After returning from the Kettle R I completely disassemble the pontoon boat, and remove the airbag from the left toon. This side of the boat had been leaking for almost 4 years now, and I could never find the leak. Always assumed it was a problem with the valve. But when I inflate the airbag and take it up to Westwood Lake I find a tiny hole on the UPPER surface, right hear the tip. May have been caused by a blackberry thorn, or a barbed wire fence? In any case, an instant patch with a tire tube kit is all it takes. Suddenly, for the first time ever, I have a pontoon boat that holds air in both toons!
Last year I got out to Kennedy Lake in October, when the water was already high. This year I want to go in Sept. And I have another mission that I swore to accomplish this year – floating the entire anadromous section of the Kennedy R above the lake. I take load the pontoon hotel on top the car, and tie my bike on top of that, and I am trailering the Bullship along behind. After a late and wet spring and summer, the fall has arrived along with an all-time record drought. We have not had a drop of rain in almost 2 months.
The river rampages out of the Van Isle mountains and pours into Kennedy Lake, the biggest lake on the island. Separated from the ocean by a broad band of glacial deposits, and a single rapids that flow into Cannery Bay in Tofino Inlet, the big lake is only 10-12 ft above sea level at hi tide. A large shallow main basin is connected to two long deep arms that extend into the mountains where the two main trib rivers – the Kennedy and Clayoquat – flow into the lake.
Hwy 4 Rant
The upper Kennedy flows alongside the infamous and horrid and deadly Hwy 4, one of only 2 hwys that extend blacktop all the way across to the W coast of Van Isle. Hwy 4 was built in the 1950s, by BC Forest Products, as a string that was attached to the gift of a goose that laid golden eggs. In the 50s the great rainforests and interior pine and spruce forests of BC being placed under a new kind of management, or "tenure". The old system of private enterprise acquiring tracts of timber for harvest via a process of competitive bidding was phased out. Instead, huge areas of the province were dedicated to corporate owners on rotating 25 year agreements, that never get cancelled, in the form of Tree Farm Licenses. The "publicly owned" old growth forests on the W coast of Van Isle were divided roughly in half and handed over in perpetuity to two giant companies. TFL 46 was awarded to BCFP, and TFL 44 was handed to MacMillan & Bloedel. The smaller, independent, "free enterprise" loggers were left out in the cold.
The wealthiest and most powerful of the "indie" loggers, Gordon Gibson, was also a member of the legislature, where he raised hell. The end result was that the forest minister of the day, Robert Sommers, was found guilty of bribery and conspiracy in the awarding of TFL 46 to BCFP. And the public is left to wonder ever after about what went on in the awarding of the other TFLs? Although Sommers went to jail for a little while, of course nothing was done to invalidate the crooked TFLs, which still form the backbone of the forest industry in BC.
Now the construction of a hwy from Port Alberni to Ucluelet/Tofino on the W coast had already been written into the TFL 46 agreement before the scandal broke. Once the stinky brown stuff started hitting the fan BCFP started feeling like its name was getting dragged thru the mud. There was a 12 mile stretch of road along Kennedy Lake that still needed to be built, but BCFP went into minimalist mode and blasted a cowpath along the rockfaces and gullies that make up the S shore of the lake, threw a quick layer of blacktop on it, and called it good. It is noted for extreme blind hairpin curves, extremely steep grades, near vertical dropoffs, lack of shoulders, wicked snow and ice, and – during rainy weather – waterfalls that surge off the rockface above and land directly on top of your car. The road was not ballasted like a proper hwy, cuz BCFP just wanted to get the pavement on and get out. So instead of ballasting with rock, they just used whatever was handy, like stumps and big logs. This organic material rots over the years. That is why they don’t build hwys like that elsewhere, because if they did other hwys would be like Hwy 4, where the lane you are on is liable to break loose and start sliding down the cliff into the lake at any moment. When I returned from my last trip to the Kennedy last fall, during a huge monsoon event, I had to stop and wait at four different places where the traffic was shunted into a single alternating lane, while repair crews worked frantically to keep the hwy from washing out altogether. For a road that carries this much traffic, this has got to be the worst hwy in BC, if not all of Canada.
The province has spent hundreds of zillions of dollars building hwys all over the province since Hwy 4 was constructed. But this old killer stretch of road still claims victims, and not only tourists. Last year an ambulance driver and assistant, who know the road better than anyone, sent over the edge, into the lake, and died, on a return trip from Alberni during a heavy rain. I have heard of at least 3 loaded logging trucks wiping out in the past couple years. This road is the only access to the mega billion dollar tourist Disneyland of Tofino. It would be a minor and simple investment by a province as wealthy as BC to build a new and decent 12 miles of hwy here. But no one ever does it. It is as if the toxic residue from the original bribery and sleaze surrounding TFL 46 has struck fear into the hearts the entire population. No one has the nerve to fix this sleazy chunk of road built by a company with its hand in the government’s pocket. Better to just throw a quick patch over the washout, and call it good for another year.
&&&& && end Hwy 4 Rant && &&&&
The Kennedy R flows into a lagoon at the top of the lake
The Kennedy R bashes and crashes along beside Hwy 4 down from Sutton Pass for about 5 miles before it is constricted into a canyon and forced over a falls which are too high for any fish to jump. This would be a fun place to cover in the toon, but there are no big fish up here. All the salmon and steelhead and trout migrating up from the lake are confined to the area below the falls, so that is where I will float. Just below the falls, at the outlet of the canyon, is an old logging bridge. The natives have built a platform here, and strung a tight wire up the canyon. They have a little electric winch rigged up so people can get strapped onto the cable and pulled along the wire, hanging over the pool. This is called a zipline. This is what the younger generation does for fun nowadays.
I want to launch from here, so I stop to talk with the zippers. I tell them that in the old days we used to get a chokerman to drag a strawline up the canyon and spike it onto a stump. Then we would pull tight with a grapple yarder, chomp on the strawline, and zip up and down the canyon hanging on by just by our teeth. But the kids of today are not interested in old fuddy-duddies like me.
The Kennedy R flows into a lagoon at the top of the lake. I carry the pontoon, along with camping and fishing gear, down to the river at the zipline, and then drive 5 miles down to the lake. It is glassy calm in the lagoon, looking up towards Mt Maitland along the N shore of the lake.
Then I hop on the bike and pedal back up to the zipline. There are a few customers zipping when I arrive.
This is adventure in the great outdoors!
There is a second platform at the upper end of the zipline, where the canyon walls start to narrow. Here you can see somebody on the platform, waiting to get zipped back.
I carry all my gear down the rocks, and load up the pontoon hotel.
I have been warned by the zipline people that there is a bad run of boulders below the canyon. Are you sure you want to go thru with this? I tell them that I canoed this same part of the river years ago, and I know I can make it. Off I go!
After the long drought there is hardly any flow in the river. A gentle W wind pushes me right upstream to the mouth of the canyon.
The river is low and clear now, but it is not uncommon for these mountains to receive 8, or 10, or even 12 inches of rain in a single day in winter. And when that happens enormous amounts of water came raging thru this spot. Here you can see a drift log jammed 40 ft up on the canyon wall, relic of last year’s high water.
Eventually the river gets narrower, to the point that the entire Kennedy R is compressed between vertical walls so close together that I cannot extend the oars in my pontoon boat. This is as far up as I can go. I have been making casts with a single barbless spinner, but there is not a fish to be seen in the crystal clear deep blue water. Further up the crevice changes direction, and there is current flowing around the bend into the deep still pool. I hook a big trout at the inflow, a beauty cutthroat about 18", dark and lean. This is a resident fish to be sure, not a searun from the ocean. The big cutt spits the lure and is gone. Oddly enough, this turns out to be the only fish that bites during my entire trip downriver.
Rowing back downstream now, the big pool shallows out over a long run of huge boulders. This is ideal fish habitat. Should be loaded with big cutties coming up from the lake and ocean to feed on the eggs getting laid by the thousands of sockeye salmon that should be in the river. But there is not a single trout or sockeye here.
The big river is a steady and dependable worker, always focused on performing the job it was hired to do: tearing down the mountains of Van Isle and distributing the resultant rubble downstream and to the W, towards the ocean. When the river is raging down the canyon during a flood it has enormous power, enough to snap huge tree trunks like matchsticks, and push around boulders the size of cars. As it leaves the confinement of the canyon walls it spews this erosional debris all over the floodplain. Below the canyon the gradient is still so steep that all the smaller rocks and gravel are washed away, and the channel is filled with huge boulders. I have pulled up on the bank on this pic, looking down at a boulder washboard that begins here and extends out of sight downstream. The jagged crest of Hidden Peak towers in the distance.
Well, the party is over, and the grunt begins. I have never been on the river when it is this low. A month ago when I was here last I could have skated right over and between these boulders in the pontoon boat, and had a fun time doing it. But now there is not enough water to go over them, or between them. There is only one choice – get out and wade, dragging the loaded toon along behind, between the boulders when I can, and over them when I can’t. This is no fun, cuz if you step off an 8 ft boulder you might be stepping right into 4 ft of water. And it is harder on the boat than it is on me. With the huge load of camping gear the toon is much harder to drag over rocks than it is when I am traveling lite.
It takes a couple hours, but I finally drag the boat and myself out at the end of a solid mile of boulders, during which I was never able to get out and paddle. Looking back up at the pile of rocks I just came thru, I hope things get better downstream.
I have had this pontoon boat for 4 years, and treated it pretty rough along the way. But I have done more dragging over wet rocks in the past few hours than I did in all the previous years. The added weight of the Pontoon Hotel does not help matters.
Even tho I am right next to the hwy, and there are old clearcuts all around, there is still some spectacular scenery. This pic is looking downstream to Cats Ear and Mackenzie Peaks.
After the long drought there is still a patch of snow around the peaks.
Downstream from the huge spill of boulders I ran down below the canyon I start to see sockeye in the pools once again. These fish are further along in their metamorphosis from fearsome predator to reproductive machines. They have rototilled hundreds of acres of riverbottom, like Illinois farmers planting corn. But the seeds they are planting are bright red and perfectly round. Now if I was a salmon I would pick the best spot to lay my eggs – in the tailout of a big pool. But these choice spots were already used by the first fish that spawned. Rather than re-dig in the primo areas, and lay waste to the millions of eggs already laid there in recent weeks, the sockeye seem to have some kind of code of ethics about this. The very best spots now seem almost empty of fish, and the fish spawning now are doing so in much more marginal habitat.
The salmon frolic in the shallows. Party hardy fish! You will all be dead in a few weeks.
I keep hoping that the riffles will get deeper as I head down. As the river gets bigger and slower it should be easier to float right? Not so. The Kennedy watershed was ravaged by ruthless clearcut logging during the late 20th Century. Huge landslides washed what normally would have been a thousand years of erosion into the river in a matter of decades. Today’s river flows thru this gravel as well as over it. And during low water there may be more water running under the rocks than over it. The further down I get more I have to drag the toon over wet rocks.
Getting towards evening now. I am about a mile and a half down from the launch site, and I start looking for a beach to camp on, but there are none. The river is still so powerful here that anything smaller than a bowling ball is swept away. Finally I come to a big pool, with a giant pyramid of solid rock projecting up from the middle. The rock splits the current, which spits up a gravel bank on one side. Flat level ground with no boulders! I will camp here.
I build a fire against the big cedar drift log, and set up my tent and lounge chair. One minor problem here. I am not the first visitor. The previous visitors were not very polite, and they left piles of poo all over the gravel bar. I must scrape away piles of fresh bear crap in order to set up my tent on the flat spot. Don’t they know they are supposed to shit in the woods? Well, they are going to have to pick another spot for their salmon smorgasbord tonite, cuz I am claming this spot for the Pontoon Hotel.
Unlike a month ago, the sockeye here now will not bite on anything I throw at them. Interested only in spawning now, they will not even turn and look at a shiny spinner or spoon. Just like a month ago, and every other time I have been here when the sockeye are in, there seem to be no lake run or sea run cutthroat trout in the river, pigging out on what one would expect to be a bounty of fresh salmon eggs rolling along the river bottom. Why?
With the good spots already spawned on by the earlier fish, the remaining salmon are going to extremes to locate fresh turf. My pontoon is dragged up on the beach, and there are a pair of sockeye spawning in 8-10 ft of water just beyond it.
In this deep pool patches of the bottom are rototilled by spawners wherever it is less than 12 ft deep, and there is current upwelling thru the gravel to provide fresh water and oxygen for the incubating eggs. This pair of fish are still on their spot the next morn.
As I am sipping coffee and loading the Pontoon Hotel back on the boat, a dipper comes dipping by. These drab birds, about the size of a robin, make their living by walking along underwater in rivers, eating bugs that live on the rocks.
Loaded up again, and heading downstream. The earliest of the spawners are also the earliest to die. You begin to see their carcasses shimmering on the bottom in the deep clear river. Like ghosts.
I get down to Kennedy Lake. I have proved my point: the Pontoon Hotel is feasible, just not much fun when there is no water to float it. Instead of destroying my boat just to prove I can make it, I decide to bail on the rest of the trip, tie up the toon, and walk 5 miles down to the car. Waste a couple hours, and save a boat. There I hop on my bike and peddle 7 miles back up to the zipline, retrieve the Volvox, and head back down to pick up the toon. This would be a great float in the toon if there was another 3 inches of water in the river.
&&&& &&&& &&&&
Now I am back down to Kennedy Lake, launching the Bullship, getting ready to head across to my sacred fall campsite at the Big Hollow Cedar. It is a pretty evening there. The level of the big lake is way down. When I fled this spot last October the water was only 50ft from my campsite, and rising. But tonite I cannot get the boat closer than the length of a football field.
The long beaches on the big lake used to be covered by driftwood, everything from windrows of fine, ground-up dust to huge full trees over 10 ft in diameter. There were thousands of big logs floating in the lake in winter, and at times it seemed you could almost walk across the lake on floating wood. In the late 1970s I was one of a few people allowed to "salvage" some of this driftwood for commercial purposes. Over the course of a summer I methodically marched along about a mile of beaches, gutting the big cedar driftwood logs with a chainsaw, extracting clear (no knots) straight-splitting 18" blocks and piling them on the beach. In Sept I loaded all my shake blocks across the lake and trucked them to Port Albion, where I used them as a wooden bank account, splitting and selling them for roofing shakes.
At the time I was aghast at the horror of the clearcutting going on all around Van Isle, and I felt like a hero cuz I was producing quality wood products without killing trees. In retrospect, gutting these big cedars for shakes was a gyppo way of going about it. After that summer it was not allowed any more. Instead the big logs were towed up to the top end of the lake, loaded out onto logging trucks, and hauled off to Port Alberni. Now they are gone, except for the occasional new one that washes down Kenney R into the lake. Almost all the driftwood left now is small junk, with no commercial value.
There is an old cedar on the beach here, sawn into with parallel cuts 18" apart. Since I was the only one cutting 18" "barn shakes" in those days, these cuts were undoubtedly made by me, in a previous incarnation, back in 1977 or 78 (I forget which).
I removed one block and tested it. This tree is rotted out in the middle and hollow, like many a cedar. No $ in this log, so I was off to another. The space where I split the block out now makes a perfect little seat, where you can relax and look out over the lake, with your camera and flask of brandy (if you should have one) handy beside. After more than 30 years my hard work has created a tourist facility.
Back out on the water now, looking N, you can see a green peninsula in the middle of the shoreline that separates the long and winding outlet channel to the sea, on the left, from Clayoquat Arm on the right.
Both the Kennedy and Clayoquat Arms are ancient inlets of the ocean, now separated from the saltwater by a pile of glacial spill.
There is a bridge over the narrows where the channel runs out, and another over Clayoquat Arm. This area was often the focus of the protest fury that raged against the corporate clearcut loggers here around the turn of the last century. The Clayoquat protests were the first big, nationally publicized ones in Canada, and among the first in the world. Protesters from far and wide would line up at these bridges to be arrested, while the logging trucks waited at idle for the road to be cleared, each side hurling vile insults at the other, and the squads of RCMP where were on hand to preserve order and haul protesters away.
Both bridges were made of wood timbers laid on top of log pilings in those days. Until, at the height of the protest frenzy, the Kennedy R bridge was set afire and burned by arsonists, who were immediately caught and charged by the RCMP. This incident did a lot to split the protest movement. Many of the protesters against clearcutting were appalled by the concept of brotherhood with arsonists.
The protests are ancient history now, along with the brutal enormity of the clearcutting that was going on back then. The bridge has been rebuilt with a steel deck over the old pilings. If you continue under this bridge you follow 5 miles of winding, stagnant channel to a rapids that empties out into Cannery Bay and Tofino Inlet.
The lake has got to be full of salmon returning to spawn, but there has been no sign of them so far. Other than the Kennedy, and possible the Clayoquat, R none of the tribs to the lake have enough water in them right now to cover a salmon’s back. So they must be hanging in the lake, waiting.
I know of a creek near here. At this low water it is hard to push the Bullship over the mudflat to get in to it. I know there is a deeper hole where the creek pours into the lake, I throw my spinner across the hole and bingo! A bright silver coho, leaping and ripping around, pealing off my 6 lb test line. A perfect C&R. Note that there is NO RETENTION of wild salmon in the Kennedy Watershed.
Whereas many S Island lakes are a roaring madhouse of ski boats and jet skis on a day like today, I am the only boat afloat in 10 miles worth of Clayoquat Arm. There are little islands everywhere. Some have trees, and runted little forests. Who knows but that there might be ancient civilizations of tiny people living on these rocky outcrops? Does anybody ever stop to check? Not me.
Further up now, approaching to old sockeye spawning beaches. They used to have a sockeye hatchery here in days of yore. Nowadays the wild salmon are a threat to the big salmon farming feedlots, and the feds would probably prefer to see them disappear entirely like the buffalo, to make room for Progress. But they are not gone entirely, and even if the beach spawners are getting rare there is rumored to still be a fairly strong run of sockeye heading up Clayoquat R into Clayoquat Lake above.
In addition to islands large and small there are also a lot of rock pinnacles rising from deep water up to just under or above the surface, depending on the lake level that day. Since this lake rises and falls by up to 15 ft or more in a year, this means there are lots of rocks to beware of in a boat. I am speeding along outside the old sockeye beaches now, and outside of a couple rock outcrops coming out of nowhere, about the size of the roof of a house, black and bare with no vegetation, cuz they are underwater all year except now. On one rock are a bunch of big round black boulders. But boulders they are not! They start moving. This cannot be, but is. They are not boulders, they are seals, or sea lions, sunning themselves in the middle of this freshwater lake, before heading out to feast on sockeye.
I knew there used to be seals in Kennedy Lake, but I didn’t know any were still here, especially after so much demolition to the salmon runs. I ease the boat off the plane, and grab my camera. The seals are all looking at me, but not moving. But as soon as I point the camera at their rock they slide into the water one after another. Gone. I wait around for 5 minutes, and they finally resurface out in deeper water, then slip back under before I can get a pic. They have lost their chance to appear in the basstravaganza.
Farewell my old friends. Good to see you again out on this beautiful lake.
Soon I am approaching the top end of the a lake. In the distance you can see the huge, nearly vertical rockface that backs up Clayoquat Lake behind it. Clayoquat R runs down to the beach here on Kennedy Lake. There are a couple locals with a baby who have come up while I have been puttering around, and they are fishing from shore at the beach with the river enters.
I fish the mouth of the river, which has been known to be good. There is only a single nice cuttie to be had here today. I get out and walk upstream. The river is very low, and the big pool above the lake is full of sockeye.
These fish do not look so far advanced into the spawn as the Kennedy R fish I was paddling over yesterday. I throw a spoon over them, and get an occasional head nod, but no bites. In the deepest spot I let the spoon sink to the bottom, and suddenly, kachunck, I am into a big sockeye with and ultralite rod and 6 lb test line. After a long tussle I take a pic and release it. Another beauty sockeye, around 10 lbs. Not silver, but still a lot brighter than the sockeye the natives were harvesting in the Okanagan.
The rest of the river is too low to hold fish at this low water. I toy with the idea of hiking up to Clayoquat Lake a mile upstream. But I have a sore foot, and it is getting later in the day. Some other time. Instead I head back down to my campsite at the big cedar. Here is a shot looking across Clayoquat Arm to the steep, unlogged W shore.
When the various government ministries allowed log salvage on Kennedy Lake they did not allow it in Clayoquat Arm. No doubt most of the really big and hi-grade cedars have been spirited out by beachcombers when nobody was looking, but there are still some impressive pieces of wood on the shore here. This is a big cedar drift log, over 6 ft in diameter at the butt, with a dramatic spiral twist to it.
I have never hear of anyone who has an explanation for why one tree in a hundred will grown to look like a candy cane, while all the others around it are straight.
This is the butt of a big cedar that fell over onto the beach. Note the size in comparison to my 13.5 ft boat.
By evening I am back in my lounge chair cooking a big steak over big fire outside the big cedar. There is still time to fish, and I catch a few nice cutties, but no big ones.
Next morn I load up and head back to the boat launch. Looking back across to Laylee Island and Mt Maitland here. There is often a school of 500-1,000 gulls hanging around this part of the lake. What are they doing here – feeding on something, or getting away from predators on the ocean only a few minutes away?
On the way back I drift down along the hwy shore, throwing casts into a few good spots. Not much here for trout today. I come to the mouth of Thunderass Creek (changed from the loggers original name to the much more politically correct "Thunderous" Creek on the hwy sign). There is a local fishing there, and big salmon are rolling occasionally just off the mouth. These are not sockeye, they are cohos waiting for rain so that they can swim up the creek and spawn there. The local guy says he has caught a few trout, but that the salmon will not bite. They never bite. I tell him I know what they will bite on, and I tie on my killer sockeye spoon. A few casts along the edge and I am fast into a big leaping buck of a coho, over 10 lbs, vaulting in great parabolas along the shore. After a long battle I get it near the boat before it shakes the single barbless hook. Faretheewell, finny friend. May you meet the girl of your dreams and make many copies of your silver selves.
As I load out I have fantasies about coming back after the first rains. But alas, it is not to be this year. The long and record drought extends deep into October, when it is crashed by a monster low pressure system that floods the whole western world
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