A River Never Sleeps in 1944 and will be remembered as one of the greatest writers on fishing that has ever lived. He died in 1976. When I met him he was an august figure: the young English immigrant had become magistrate of Campbell River and chancellor of the new university in Victoria. But on this wild island loggers liked him too because he had once been one of them.

  More than any other writer had done, Haig-Brown made it clear that the west coast of North America was an angler’s heaven. He fished many remote places in the southern hemisphere where trout and salmon had been introduced but he always said the fishing in British Columbia, because of the nature and wildness of the land, was supreme. He would almost certainly have told lesser anglers that fishing in any water anywhere was wonderful, and that fishing had nothing to do with the size or number of fish caught. That the important thing was not just the joy of the hunt, but all the other things the angler discovers on the way. The fish was not the reward; it was just a symbol of really getting to understand the nature of the land. I don’t know if he ever got a fish stuffed, but I rather think not. He knew better than I did. In those heady days in the late sixties it seems I caught a fish with every cast, but eventually I too came to understand that fishing was about something far more important than fish.

  Ned said to me as we walked back towards the cabin, ‘Why is it, Grandpa, that fishing is so much fun even though we are not actually catching fish?’

  I told him it took some people a lifetime to work it out and asked him what he thought.

  ‘I don’t know, Grandpa, but I think the water and the wildness has something to do with it because it is definitely not as much fun just walking in a park.’

  I resisted the temptation to tell him that that was because modern parks were really designed for ball games, and instead decided to give him some other facts to think about.

  ‘I think you are right,’ I said. ‘When you were born your body was seventy-five per cent water and as you grow bigger that amount of water will gradually become less, but water will always attract us.’

  ‘How much water is inside an old man like you, Grandpa?’

  ‘I am not sure,’ I said. ‘But I am willing to bet it is still more than fifty per cent. Females for some reason have a little less than men, but I don’t think any humans ever drop below forty-five per cent or they die.’

  ‘That’s probably why girls stay at home more and don’t fish as much,’ Ned replied.

  Thinking about possible future charges of sexism, I tried to steer the conversation in another direction. ‘I am not sure about that, Ned, but one thing I do know is that the girls always seem to catch bigger fish than we men do.’ I told him how Georgina Ballantine caught the world’s largest salmon in 1922 on the River Tay and also how another lady from Victoria caught the biggest fish in the Cowichan.

  ‘That’s not really fair, Grandpa,’ said Ned.

  ‘That’s life,’ I replied.

  We were now almost back at the cabin and we could hear Matthew’s axe. ‘Dad’s chopping wood. That’s not really fair either.’

  ‘Maybe he’s enjoying it; I know I do. But I think he is just making himself useful and giving us a bit of time together so we can catch a fish. Fishing is a bit like cooking; too many cooks spoil the broth.’

  13

  Fishing Little Lakes

  I prefer to fish flowing water but most freshwater anglers confine their fishing to the still water of ponds and lakes. Many anglers prefer to sit and contemplate the water and this is much easier for landowners to control. It is a very different kind of fishing. There is little exploring of new country, except when plumbing the bottom of the lake, and it is not nearly as energetic. The fisher remains in a comfortable spot and waits for the fish to come to him. I always want to see what is around the next bend in the river as well as find out what is in it.

  Before the days of heavy regulation, most anglers preferred to fish rivers. In my view, it is only when a fisherman gets really desperate that he fishes lakes.

  The problem with lakes is that anglers have to rely more on luck than skill. Experienced anglers don’t like this because they like to predict where fish are lying and cast to that particular spot. In lakes that is not possible because fish behave quite differently. For any fish it is more efficient to lie still in a protected place in a river and capture any food that is swept past. Causing lots of jokes amongst non-fishers, anglers like to refer to a spot like this as ‘a good lie’. These ‘lies’ do not exist in ponds and lakes because in still water fish must keep moving in order to make the less-oxygenated water pass through their gills.

  As a boy in southern England I preferred to fish rivers, especially the clear streams that flowed out of the chalk. But as all of them were strictly preserved, I was forced to poach. With my long bamboo rod tied to the crossbar of my bicycle I searched the English countryside and fished every piece of water I came across. I even fished a flooded bomb-crater on the edge of the local airfield during the Battle of Britain. I waded in bare feet right under Spitfires that were taking off. Amazingly, I caught my first pike there, even though this particular hole in the ground had only been there a couple of months. I cut my foot rather badly on some debris under the water so I limped back to my bicycle and painfully made my way home. I left my little jack-pike in the new pool to grow bigger, although what there was for it to feed on I had no idea.

  A kilometre or two further up the road was the Hainault Lake and I fished that regularly for rudd and perch. It was a popular spot and had been a fishery since Norman times. The rudd often fed in shoals near the surface and were a delight to watch and catch. They are beautifully coloured fish with rich red sides as the name suggests. The perch were less common but perhaps that was because they knew I liked to eat them. There were also quite large pike in the lake, which ate the other fish and occasionally pulled under a duck or a coot, but I never caught one of those. If I had hooked an adult pike I wouldn’t have been able to land it with my rod as I didn’t have a reel. Older and more experienced anglers told me that pike spawn were transferred to places like my bomb crater on the feet of ducks, and that was how I was able to catch a baby jack in such an unlikely place.

  Once, before the war, I fished Hainault Lake with a somewhat heartless f
riend. As his float gently wobbled he struck rather clumsily and his hook pulled out a fish’s eye. Having lost his last maggot on the strike, and being quite unmoved by this event, he then used the eye as bait. A few moments later he caught a one-eyed perch that had eaten its own eye.

  There are countless lakes in Canada, more than in any other country, and most of them are on the great Canadian Shield, the world’s largest area of exposed glaciated pre-Cambrian rock. It is part of the planet’s original crust and the retreat of the ice sheet at the end of the Pleistocene left it covered with more than a million lakes. I canoed across about half of it once, an expedition that took a couple of months. I had to abandon my voyage and fly out because winter was coming.

  The journey filled me with admiration for the pioneers and the handful of native people I met on the trip. The fishing was amazing. Whatever fly or lure was attached to my line was grabbed almost immediately by a fish. More often than not it was a pike, but walleye and brook trout were also common.

  The Nehalliston Plateau in central British Columbia is another wonderful place for lakes, with perhaps ten thousand of them left by the melting ice. These lakes are unique because they contain only trout. Many would argue that this plateau has the best trout fishing anywhere on the planet. Lakes are not common in the far west of the province because there the land is drained by straight, fast rivers.

  The time had come for Ned and me to fish a lake. We had no canoe so the lake we chose to fish was the small three-acre pond not far from the cabin I had spotted walking back from the canyon the day before Ned arrived. It was surrounded with rushes and there were not many gaps where an angler could comfortably fish. The tiny side feeder of the main river had been dammed, probably about eighty years ago when this lower part of the valley was being logged and the water used for fighting fires.

  There was one of those cast-metal signs with raised letters that Canadians do so well on the access path. It stated the name of the lake and it said fishing there was reserved for handicapped anglers, senior citizens and juveniles. So Ned and I were permitted to fish. It was much easier to fish from the dam itself but Ned and I chose to wander through the rushes and find our own quiet places. In the still water of these ponds it is easier to see when fish rise to the fly. Ned had noticed some rises further up the lake and had picked a place; but the fish only rose occasionally and were out of reach. I made a few casts from another spot, putting the fly out quite a long way but didn’t have any success. Actually I didn’t want to catch a fish because I wanted Ned to succeed before I did, so I spent more time looking at the water and fiddling with my tackle.

  After we had been on the water about half an hour a pick-up truck arrived and a man in his forties got out and started casting from the dam. He obviously wasn’t handicapped, a senior or a juvenile but it wasn’t my job to point that out. He seemed quite a pleasant person. He said his name was Lorne and told me he often stopped at this lake on his way home from work. He showed me his gear: a spinning rod with a fixed-spool reel filled with thin nylon. He said he usually made a dozen or so casts from the dam and often caught a fish. Mostly he caught brook trout. The pond had been stocked with this eastern American variety of trout because they were easier to catch. ‘It’s almost infallible,’ he said. ‘You cast out as far as possible; use one of these torpedo-shaped plastic casting aids half-filled with water so it acts like a weight and put a Doc Spratley on the end. If you don’t get one on in less than a couple of dozen casts,’ he added, ‘they are not biting and you go on home.’

  I told him I should have known the Doc Spratley was a good fly for I remembered a friend having a lot of success with it in this valley forty years ago. I then thanked him for reminding me of its existence and said it was good to see the fly was still popular in this neck of the woods.

  I didn’t tell him that once Big Arthur took to fly fishing the Doc Spratley was his favourite fly, and I certainly didn’t say that any other fly would probably have worked just as well when whacked out into the middle of the pond. Instead, I just smiled. He spent less than ten minutes fishing, then climbed back into the truck and left. ‘Try again tomorrow,’ he shouted. ‘And get yourself a couple of Doc Spratleys.’

  Doctor Spratley was a dentist from Washington State who was one of the first Americans to fish in British Columbia. The fly named after him lived on around Cowichan Lake. The original pattern was tied on a number six hook, usually a sproat. It had a Guinea fowl tail and hackle and the head was a few turns of peacock herl. Sometimes it had a small wing of brown pheasant feather but the most important thing was the black wool torpedo-shaped body wrapped with silver tinsel. In fact if you left out the unnecessary wing it was almost identical to my fly, a copy of the stone fly tied by the Abbess of Saint Albans six hundred years ago. We certainly do weave a tangled web when we try to deceive something as simple as a fish.

  ‘What was that man talking about, Grandpa?’ asked Ned.

  ‘He was just teaching your poor old grandfather to suck eggs, but I didn’t hold it against him because he was kind and friendly.’

  ‘Do you suck eggs, Grandpa?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I still have a few teeth left, so I usually boil them first.’

  Ned asked me about the strange expressions we use in the English language.

  ‘It’s just a way we say things sometimes, it’s called a metaphor, I think. A figure of speech.’

  ‘Why do you call a thing a metaphor if it’s a figure of speech?’

  ‘You’ve got me there,’ I said. ‘You will have to ask someone who knows more about the English language than I do.’

  ‘Are you still learning, Grandpa?’

  ‘We all are. No one can know everything, but it’s important to try.’

  Ned and I continued fishing the edges of the lake for about another two hours and then gave up. I was not nearly as persistent as my grandson, and I continually allowed my mind to drift away from the job in hand.

  ‘What did you think of the lake?’ I asked Ned as we left.

  ‘I thought it was a very good piece of water,’ he said, and I knew he would be a first-rate fisherman given a little more time.

  We packed up our gear and got in the car to drive back to the cabin. Just as we drew away from the lake, as often happens, the fish started to rise.

  ‘That’s typical,’ I said. ‘We’ve put all our gear away and now they start to rise.’

  ‘Maybe they know we are going,’ said Ned.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said his frustrated grandfather. The amazing thing was the kid was more philosophical about it than the man.

  As we drove away from the lake I realised that I didn’t know its name. It must have been at the top of the metal plate but I hadn’t taken it in. Although I know how to get to a hell of a lot of places that are interesting to anglers, I generally don’t notice the names, and when I do find a place that I love I often refer to it by a special name that I make up. Two that spring to mind are Mystery Creek and the Lost River—they are both great places for fish but neither could support large numbers of anglers so it is probably clever not to identify them. I no longer remember the official names of these two rivers. Visiting them on this trip wasn’t possible, we couldn’t have stayed near either of them for they were both isolated and there was no accommodation.

  Years ago I read Clive Gammon’s angling classic I Know a Good Place and I enjoyed it a lot. Gammon never actually identified any of these spots but cleverly made his readers fellow conspirators. I have always been rather secretive about the ones I know.

  Of course with Ned it was different, and for a moment I thought it would have been better if I had taken him to a fabulous river like the Lost where I often used to get a fish with my very first cast. It probably wouldn’t be like that now because of commercial fishing near the mouth, but it was fished far less heavily than the Cowichan and was rarely visited by anglers. Thinking about it, however, I understood I had done the right thing trying to show Ned how to
fish on this much more popular river. If anything is made too easy it is always less satisfying. I would leave the Lost River for him to discover.

  I started thinking about worms. Angling with a worm, especially when the water is other than very clear, is probably the simplest way to catch a fish. Quite why that is, is hard to say, because earthworms are not the natural food of fish. I have opened the stomachs of hundreds of fish to check what they have been feeding on and have never found a worm inside. Flies by the hundred yes, but never a worm, although I have occasionally found lots of snails complete with shells inside a trout. Oddly, I have never used, or known another fisherman to use, a snail as bait.

  The next time, we decided, it would have to be a worm. We decided to commission Ned’s dad to find some of this more suitable bait. Thinking back, though, we had plenty of bacon at the cabin and it might have been worth trying a small worm-shaped portion of that. It probably would have worked very well. Maybe I had fished too long with flies.

  Fish may not be that familiar with worms although worms obviously do get washed into rivers especially when the banks are swept away in times of flood. Fish have an excellent sense of smell, even better than that of a bloodhound or a bear. Scientists tell us that a bear’s sense of smell is forty times more sensitive than that of a bloodhound because it can smell things from several kilometres away, but this pales into insignificance when compared with various members of the salmon family which can smell their way back to the stream of their birth from far out at sea.