Back from the Okanagan. Still stuffing myself with fresh cherries. Getting hot even in Nanaimo now, so I will head over to the W coast of Van Isle, where it never gets hot. When the rest of BC gets hot and dry, the edge of the continent where the frigid N Pacific meets the hot sunny landmass is smothered in chilling fog and weeping drizzle. If I am lucky, the sun will come out briefly in the afternoon.
But next summer this big tree might be miles from here, washed away in a winter flood.
I visit the aquarium in Ucluelet. Last summer they were just pouring the first concrete. Now it is open!
Right on the downtown waterfront, this is sure to shift some of the huge differential in tourist dollars from Tofino to Ukee.
The hilite is a giant indoor pool in the center of the building, and holds many different kinds of fish and other sea life.
Off to Kennedy Lake now. Biggest lake on Van Isle. Used to generate such huge salmon runs that there was a cannery at its outlet into the ocean – Cannery Bay. Used to be a contender. Just a battered and bruised punch drunk fighter now, after taking so much punishment from the loggers and commercial fishermen during the past century. The pitiful remnant salmon runs in the watershed nowadays are not even large enough for the fisheries department to bother counting. In these "business oriented" times wild salmon are an obstacle to fast money, not the cash cow that first drew Europeans to migrate here.
The big drift logs that come barreling down the Kennedy R, or fall into the lake from the miles of old-growth shoreline, used to just wash up on the beach. With its narrow outlet into Cannery Bay holding back an immense watershed, coupled with torrential winter rainstorms that can dump over half a foot of rain per day over the lowlands, and double that much over the mountains, the big lake will rise and fall as much as 15 ft from late summer to peak flood in winter. When the lake floods back into the forest all the drift logs start floating.
When I first came out to the W coast in 1971 it seemed like you could walk across the lake on floating wood during a big flood. In 1977 or 78 (can’t remember) I was one of the first people given a permit to "salvage" drift logs from the lake. I spent the entire summer ripping into big cedar drift logs with my chainsaw, gutting them for clear straight-splitting shake blocks, and leaving enormous piles of split waste wood piled on the beach. This went on for one summer, after which the log salvage went big time.
The roots were bucked off the big drift trees in summer, and in winter the logs were towed up to the lagoon at the top end of the lake, loaded on trucks, and hauled off to mills in Port Alberni. Hundreds of big logging truck loads of Kennedy driftwood were hauled away, and the lake is a different place now without them.
In those days there were more salmon than now. Kennedy Lake is the only place I have ever been where there were populations of seals that lived their entire lives in freshwater. Sure, they probably swam down the rapids into the ocean to check it out, but why leave this beautiful lake which was full of delicious salmon and trout year round, and where there were no sharks and killer whales to eat your pups? Once I was told by a steelhead fisherman that he saw a seal in Kennedy R canyon, surrounded by snowcapped mountains. Swam up thru miles of whitewater rapids to hunt fish.
The seals in the main lake became scarce over the next decade, as salmon runs declined. In the late 1980s I spent 3 summers select logging on Rocky Island out on the lake. My boss had a big aluminum log salvage tugboat with a V-8 powered jet drive. We would commute to work from the lagoon to the island. In the narrows between the lagoon and the main lake there was a big drift log, and a mom & pop seal had chosen this spot to raise their little pup. Every morn the 3 of them would be laying on this log, which was at a bend in the channel. They got to know us, and would just lay there as we raced by, and wait for the big bow wave to roll in and wash right over them. They seemed to enjoy getting a daily dunking. Those seals are long gone now – not cuz they were harassed by boat wakes but cuz there are not enough sockeye left in the lake to feed a seal family.
In addition to salmon the big lake is home to millions of 3-spined stickleback and peamouth chub, and also to resident and migratory cutthroat trout. RB/steelhead trout migrate thru the lake into Kennedy and Clayoquat Rivers, but I have never caught one in the lake. Today I will launch the motorized pontoon, and fish down the shore along the hwy, throwing a spinner around shore, seeking cutts. It is very slow fishing, only a few bites. I lose a big one around 2 lbs, then catch & release a nice little one about 11".
You can faintly see the red-orange marking ("the orange slash of Jack the ripper", as Richard Brautigan called it) under the jaw and gillplates. This differentiates the cutt from the RB. These are really pretty fish, and they deserve a prettier name.
On the way back home I find an old road that leads down to the river. This is the old "CarBQ" pool – so called cuz there used to be a burned out car here. Gone now, like almost every other free campsite, like the hundreds of miles of logging road I used to drive around and camp on in days of yore. Nowadays you gotta pay by the minute to visit world famous mega tourist attraction Clayoquat Sound. Used to be able to drive your car right out onto and around Long Beach, but now you can’t even stop to take a picture there without paying.
Kennedy R is a beautiful whitewater float in summer, but no one ever comes here, or to Kennedy Lake. I make a campfire and relax by a big pool, looking for risers. There is only one – a trout about 12" rising to bugs over and over. O well, a campfire with fresh Okanagan corn, Okanagan cherries, some gummy bears, and a bottle of Budvar (called Czechvar here in N America) – life could be worse.
I haul the pontoon down to the river. I will fish and explore. There should be sockeye heading up into the river soon, but I see none today. Some German tourists I met downstream said they saw some big fish, so the run must be starting. The CarBQ pool is deep, but the water is crystal clear and it is easy to see 40 ft down to the bottom. No sockeye in here.
I paddle up to the first rapid above. This river would be great fun to run in the pontoon. Wish I had brought my bicycle, so I could paddle down to my bike and pedal back up to my car.
Must come back here again this summer.
Back home now, and time to explore another watershed. The Little Qualicum is the first river N of Nanaimo. I have explored it with Google Earth, and visited a couple spots in person. I drive down to the end of the road and hike down the now abandoned RR tracks to the trestle over the river. You can see the Little Q winding far below.
In the great history of RR boondoggles, the E&N RR is one of the boondoggliest. The bulk of the most valuable land on Van Isle was given away to the richest industrialist on the island, Robert Dunsmuir, in exchange for building a RR that served little purpose other than making it cheaper to haul coal from his mines to ships for export. The cost of maintaining the wood and steel trestles alone is way more than the RR generated in revenue, after the Dunsmuir’s coal ran out. The RR is idle now, after running on subsidies from Ottawa for 50 years. Looking down from this trestle gives me vertigo.
Just nearby is Little Qualicum Falls, a provincial park that I have driven by hundreds of times but never visited. Until today. In the parking lot is a fir with a big burl swelling all around its trunk.
Once I fantasized that burls were a trees attempt to evolve brains, to modify the straight grain simplicity of the cellulose into something so convoluted and complex that it could deal with abstract concepts like Truth and Justice, and Bass Fishing.
The falls are spectacular, but hidden down in a deep canyon.
Almost impossible to capture the mood of the place with my camera.
Ain’t no fish gonna jump up over these falls, so this is the end of upstream migration for salmon and trout in the Little Q
But this is one of only a few rivers on Van Isle that is home to another invasive species, the Brown Trout. Salmo trutta. This is the original trout, native to Europe. The fish that triggered the invention of the entirely new concepts and genres of fly fishing and sport fishing. Pursued by Izaak Walton in the 1600s, now transported and transplanted all over the world. The brownies mainly live above the falls, especially in Cameron Lake. But there is no reason they could not survive a trip DOWN the falls, and establish a population in the lower river. Something I would like to find out.
But I sure ain’t gonna climb down these cliffs to look for fish today.
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