"They don’t give a shit … they just throw all the small ones away."
Or … "They catch so many that they dump the ones they don’t want or can’t sell back into the lake."
Or … "Their nets are really crude and lots of fish get away.Then they die from the stress of escaping from the nets."
Now I know that there used to be lots of sockeye around here. But I also know that they were nearly extinct here a few years ago. The tribal groups along the Okanagan river in both Canada and the US have been partnering to bring the sockeye back. Twice in recent years I have run into Okanagan Nation Fisheries staff out after midnite, netting and counting sockeye smolts (juvenile salmon heading out to sea) to get an estimate of outmigrating juvenile populations. Twice this year already I had been approached by OK Fisheries personnel who were out doing surveys of recreational fishermen. They seemed to be very polite, and knowledgeable, and dedicated to helping rebuild the ancient sockeye resource. Why would the natives treat the resource so crudely as to waste hundreds or thousands of adult spawners?
As I loaded my pontoon boat back on the car that evening I was talking to another tourist who was driving by, telling him it did not make sense to me that the natives would lay waste to all these fish. I was describing to him how the OK Fisheries group was working to bring sockeye back into Skaha Lake, where they had been exterminated completely. A local guy happened to be walking by behind us, and overheard me.
"Oh bullshit!" he said. "I have been living here all my life and there have always been sockeye here. The goddam Indians just slaughter them and throw away what they don’t want. And now the whole park stinks!" He went ranting off down the road, blathering on like Rush Limbaugh about things that – I suspected – he knew nothing about.
If the fish had been netted why did I not see any gillnet marks on them? And why were the dead fish all concentrated in this one spot? If the natives were throwing the small ones away, why were all the dead fish I saw full grown silver adults 3 – 5 lbs?
Seems more likely to me, as I said to the other tourist, that we had a terrific heat wave this week, and some of the sockeye got stressed out in the warm waters of Osoyoos Lake. Oso Lake is said to be the warmest lake in Canada, and sockeye are a coldwater fish. This year’s run happened to return just in time for a near record heat wave. I suspected the hand of Mother Nature - who can be a cruel bitch at times if you happen to be a salmon trying to survive in BC – instead of native nets.
So while I was home I looked up the native fisheries group on the internet. They are part of an organization called Okanagan Nation Alliance. I called them from Nanaimo and had a great talk with a guy on their staff. Turns out that the southern half of Osoyoos Lake is very shallow. Just a huge flat puddle in the desert summer sun. The northern half of the lake is deep and cold, but the returning July sockeye must race across the south half of the lake and get thru the narrows into the cool oxygenated water of the north half before they die from stress and oxygen depletion. In years when a big run coincides with a heat wave some of them don’t make it.
Now these fish are already stressed long before they reach Canada. Dams and other water quality issues have nearly exterminated the once great sockeye stocks in the Columbia R. In fact (the fisheries guy tells me) about 80% of all the sockeye remaining in the vast Columbia R watershed are born in the pathetic remnants of the OK river here in BC. Only 10 years ago the entire OK river sockeye return was down to only a couple thousand fish. But, due to a combination of better ocean conditions and habitat restoration and stocking efforts by the OK Nation Alliance fisheries people, this year’s run is projected to be the biggest since 1933. There are certain to be over a quarter million, probably closer to a half million silver sockeye swimming up from the Pacific Ocean thru Oregon and Washington to spawn in the sunny OK Valley in BC. These fish have had to swim up past half a dozen huge dams on the Columbia, and another half dozen dams on the OK River in Washington, just in time to get to Osoyoos Lake when afternoon temps were over 100F. It is not surprising that a few hundred of them died from stress just before they made it thru the narrows into the cool waters of the upper lake.
There were no net marks on the dead sockkeye because they were never in a net. They died from stress.
I ask if I can stop by the OK Nation Alliance for a visit on my next trip to the interior. Sure. Their office is in Pentiction.
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Heading out on another Basstravaganza now down into the OK again, pontoon hotel loaded on top the car and my bike loaded on top of the pontoon. I stop by Spotted Lake again. It looks even less likely as a bass lake than it dead last month.
The hot summer sun has evaporated the whole lake into a matt of salty slush. Now I suspected that the No Tresspassing sign might just be a scam by the natives to keep other people from fishing in their secret hot bass lake. But now I am not so sure that there are any bass in here at all. And even if there are, you would have to walk out and chop thru about 3 feet of salt to create a hole into open water where you could throw a cast. And rowing the pontoon on this lake would be really hard.
You can see footprints out on the lake. Could be ecologists collecting samples. Or bass fishermen scouting for the next hotspot?
The weather in BC has been smokin hot for over a month now, but as soon as I get to the OK a cold front blows in on a screaming N wind. It is almost as if there is someone with a giant wind machine, who hates the Basstravaganza, and follows me everywhere I go…
I want to fish Osoyoos Lake, at Haynes Spit, where the park warden told me the wise guys were catching huge LMs. Not today in this hurricane. Maybe I can fish at the N end of the lake, where the "river" (actually and irrigation canal) enters. In addition to the canal, the area immediately N of the lake also contains relic channels from the original OK River channel, plus sloughs and bulrush swamps. This is one of the few places left where you get an idea of what the original OK Valley was like, before it was channelized, diked, drained, ditched, piped, irrigated, planted and converted into ag and residential property.
These sloughs and backwaters connect to the big lake during high water. There are undoubtedly bass in them when the water is high. Not so sure if there are any bass left in there now, in late summer. Inquiring bassminds need to know.
Too windy to fish right now, so I drive around exploring. I come across a strange cage in the middle of nowhere. Turns out this contraption is set up by the wine growers association, or some similar ag group. The idea is to capture starlings, which eat huge amounts of fruit around here and cost the ag community lots of $.
Now I am not one who could ever be described as a starling hugger. They are among the worst invasive species in the world. In fact, I would be in favor of catching them by the millions and grinding them up into fishfood or pigfood, in order to create more ecological space in the environment for the zillions of native species they have displaced. Less starlings is better, is my general rule of thumb.
But this trap seems to be having a bad day. It is baited with a bunch of rotting fruit, and it has attracted birds. But either it did not attract starlings, or the starlings are too smart to go in the cage.
There are 4 birds in the cage, but they are not starlings. They seem to be some kind of flicker or big woodpecker. Hard to get a good view, because they are all freaking out, battering themselves against the screen, pushing their heads thru the chickenwire and trying to force their shoulder thru, squawking and flapping. Not having a good day. I toy with the idea of letting them go, but I am a chickenshit tourist and don’t want to get myself in trouble. Hope somebody comes along soon to let these poor birds loose. Their little babies may be starving at home?
Some locals come by and tell me that the legendary Bob Izumi, Canadian rockstar bass fisherman, once filmed a TV show in here, and they caught a bunch of huge bass. Well, maybe. But that was probably in spring, when the water was up, and the bass were shallow and spawning. The wily bass may be miles away from here by now. Other locals have told me that many of the big SM bass in the lakes swim up into the canals during the hot weather, especially around the drop structures, where there is cooler water, current, and high oxygen. Inquiring minds need to know. But not tonite during a screaming N wind. I give up and leave. Maybe tomorrow morn?
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Well, tomorrow morn is still a screaming northerly, but I head out anyway. The pond is mostly only 4-5 feet deep, never more than 8 feet. Other than a few small carp, there don’t seem to be any fish in it at all. The big bass that may have spawned here in the spring when the water was 6 feet higher are nowhere to be seen. There is only one other possible explanation, that Bob Izumi is a bettter bass fisherman, and therefore a better human being, than I am. This train of thought is unacceptable.
Inquiring minds have found out what they need to know. Don’t fish here after spring.
Before I get the pontoon loaded back on the car I meet the OK Alliance fisheries survey crew again. I tell them I will try to stop by their office in Penticton later today. On the way out I stop by the first drop structure. There are 2 locals baitfishing below the dam. I go up on the bridge over the dam. Yesterday afternoon I watched from here, and I saw, SMs, sockeye, RB trout, suckers, pikeminnows and a huge 25+ lb carp, all hanging around in the fast water above the dam.
I throw my black yum worm as far as I can up into the wind, and right away I am into a nice SM. I get it in to the dam, but now what? It is 18", too big to lift up without breaking my line. But the dams are all fenced off with 7 foot tall chain link fences nowadays. I reel the fish into the rocks near shore, throw my rod down in the grass, and then climb over the fence, get my worm back and release the fish. The guys downstream are fishing for meat, and they can’t believe I let my fish go.
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I head up the valley. The cold front has passed. The sun is coming out again, and the irrigation pumps are driving the water that once flowed down the river out over the benchlands and bottomlands. What used to be desert scrub is now some of the richest farmland in all of Canada. Many fortunes have been created here by water diverted out of the OK River. Yesterday I watched a tractor harvest perhaps a quarter million dollars worth of hay bales out of this field. Soon it will be ready for another crop.
Orchards were the original cash crop bonanza here, but nowadays the wine industry has exploded. A lot of orchard land has been converted to grapes, and a lot of dry banchland has been converted to vineyards. In late August the vines are thirsty.
Around here, one side of the road may be sagebrush and runted prickly pear cactus, and the other may be a lush vineyard with a mansion on the hilltop.
The wind is still puffing a bit from the N. If I park next to the fence the spray drifts over my car. In all the years and miles I have owned this old Volvo this is the first time I have ever taken it to a carwash. When the spray blows over me it feels wonderful, and I am sure the grape vines agree.
I get to Penticton. Turns out that I show up at the OK Alliance office just as they are having a big annual barbeque out back. I have a nice chat with the head of the fisheries section, but I don’t want to hang around and be a bother. Thanks for the good work folks!
I have had a tummy ache for a few days from something horrible I ate before leaving Van Isle. So I eat an entire liter of yogurt for lunch, sitting under the bridge where the OK River flows out of OK Lake. I have heard stories of SM bass in the giant lake. I fished it twice. Never got a bite. But sitting under the bridge I see that the shallows along shore are swarming with juvenile smallies, 2-3 inches long. Well, if there are little ones here there are big ones in the lake above. They are in here all right. You just have to locate the adults.
There used to be wetlands and a winding channel between OK Lake and Skaha Lake, 2 miles to the S. But now the river is confined to a straight channel that flows at moderate speed, and a city of 35,000 people has grown up between the lakes. The channel is a famous place for tubers in summer. There are no rapids or snags or sharp curves. You can hop in at OK Lake and get out at Skaha an hour later, deflate your tube, and hop on the bus to get back to your car. Hundreds of people make this float on some hot summer days. Today there are only a few people floating down. They are using identical blowup Wal Mart Kayaks. They don’t even look where they are going, cuz they don’t have to. There is nothing to run into. All you see is a pair of legs in the air, and a hat where there is a head.
Well, actually there is one thing you can hit – the concrete center pier of the bridge I am sitting under. The second guy that comes floating down is puffing on a big J. All I can see is his feet, and the occasional cloud of smoke from his hat when he exhales. Nice way to spend a breezy summer day, spinning in lazy circles down the OK channel. He is coming right down the center of the channel, not looking, oblivious to the external world. What are the odds that - 5 minutes from now when he gets here - he will hit the pylon?
The closer he gets the more he drifts down the dead center of the canal. I should warn him, but this is going to be too much fun. Just as he is exhaling a big toke he bonks right into the bridge with a jolt. His little rubber boat sticks against the concrete and tilts over as he lurches up to look around. He pushes off the bridge pier and I wave as he heads past.
After lunch I walk up on the bridge and look down. There are big patches of milfoil waving in the current, and fish rising here and there. Hey – there are RBs in here. The biggest one looks to be about 14-15", feeding furiously just below a milfoil bed upstream from the bridge. Every few seconds it charges out and captures a bug, patrolling an area about 15 feet wide. Other smaller trout are rising upstream. I head over to my car and get my little ultralite rod rigged with a small spinner. Sure enough, there are lots of small trout in here, and I catch a few 10 inchers. Little by little I work my way down to where the bigger one was. I drift the spinner down and flutter it over the big trout’s zone. I can see it come chasing out, nose right up to my spinner, but it won’t bite. That is how you get to be big in the world of trout.
Below the bridge where the current slows I catch a 12" SM – the farthest up in the OK watershed that I have ever caught a bass.
+++++
Heading back down along Skaha Lake now, I take a swing down to Kaleden. While the OK Valley is among the priciest and most trendiest residential areas in Canada, the little town of Kaleden has almost faded back into history. I am always amazed by these kinds of paradoxes. Why are there booming cities at each end of this lake, and dead empty buildings in the middle?
This old shell of a building will likely be gone soon. It is in a perfect spot for a glitzy casino or resort hotel.
But in the meantime it serves as a home for vines, if not people.
It is too late to start floating down the canal today, so I head back up to Sawmill Lake where there is a pretty and free campsite and big trout. But the bite is tough. Two boats are out in the evening, and neither get a bite. I can hear the guy in one boat, who has been staying in the same area, talking to the other boat. Turns out the previous time he came here a 5 lb RB screamed off with his fly, and pulled his flyrod overboard. So he is not only fishing. He is also dredging in the hopes of snagging his lost rod, also with no luck.
I go out in the morn. There are a few nice fish rising, but they are way too smart to be fooled by crude bassdude to flyfishing. This is a really pretty little lake.
There is a young buck mule deer browsing along shore, directly in front of the pine on the left of this pic.
And a doe wading along near me.
She is not much bothered by my pontoon.
Time to check out this rumor I heard about big smallies that hang out in the OK channel above Vaseux Lake. Between Vaseux and Skaha there is a lot of undeveloped river bottom, and pieces of remnant natural river channel from the days before the OK River was turned into an irrigation ditch. Here in overview you can see the new canal, and the old original relic channels and sloughs. Must have been a different world back then.
Down by the river again I pass by the dam at the outlet of Skaha Lake. There is a native guy here, fishing for sockeye. He is fishing for food, not for fun or cosmic enlightenment, as part of some idiotic Basstravaganza. I go down to watch, and bring along the spoon that worked so well for me for sockeye in the Kennedy R. Maybe I can give him some tips on sockeye fishing?
Turns out he has an even better lure – a huge triple hook with a big lead weight in the middle. With this lure the fish bite even when they are not hungry. Pretty soon he hooks a nice sockeye under the dam, and reels it in. This one bit with its belly.
This type of lure is not recommended for catch & release fishing.
I head down past 2 more dams, or drop structures as they are called here. Below the third dam it is an open canal all the way to Vaseux Lake. There are schools of sockeye ranging all over the channel. I caught SMs in a lot of places before, but never in the middle of the biggest sockeye run in 80 years.
Just below the third dam there is a big crane dropping huge concrete casings into the canal. They are building a new wastewater treatment plant here. This is either a water intake to or – more likely – an outfall from the new plant.
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Footnote: I am on familiar turf here. My previous job, before I started working for the Basstravaganza, was with the City of Ashland, Oregon. Ashland Creek ran by outside my office, and there were still a few coho migrating into Ashland Creek while I worked there. A couple pairs spawned right in front of my office once.
Gone now. No one has seen a coho in Ashland Creek for a number of years.
In the US, water quality is regulated under the Clean Water Act, and the TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) Program. When Phase II of the TMDL came to pass, one of the new "pollutants" added to the list of items regulated for daily limits was temperature. Because Bear Creek and its trib Ashland Creek are listed as coho habitat, and because the coho is listed as an endangered species under the US Endangered Species Act, there are especially strict regulations under the TMDL. I spent countless hours at meetings trying to help coordinate regional compliance of the TMDL regs. The upshot is that the feds are now forcing the City of Ashland to adopt one of two options: A) Install millions of dollars worth of cooling towers to chill the temperature of the wastewater down to a level deemed acceptable for coho. This option would meet regulations, but do little to help the fish, cuz the watershed has few riparian trees, and the creek will just heat up again from sunshine a little ways downstream from the WWT plant, or B) A much better choice, and the one that the city has chosen: Spend millions of dollars planting riparian trees along streams throughout the watershed. This will provide WAY more cooling in the long run, and also improve riparian and fish habitat in a thousand other ways.
There is nothing like a TMDL in Canada, and no legislation that has anything like the teeth of the Endangered Species Act. If there was ever an endangered species it is the Okanagan sockeye. Millions and billions of dollars are generated by gradually forcing them out of the biosphere here, but no $ that I am aware of coming from the feds or the province to help protect and restore their habitat (other than possible funding to OK Nation Alliance?). Even tho in the OK Valley there is immense opportunity to do so.
Kudos the OK Nation Alliance for the work they have done so far.
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I launch the pontoon and rig up the electric motor. It has been a wet summer, and the channel is flowing much faster than normal at this time of year. Gonna be a grunt to get back upstream.
The channel is 150 ft wide everywhere. The banks are steep and the bottom is pretty much flat, 10-12 feet deep in most places. This place was designed by mechanical engineers for one purpose only – to move water from point A to point B quickly and efficiently - with absolutely zero consideration for fish and fish habitat. There is no "structure". No boulders or sunken logs or dropoffs. No current breaks where fish can rest, no shallows where small fish can run to escape predators. And maybe more important, the modern "river" is completely diked off and disconnected from its natural floodplain. The backwaters and flood channels and oxbows have been separated into another world. This river has about as much complexity as a 2x4, as much personality as Stephen Harper.
Well, it may not be perfect fish habitat, but it does have one thing the wily bass enjoy: Cool clear water, and lots of it. Huge mats of Eurasian milfoil, a ruthless invasive species that has colonized most of N America like an aquatic Hernan de Cortes, roil and swirl in the current. Rooted on the bottom, they grow all the way up to the surface in places. Big patches of bare sand and gravel are exposed below the waving water weeds. Schools of a dozen or more sockeye range around the middle of the channel. Amazing that they bother to swim all the way up from the Pacific Ocean, up over a dozen big dams and another dozen drop structures, to hang out here in this shithole of a river. A lesser species would have just given up and gone extinct. Today I am drifting down over them, rigged for battle with the mythical mega dolomieu.
Now I have had 2 pontoon boats over the past 5 years, and they share the same bad habit. One pontoon holds air and the other does not, and I can never find the leak in the defective toon. But on this trip the leak in the left toon is getting worse, and my foot pedal air pump seems to be malfunctioning too. It should take me 5 minutes to pump up a toon, but now it takes me a half hour. It is getting to be a full time job just to stay afloat.
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Anklenote: After my return from this trip I finally found the puncture in the leaky toon, and patched it. And I found that my foot pump was not scratched, it was cracked in half, and barely pumping when I stepped on it. But this pontoon issue proved to be a huge problem on this trip.
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About 5 minutes down from the launch there is a slight pile of rubble along the bank tht makes the faintest of current breaks, and above it a rare organism along this stretch of river: a TREE. A full grown cottonwood that actually throws a spot of shade on the water! If there are any dolomieus in there this has gotta be the spot. I toss the black yum worm in near the bank. Yes! A nice little SM, about a pound. They are in here. Lurking among all the sockeye and carp. We have a regular United Nations of Fish here people!
This is a strange place to fish. Probably not a dozen people a year fish from boats here. You need lures that get to the bottom fast before the current sweeps them downstream. And you need and anchor, properly rigged with an anchor trolley. There is no way to stop without burning up precious battery power. No curves or slack water. Easy to go downstream, but hard to slow down enough to fish, and gonna be a real pain to get back up to the car against the flow. The leaky toon creates immense drag as it deflates, but the banks are too steep to allow me to get out and pump the toon back up.
In spite of my troubles I catch a about 10 decent SMs up to around 2 lbs. I see some bigger ones over 3 lbs, deep down between weedbeds, but I have no lure that will get down to them. I don’t really care, as long as there is still some air in the toon and some slush in my slurpee I am doing OK. I am learning a whole lot about this strange fishery. Next time I come here I will be much better prepared.
About a mile down I turn around and head back upstream. This turns into a horror show. Pushing the mushy toon upstream is like motoring thru pudding. This must be what it is like to fish bass in Spotted Lake. Takes an hour and a half to get back up to the car, followed by another hour of furious pumping to get reflated, before I can head down for another run in the evening. I want to throw a surface plug, to see if I can encourage any big bass to come up and smash a (fake) crippled minnow twitching on the surface.
But in my travels the other day I stupidly left my little kit of $50 worth of surface plugs behind at a boat launch. Gone forever. So earlier today I scoured the Wal Mart and Can Tire stores for bass lures. There is some fine bass fishing around here, but few people who fish for them. So it is hard to find a decent bass lure anywhere in the valley. There is nothing at Wal Mart, but at Can Tire there is one lure that looks interesting, so I pop for the $7, and become the proud owner of a shiny new SkitterPopper, or something like that. It is Japanese, made by people who are masters at making plastic look like something real. Now I am tying it on to see if I can fool the rumored lunker smallies in the OK channel.
Now I seldom buy a bass lure that is new to the market. There are about 100 new GBLEs (Greatest Bass Lure Ever) invented every year. And this has been true as long as I have been alive. But I like to use old trusty lures invented during the ancient days of the 20th Century. I am determined to throw a surface lure around this channel, and also along Haynes Spit. The SkPop will have to suffice.
I am dubious as I unpackage the lure, but as soon as it hits the water I fall in love with it immediately. It floats, but it is weighted to the rear like a zara spook, so it sits at a 45 degree angle on the surface with its tail hanging down. Like a spook you can "walk the dog" with a zigzag retrieve, but it is much more versatile than the old spook, which is a one trick puppy of a lure. This lure has a hollow, concave face, so you can pop it like a hula popper. If you give it a quick snap just right it will actually spit a little spurt of water out a foot in front of the lure. I don’t care if I get any bites or not, it is fun just to play around with this clever little bit of plastic foolery. But alas, like so many GBLEs, it looks really sexy but it does not generate any strikes.
After another half hour the sun is setting behind the mountain. I am really impressed with this lure, so I am sending vibes out to the bass. Hey! Come on! You gotta check out this hot new lure! Look – it skitters! It pops! Finally the wily bass get the message, and the SkPop gets popped. A nice SM around 2 lbs. Surface hit. Life is good.
About 15 minutes later I come to a solid vertical wall of milfoil along shore growing out of 12 feet of water, with nearly slack water along the edge. This is what I thought was the best looking bass habitat I saw earlier today. I throw the SkPop out in front of the weeds, wait, pop, and the water explodes. A huge bass over 5 lbs grabs the lure on the way up as it leaps clear out of the water. This bad boy means business. But the lure bounces out of his jaws before he hits the water, and he is gone.
Well, that answers one question. Inquiring minds can rest assured that there are giant bass in the OK canal. I get a couple more smaller fish, but the rest of the evening turns into a brutal man-against-nature contest. I need to conserve battery power for tomorrow morn, so I paddle the flabby pontoon back up against the horrid current to the car. No wonder nobody fishes here. Man wins this time, barely. I sleep at the rest area above Osoyoos, with visions of monster smallmouth smashing the SkitterPopper all around Haynes Spit at dawn’s early lite.
+++++
But I get up a little late. The park is still closed, does not cater to bassers out for the dawn bite. So I have to carry the pontoon around the gate and down to the water, and then return for the battery and motor, and then again for oars and fishing gear. This is a perfect morn. The whole lake is a sheet of glass, why did I pick today to get a late start? The place I want to fish, where the park warden said the wise guys were catching big LMs, is on the S side of the spit. But it is too far to carry my boat and gear to the S side, so I launch on the N side. I will scoot a mile around the N side of the spit quickly, and fish the S side before the sun comes over Anarchist Mountain.
After puttering along for a few minutes I make a horrifying discovery. I am in paradise in my pontoon boat on a perfect morn, but I have left my fresh thermos of hot 7/11 coffee back in the car.
%(#$&)^%(!*?%#!?&%#!
This will not do. I was planning to fish along the way, but now I have the Minnkota revved up to Mach III, speeding around the spit to get back to my car before I die from coffee withdrawal. I have nothing better to do as I race along, so I pick up the big rod with the SkitterPopper. I can throw a bass lure a mile with this big steelhead rod, but I am going so fast that if I throw the lure out to the side or the boat I am already way past it before I can start retrieving. I am sitting backwards on the toon, so I must throw the lure back over my R shoulder way ahead of the boat, and then reel in like mad. If I do it right I get one or two pops before I race past, and have to make another cast.
There is no possible way to hook a fish like this, but at least I am getting my lure out on the water, and there is a possibility of generating a strike. As my dad used to say when telling me about the important Facts of Life, you can never catch a bass unless your lure is in the water.
Now I have fished Oso Lake many times over a period of 30 years, during which time I have been able to generate exactly 1 (one) surface hit from a big Oso lake dolomieu, earlier this summer. I have fished this side of the spit many times, and caught quite a few bass here, none over a pound. I am racing along about a cast length from shore, in the area where I normally fish, and throwing the SkitterPopper miles out into deeper water, where no man has ever thrown a topwater before. Well, maybe not, cuz I remember the park warden telling me that the wise guys were fishing topwaters way out from shore. I have nothing to lose, except my life if I don't get some coffee soon.
The second time I throw out into the deep and give the skitter a pop a plane crashes right on top it. No, it is a giant bass blowing up on my lure! I skid to neutral and jerk in slack, but the fish is long gone without getting hooked.
I am stunned. This is impossible. But I need coffee bad so I start racing along again. As soon as I get up to warp speed I throw the SkPop out into the deep again. On the second cast somebody drops a piano into the water, right on top of my lure. No, it is another giant bass! Again I miss the strike.
What now? The impossible has just happened twice. I should stay and fish, but if I do I risk death from caffeine underdose. But a wretched and agonizing death is a small price to pay for the chance to catch atrophy bass. I spin the toon around and creep a bit farther along, and then throw the SkPop way out again onto the glassy lake. Wait… Twitch… Pop … KaBlam! A comet crashes into the water on top of my lure. No, it is another titanic Oso Lake dolomieu crushing my lure! This time I am ready, and I slam back with all 8 feet worth of my steelhead rod. And miss again.
I am really starting to shake now. Is this latte leukemia, or adrenaline? No time to ponder. There is a deep weedbed coming to the surface way out ahead of me. I throw the SkPop out near the weeds, wait, twitch, pop. KaBlooie! An underwater volcano erupts, and a new island appears in the lake. No it is noat an island, it is the back of a giant smallmouth rolling on my lure! I jerk back so hard that I hear the plastic crack in the pontoon seat. The fish is hooked for and instant, then gone.
Now these are giant fish, erupting out of the lake that I believe holds the biggest SMs in all BC. There are big LMs in here too, and LMs are what the park warden told me he saw people catching here. But like a lot of people around here, he probably does not know the difference between SM and LM. I have watched every hit, and I can see that they were all SMs. There are two laser sharp triple hooks hanging off my lure. How can at least one of those points not connect?
I am working a pattern now. I sneak down the shore, throw a couple casts out deep, and if I don’t get bit I go a couple hundred feet further and do it again, About once every 5 minutes the glassy lake explodes where a giant bass crushes my lure.
The next time I am ready, and I do connect. The fish goes berserk, as Oso Lake smallies are wont to do. I motor in to shore, hop out, and finally get this pit bull of a fish up onto the beach. 19 inches of mean. Maybe 4 ½ lbs.
Not huge by the standards of this lake, but tied for my second biggest ever here. When I say that the bass in this lake fight harder than anywhere else I have ever been, I submit this photo of the SkitterPopper after I released the fish. Notice the front triple hook, twisted around like a pretzel. When the SkitterPopper people in Japan designed their hooks, they did not consider the consequences of meetiing up with an Osoyoos Lake smallmouth.
If you mangled a hook this bad reeling in a 5 lb trout or salmon you would probably kill the fish, if you didn’t rip its head right off. But when you do it against an Oso Lake SM all you do is piss them off. I straighten out the bent metal as well as I can. I have already missed 4 out of 5 hits, and I miss 2 more on the crippled hook before I get to the end of Haynes Spit.
The sun is coming up. Dam! Why didn’t I get out early this morn. I missed the first 45 minutes of the dawn bite, and now it is over. There is a guy fishing from shore off the point. Says he has not had a bite. As I creep around to the S side of the spit I tell him that I just had an incredible run of giant fish, but that it will all be over the moment the first ray of sun hits the water. Just as I say this the sun pole vaults up over the mountain, the spit is flooded with radiation, and a big fish swirls off a deep weed bed offshore. I scoot out and throw the SkPop over the rise, and it gets hammered right away. This is probably the smallest of the fish that morn, about 17".
We are looking S here, into the US and Oroville, WA.
I fished along the entire S side of the spit, but I never got another bite after the sun came up. Still it was an historic morn.
Number of big surface hits at Oso Lake, previous 30 years: 1
Number of big surface hits at Oso Lake, previous half hour: 8
Not bad. But I am here with the Pontoon Hotel to float rivers and fish for big trout. Time to leave the wily bass alone and head E
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Next morn I am back at the Salmo R, where I got into huge trout a month ago. Today I have headed up the river from the town of Salmo. As with the area around Grand Forks, there was a big mining boom in this area around the turn of the twentieth century. And like Grand Forks, a lot of the early immigrants were Doukhobors from Russia, via Saskatchewan.
Heading up the valley I come to another old cemetery. Again, this one is in the middle of nowhere, with no houses in sight. Some fritillaries are fritilling around.
There are more species of fritillaries than there are brands of cell phones. I don’t bother to learn them all.
There is a fence around the graveyard, and a simple rubber strap to hold it shut. I walk in to look around. Again, this is an old Doukhobor cemetery. Most of the names end with the letters "off". The whole valley bottom was probably clearcut during the mining years, but the cemetery is surrounded by dark, brooding second growth forest now.
One of the stones is undoubtedly related to their great leader, Peter the Lordly.
Another might be related to me?
I do not touch or molest anything, except at one stone where the wind or an animal has tipped over a small basket of plastic flowers. I set the basket back up and leave.
########################
Kneenote: After returning from this trip and doing a bit of googling, I learn that just past the spot where I turned back on this day is another lost Doukhobor graveyard.
In 1929 the entire Doukhobor community in BC was in turmoil. Only 5 years previous their exalted leader Peter Verigin had been assassinated. Many members of the community wanted to "modernize" and assimilate with the larger Canadian society, at least to some degree. But the radical Sons of Freedom sect fought a fierce rearguard action against those who they accused of "selling out" to the mainstream. Any Doukhobor who built or bought a private house, or acquired other valuable personal property might be a target for arson, or dynamite, or worse, from the Sons.
By 1929 the larger Doukhobor communities seem to have had enough. They expelled many of the Sons of Freedom from their collective communes, and exiled them up here on the upper Salmo R, in the middle of nowhere where it would be hard for them to harrass the good folk in the cities. At a place called Porto Rico (named after a nearby mine) they seem to have created a kind of defacto concentration camp for Doukhobor political dissenters. Some of the Sons who died during this exile to the Salmo are buried in a small cemetery on top of a hill near Porto Rico
From what I have been able to gather, there were no guards or supervision there. Porto Rico was at that time just a remote logging camp where the Sons could live and work, without getting into trouble, after being expelled from the larger Doukhobor community. After a couple years the Sons got tired of this isolation, and simply walked away. Their return to the larger centers of population led to another round of protests, nude marches, and occasional vandalism.
The BC government responded by raising the penalty for public nudity to a mandatory 3 years in prison. The Sons responded with mass nude protest marches, and soon over 1,000 were in custody. But the province of BC did not have a prison large enough to hold them all. So they created a special prison for the Sons on Piers Island. (This is the island directly in front of the Swartz Bay ferry terminal if you are leaving from Victoria.) By 1932 there were over 500 Sons of Freedom men, women and children shipped to this tiny island.
The demands of the Sons – free land without taxation or obedience to any form of government – were not acceptable to the Province of BC. Soon the scene on Piers Island degenerated into the kind of maddening and obnoxious "passive resistance" that the Sons of Freedom were infamous for. The Sons invented passive/aggressive. The men refused to perform any work for their oppressors, so they refused to carry firewood into their own dormitories. The guards refused to do it for them. So they froze their asses off walking around all nite waving their arms to keep warm, until a hard cold snap broke their spirit on this one and they relented, and carried in firewood to light the woodstoves. The women resorted to chanting and screaming in unison, refusing to stand still while being counted, and tearing the numbers off their clothes.
It was expensive to feed all these political prisoners during a depression, so none of the Sons served out a full 3 years sentence. The last were released in 1935.
I am no expert on this stuff, and I would like to learn more. I will have to try to find this Porto Rico cemetery on some future Basstravaganza.
(Hipnote: Love then or hate them, it cannot be denied that the chanting prisoners on Piers Island produced one ot the great rock 'n roll songs of all time:
"Douk Douk Douk Doukhobor
Douk Douk Doukhobor
Douk Douk Doukhobor
Douk Douk
As I walk thru
This world of war
Nothing can stop the Doukhobor!
Douk Douk etc"
As was ever thus it seems for these bizarre and unfortunate people, they never sought or obtained ownership or copyright for this song. Eventually someone else took the song and ran with it, and made millions. But the Doukhobors themselves got not a penny.)
Buttnote: The preceding Hipnote was pure BS. Made it all up myself. Don't care if the Doukhobors get mad at me. They are pacifists. What are they gonna do about it?
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The boom started a bit earlier here in the Salmo than it did in Grand Forks. The RR was driven up the Salmo Valley to connect from Nelson down to the USA in 1893. Within a few years there were big mines running, and giant millworks, and 4 story hotels. All gone now.
The RR must have been deactivated in recent years, cuz there are no tracks on the railbed. I find a tiny road that leads down to the rail grade and the river. Looks like I could just turn and head the Volvo right down the old RR, but it is probably meant to be a bike trail nowadays, so I park and ride my bike up the river. After a mile I come to a big abandoned building. Looks like this was a Kootenay Beer brewery, empty and derelict now with no more trains to feed it. Heading downstream with my rod I park the bike and crash bush to get down to a nice pool.
Where I and catch a pretty bull trout.
There are still fish in the deeper holes and slots, but the giant RBs that were around last month seem to have vacated this part of the river now. Maybe gone downstream into the canyon, or all the way down to the Pend Oreille? I catch a number of nice trout, but no giants. I am glad I did not take the pontoon hotel down this river.
At the same spot where I landed my biggest fish last month I catch the biggest one today.
This one is only 20 inches, 4 inches shorter than the big one I caught here last time. Still a spectacular RB, especially on light line with ultralite rod.
I have given up on my fantasy trip down the Salmo – for this year anyway. Heading back now. I may be able to do a float down the Kettle R, which I have wanted to do for many years. On the way back W I get to Christina Lake at dawn. I will try the SkitterPopper there. After the awesome series of attacks this lure generated in Okanagan, I am beginning to think it really is the GBLE. It is invincible.
But at Christina I only catch a few small LMs in the outflow channel, and one big hit along the lily pad bed. Fishing back to the car. I catch more small LMs along the docks on a worm. This is about the biggest one.
There are big bass in this huge lake. I have seen pics on the web. But all I catch are dinker LMs and SMs. The lake is 25 miles long, and I need to get the Bullship out here again to cover the miles of exploring necessary to target the wily bass. The challenges keep mounting for future basstravaganzas. I will need to clone myself, and the Volvo too, and all the boats. So many bass lakes, so little time. Sigh….
I load the pontoon back on the car. When it is on the car I can pump up the leaky toon with the Volvo’s cigarette lighter, but if I head down a river I am committed to using the footpump, which is getting to be more and more of a pain. A few miles down the road and I am back to Grand Forks. There are roads next to the Kettle R all around here, so it is a good place to float with a leaky boat. I will leave my bike downstream somewhere and float down to it. It is blowing another screaming norther again today. What happened to summer?
On my way into town I pass a motel, and I see a small sign with a pic of a dry fly on it. Hey – a fly shop! There used to be fishing tackle stores in every town, where you could stop and talk to locals who provided accurate advice, and buy a couple lures or leaders or flies. Used to be a store like that in Grand Forks, in fact, cuz I remember stopping there 30 years ago. Long gone now, like the big smelter. Times change, and the fishing tackle nowadays is all sold out of Wal Mart, and their unfortunate staff know almost as little about fishing as they do about the rest of the universe. I slam on my brakes and turn around. Maybe I could talk this guy into dropping me off upstream, and leaving my car at his motel so I could float back down to it?
I enter the motel office. Turns out they have their own little fly shop. Now this is my kind of motel. A lady comes out to meet me. She and her husband are the owners, and it is Lawrence I want to talk to. Lawrence is a big guy, really friendly, turns out to be an avid fly fisherman, and really cool guy.
His motel customers are often people who come here to fish the Kettle. There is a pic on the wall of a guy holding a giant RB. Looks like a Kootenay Lake giant, or a steelhead perhaps. No – it was one of their guests fishing the Salmo, first fish ever on the fly.
I talk to Lawrence about the fishing, picking his brain about the Kettle. He says it is a real sleeper of a river. Most people don’t have a clue how good it is. Could I leave my car here and float back down to your hotel? Sure. And my bike? Sure. Could you recharge my dead Minnkota battery? Sure. And drop me off upriver so I can float back down? Sure. He says that the best fishing is right within the town of GF. I can launch at the border and float down to here, a typical day trip. Too good to be true! I will go have some breakfast and come back later, and float the Kettle!
By the time I get back the wind is horrendous. And Lawrence is not around. Turns out he is a volunteer with Search & Rescue, and there was just a bad accident up the hwy. When he gets back he tells me about another S&R task he was part of earlier this year – retrieving the survivors, and late the bodies, from the horrible mass drowning at Kettle Falls in June. He says that the deal is off. He cannot be party to helping me get out on the river today. It is too windy. I tell him how stable the pontoon boat is, but he knows all about them. Has one himself, and sells them, and replacement toons and parts.
But last year he was floating down the river with his wife on a day like this when all of a sudden huge ponderosa pines started blowing down, crashing into the river from both banks all around them. Well, he has a point here. A 4 foot thick pine tree landing on your head would make it really difficult to cast accurately. There are little tornados of dust spinning around the parking lot, and clumps of dry pine needles sailing out of the trees and swirling around everywhere. But eventually we agree that the worst of cold front is passing, and the wind won’t get bad enough to blow down trees.
The two forks of the upper Kettle join above Rock Creek, and then turn E along the Canadian side of the border to Midway. Here the river turns on a big loop S into the US before crossing back into Canada at Grand Forks. Stressed as it is from a huge list of degradations generated by modern development, there are still lots of RBs in this river. Along the loop into the US the Kettle receives a tributary which is the outflow of Curlew Lake, in Washington. Curlew Lake is stocked with brown trout, and also "tiger musky" – a cross between northern pike and muskellunge. Every once in a while, during floods, Curlew Lake will overflow, and some of the brownies and muskies have been known escape. So in addition to RBs you have a chance to run into a brown or musky. The muskies have been known to make it over Kettle Falls alive, and swim up into Christina Lake, where they scare the hell out of bass fishermen. They can grow big – over 4 feet long – and they look and behave very similar to a barracuda in the ocean. People around here like Lawrence have seen and heard of them, but don’t really know what they are. Oddly enough, Lawrence is obviously very knowledgeable about trout fishing and fly fishing, but seemed to have LM and SM mixed up. We catch the SMs in Christina Lake all around the weed beds, and the LMs where there are rocks. No – it is just the other way around.
The Kettle R crosses from Washington into GF at International Road, which runs along the World’s Longest Undefended Border. Becoming more and more of a misnomer nowadays, and the Homeland Security crowd receive billions of bucks from a bankrupt government while they watch their country wither on the vine. But it is good to see that there are still places where the old US/Canada comraderie still exists.
Looking W down International Road in this pic you can just see the tip of the roof of the US customs house at the border crossing in the distance. The pavement and everything to the right is in Canada. The power poles on the left side of the street are in the US. There is no fence. So I am standing in the USA when I click the shutter on this pic, but I am down in a little dip where the Homeland Security folks can’t see me. Except on TV, with the cameras and motion sensors they have undoubtedly got strung up around here somewhere.
I hop back into Canada after taking this pic, then hit the dust as hot lead starts flying everywhere. No, I just made the last part up.
International Road ends in a sand bank that slopes into the river. The N half of the sand bank is in Canada, and the S half is in the US. The Yanks can’t see down here either from the customs house. In the next pic my pontoon is in the US, but I am standing in Canada. I hop back into Canada after taking this pic, then hit the dust as hot lead starts flying everywhere. No, I just made the last part up.
International Road ends in a sand bank that slopes into the river. The N half of the sand bank is in Canada, and the S half is in the US. The Yanks can’t see down here either from the customs house. In the next pic my pontoon is in the US, but I am standing in Canada.
The current is really slow here, so after I launch (from Canada) I pull a few quick stokes into the US, and sneak in a couple casts. There are no fish in this country, so I head back to Canada and start downstream.
It is still blowing hard, but gusty and squally now. The surrounding ecosystem is mature ponderosa pine, and at the end of summer there are zillions of dead pine needles raining out of the sky. The ponderosas grow their needles in groups of 3, according to an ancient engineering design drawn up before there were even any computers. The river is big and wide, and covered in needles. On a number of other days this summer I have sat on the bank and watched hundreds of nice trout rise to bugs on the glassy surface. But there is no glassy surface today, and the water is covered in pine needles, and there is not a single trout rising anywhere.
Impossible to fish with a fly in these conditions. Not a problem for me, cuz I have brought 2 other spinning rods along as well as my flyrod. But it is almost impossible to fish with a spinning rod and lure today, cuz your line instantly fouls on pine needles as soon as you start reeling in. I am throwing a small brown roostertail spinner with a brass blade. It is an old lure, corroded to green and sanded back to brass, but I like it. I have had success with this lure for browns in other rivers, and – most important – it has a small single hook. I still feel bad about the trout I killed with single barbless spinners in the Salmo R last month, and I think this is about the least destructive spinner I have with me.
Fish or no fish it is a great river to float. I am heading down toward the big Doukhobor cemetery that I visited last month. The river begins a big arc to the right, and as it does it begins to undercut a little bit against the left bank. There are actually trees here, big pines, with roots that hold the bank in place while the current cuts under them. The broad shallow river begins to get a little deeper. Fish on!
Beauty RB, leaps and shakes off. Then another. There are fish here, but you have to wait for the wind to die to down before you can cast. During the gusts you just have to hold your place with the oars. You need an anchor here. Every once in a while the wind drops, and I can get a cast in that does not get fouled with needles. The farther I go the deeper the cutbank, and the deeper the cutbank the more trout there are.
These fish are hyperactive silver rockets. Without exception they leap hi in the air the instant they feel a hook. Most fish shake off after one or two jumps. C’est la vie when you are using single barbless on fish like this. But occasionally I actually manage to land one. These are not hatchery planted RBs like you catch in the lakes on Van Isle. They are all the same - a brilliant color pattern unique to this river, with flashing red gills and stripe. Here is a nice one, about 13".
There are lots this size, and lots smaller. And some bigger. According to my googling about this river, the biggest RB I can hope to run into is probably around 18", vary rarely up to 20". But I am not out of sight of the launch yet and now I hook and lose one about 17, and suddenly I am into a bigger one. The big ones all shake loose. I did not just bend down the barb on the hook I am using, like I usually do to make a hook barbless. I took a dremel tool and ground off every trace of a barb. With my short ultralite spinning rod and 6 lb test line I can’t really handle the bigger fish for long. Plus I am spinning around in the wind and current, coming down a river I have never been on before. But the fish keep coming.
Now I am into a giant. This one is over 20, maybe 3 lbs, leaps way into the sky and shakes off. Hey – this is spectacular. I am going to let the fish go anyway. As long as I get a good jump and a good look at the fish I am happy. The closer I get to the cemetery the deeper it gets, and big trout are charging out from the cutbank, often swooping right under my pontoon. A big problem are the needles, cuz when the line gets between one of the 3 needles in a ponderosa cluster it snags at the base, and you have to reel the whole mess in and start over. I an pulling the spinner in along the cutbank when a big shadow charges out. It is making a beeline for my roostertail. And I can see that this one is not a RB, it is a big brown around 3 lbs. Just then my line tangles in a cluster of needles. I give a jerk, trying to shake the line free, but it pulls right up and gets balled up in the needles. Dam! Ruined my first and maybe only chance at a trutta. I relax and the spinner sinks back, tangled in needles. The big brownie is confused but… what the hell. It charges on and gulps down the whole mess - spinner and a bunch of 4 inch long pine needles. As all trout fishermen know, brown trout are the most intelligent and selective of feeders. It spits the spinner out before I can try to set the hook.
You only get one chance here, and then you are gone with the current. Wish I had an anchor. Wish it wasn’t windy. A little further down a bigger fish chases. If I was fishing from an anchor I could hook these fish, but I drift right down on them before they can bite. This is a huge RB, 24" at least, way bigger than trout I ever expected to see here. At least 5 lbs, where I never expected to find a RB over 2. He is right under my feet now as I drift along in 8 feet of water. I am twitching the rooster up and down like a crappie jig, and the big RB is snapping his jaws like a brush cutter. But he won’t bite.
Soon I am around the curve and into a long shallows. You can go for a half mile on this river, and never find water more than 2 feet deep. One of the results of years of riparian deforestation and floodplain modification. The pontoon is leaking badly, and I have never been here before. Lawrence told me that this is a 6 hour trip. But I could spend 6 hours in that first long run.
In spite of my attempts to disarm my spinner I am still wounding and sometimes killing fish. I can catch a hundred bass with triple hooks and seldom do any serious damage to any of them. But these wild RBs are so fragile that I put the rod down and mostly just float, and watch. Single barbless is just not the answer for these trout streams. I am forced to agree that a river like this one, or the Salmo, should be restricted to fly fishing only, with tiny little hooks that cannot penetrate the brain or eye socket. I need to relearn how to flyfish.
In spite of the fact that I do not fish much of the time, and that I am fishing on maybe the worst weather day of the entire summer, and that there are only a few rises during the whole trip where there would normally be hundreds, and that I have never been here before, I still manage to hook about 50 nice trout. All within the city limits of a town of 4,000 people. One big RB wraps me around a boulder and breaks off. All the while I am listening to CBC radio coming out of the houses of people along shore.
It turns out this is a 6 hour trip if you keep moving. If you slow down, or if you have a leaky boat that is a slug to row, it takes much longer. I have to get back to the hotel before dark. Besides being a good guy, Lawrence is also with Search & Rescue, and I don’t want him to feel like he has to call out the troops to find me. I stop once to try to pump up the leaky toon, but it takes me 45 minutes. This footpump is worn out. (Actually I learned it was broken – after I got home.)
Later in the day the wind dies down, and now and then stop entirely. This is a gorgeous float trip.
I can’t understand why more people don’t quit their jobs, abandon their family and friends, and just go off floating down rivers. It is so cool.
I pass an old watermill, probably an old Doukhobor flour mill?
After I get home I find out that I actually passed a working Doukhobor water-powered flour mill, but I did not notice it somehow. I could have bought a bag of wholewheat flour and hauled it downriver to the Volvo. Next trip I must do this!
I pass a spot where people are cutting down big cottonwoods and dumping them along the bank. I cut down a lot of trees in my time, and lots of big ones. But it always makes me mad when I see people cutting big trees next to a stream.
The RR boom faded along with the mining boom around here, and most have been converted into a paradise for bike trails nowadays. But right now I am floating beside the shortest RR in Canada, the Grand Forks Railway. With a staff of 6 and a single 50 year old diesel freight engine, they shuttle railcars 3 miles back and forth from the 2 big sawmills in town to the still functional mainline on the US side of the border.
Sun going down now, and I am rowing hard. I reach the confluence where the Granby R joins the Kettle, and soon I am back at the motel. Great thanks to Lawrence and Karen. What a wonderful day on the water! I will be back some day, in a boat that floats.
But right now I have a boat that leaks. Must continue heading home. At dawn tomorrow I will be back at Haynes Spit, with a SkitterPopper.
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Today I am on the water early, but it makes no difference. There is still a cold N wind blowing, and the hot topwater bite is history. One good hit only. Very disappointing. I stock up on another big load of peaches and coronation grapes, and head E, stopping at the Similkameen R near Hedley. This river does not look fishy to me like the Kettle, and I get no bites. I see a big bug running in circles around a big boulder.
This is what is called an aquatic invertebrate. It has lived a long time, maybe a few years, underwater hanging on to rocks in current and feeding on stuff drifting by. Now it has crawled out on land, and is about to split open, grow and instant set of wings, and fly away. I would be running around in circles if I was going to sprout a set of wings too. My camera is left about 100m farther up the river, so I grab the bug and carry it up to the camera. All this guy wants is a big rock to run around on – right. It is going to find the highest spot, and keep running around until it splits open. So I put it on the biggest boulder, and it does just that.
I know that I can take my time getting the camera ready, cuz he ain’t going nowhere. When I finally zoom in for a closeup I see that there is another skeleton here – the shell of exactly the same kind of bug, but this one has already hatched into an adult and flown away.
When you have lots of aquatic inverts like this you usually have lots of trout. The 5 lb RB that I saw in the Kettle yesterday has probably eaten thousands of these bugs. They eat little else here. If you have spill of acid mine drainage, or if the rocks the bugs live in are covered in silt, or if the water gets too hot, or if the riffle dries out … the bugs die.
+++++
I get to Princeton, and stop to look at the big millyard there. The economy of BC used to be driven by small mills cutting huge trees. Now it is driven by ginormous mills cutting tiny trees. The monoculture, monospecies, monoage second growth pine plantations are extremely vulnerable to fire and disease. The mountain pine beetles wreak havoc in the plantations, and it is always a challenge for the mills to chew up the timber before the beetles get them. Giant diesel brontosaurus loaders grab truckloads of peckerpoles at a time, and stack them in vast dryland sort storage areas.
I used to drive a 950 Cat loader, moving logs around. One of my favorite movies is Killdozer, in which a bulldozer comes to malevolent life and starts attacking people.
You can’t get a single big board out of these tiny trees, but you can cut zillions of 2x4s.
Lots and lots.
By afternoon I am heading down the Fraser Valley. On a basstravagant whim I turn off and cross the big river at Hope, instead of continuing on to Vancouver on the Trans-Canada Hwy. I have only been down the N shore of the Fraser once, many years ago. The internet has rumors of some LM waters around here, and I must investigate. One thing I like about bass fishing is just the exploring part of it. These fish have been transplanted into a huge range of oddball habitats, and the LMs especially will often settle right in and take over as apex predator. In this respect they resemble some members of another invasive species that has spread all over the world from its origins in Europe, like Hernan de Cortes or Daniel Boone or George Bush.
Here we are looking down the mighty Fraser toward the Gulf of Georgia. At the end of the river, 70 miles down on the extreme right of the picture, is the great city of Vancouver. A place I do not want to go.
Over the ages the big river has wandered all over its floodplain, dumping into the ocean at various places anywhere between Vancouver on the N to Bellingham WA on the S, filling the valley bottom with rich silt. Recently (like maybe the last few thousand years?) the Fraser has been heading out to sea along the N side of the valley, beneath the foot of the towering N Shore Mountains. Humans have diked and ditched and drained most of the swampy bottomland, and now the lush Fraser Valley is by far the richest concentration of ag land in all of BC.
The Fraser floods every year, as it drains out all the snowmelt from central BC. It usually peaks in June and drops all summer, so now in late August there is a lot a dry land where there used to be water. It is like living near the ocean, except that the tide rises and falls once a year instead of twice a day.
The LM is not nearly so picky about water quality as its brother-in-fins the SM. Bad people are said to have been planting LMs in these slough and drainage waters around the N Shore. I want to investigate. At this time of low water the places I see do not look very inviting. Reeking mudholes filled with weeds, surrounded by acres of mudflats. Even if there are fish in there, I am not sure I want to go in and fish for them. Hatzic Lake, and old oxbow floodchannel of the Fraser, looks the same as I remember it from the last time I saw it perhaps 25 years ago. A shallow stinking mudpit. And there is also the issue of traffic.
The closer I get to Vancouver the crazier it gets. It is rush hour now, and once I get in past Mission it gets insane. I have seen enough of these sloughs and slushholes. I will try to find the place called the Pitt Polder.
When big rivers reach the ocean they dump a lot of sediment in flood season. That is why places like Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana and the Fraser Valley exist. They are just big flat piles of mud washed down from the hills. When big rivers flood across tributary valleys they dump annual layers of silt that form and ever-rising dam across the mouth of the trib valleys, which eventually impound big lakes behind them. That is what happened along the N Shore of the Fraser, where a series of lakes are backed up into the mountains. Pitt, Stave and Harrison are the biggest. The whole floodplain between the Fraser and the lakes used to flood, but now the Fraser is contained behind levees, and most of the intervening floodplain has been drained and cultivated.
The S end of Pitt Lake used to simply merge into swamps and sloughs that flooded often. Nowadays a dike has been constructed to form a straight wall is the end of the lake. The Pitt R, which used to go wherever the H it wanted to, is now confined by the dike and shunted over to a defined channel along the W side of its old floodplain. The swamplands where it used to wander and coil are now called Pitt Meadows, flat as Kansas, but with better soil and climate.
The situation at the outlet of Pitt Lake is similar to the one at the inlet of the Kootenay R to Kootenay Lake. Most of the area has been "reclaimed" for cultivation, but a separate area has been diked off near the lakeshore and retained as wetland, for wildfowl and other critters. At Kootenay Lake the diked off area is called Duck Lake, and at the right time it can be a fantastic LM fishery. The diked off area along Pitt Lake is called the Pitt Polder.
At Maple Ridge I turn off the Lougheed Hwy and head N. Good thing, cuz 5 more minutes in that traffic would make me go insane. Suddenly I am in a quiet land of pasture and cropland, driving down little 2 lane blacktop roads. This could be Indiana. Except that in Indiana I don’t remember nearly vertical dark green mountain walls leading up to snow capped peaks, blocking the horizon all around. It is quiet here.
I have spent hours on Google Earth, made screencaps, looked at maps and asked advice from locals. But it is still really hard to find this place the first time you go in to look for it. I had planned to guide myself in here with detailed hi-res GE imagery. But my mini-computer had a mini-crash a while back. After I got back on the road I learned that when the computer rebooted it must have purged GE’s memory bank. Something like what happened to Gobombem when he was installed as prez. It would have been easy to find the place I am seeking if I had live access to the zoomed in imagery I had saved. But now I am lost. On my own, like David Thompson. Well, not quite. I have a map. And a Volvo. And there is a road to the place I am going. And the highest elevation I need to cross is 10 feet.
Along the way I see a guy with a fishing rod getting out of a pickup along the Allouette R, which winds around the flatlands here. He says I am on the right track. He has fished at Pitt Polder, but he says he caught a 2 lb LM right here the other day. First LM he has ever heard of in the Allouette. So he is going to fish here.
There are a couple guys already fishing from the bank, and another truck shows up as I am packing the pontoon over the dike. I ask if he is here to go bass fishing. Yes. Cool! Now I can pick his brain. "But I have never caught a bass before. I heard they are in here, but I don’t know what they look like. Do you know what they look like?" Well, maybe I won’t pick his brain. But I get him to take my pic.
A Chinese guy shows up, in a spanking new 3/4 ton 4x4 with huge mud tires and enough clearance to drive right over my Volvo without scratching it. He is a fanatic bass fisherman, and he is going to ride his bike all around the polder and fish from shore. "My brother tells me that I shouldn’t come in here, because I will wreck the truck on this road."
?
Now we are only a mile off the pavement, on a dead flat graded gravel road, which unfortunately has a few inches of annoying washboard. This guy is from deep in the heart of the city, for sure. Buddy, you should take a ride up to Sawmill Lake. He tells me that the water is really low now. It is about 3 feet higher earlier in summer, and the bass fishing is better then.
The place is very shallow now, seldom more than 2-3 feet deep. The water is stained with tannin to the color of coffee (2 sugars, no cream). There is an open channel along gated road, where they dug out material to build the dike. The rest of the area seems to be marsh covered in reeds. Looks like killer LM habitat, and I throw a yum worm all around, but it seems to be just too shallow. I spook a few fish here and there, and get a few nips. There are small ones in here.
Eventually I get to the end of the channel, at the base of the mountain, where the dike turns 90 degrees to the N. In my memory this was the big pocket of open water I remember from Google Earth. There is more open water here, but no more depth. The sun is setting, but there will be no evening bite here tonite. I turn around and head back down the channel to the car.
A few feet of water here would make a huge difference. There is lots of area, just no depth. After I get home and look at live Google Earth, I find that the polder is divided up into sections by dikes. The place I fished is not even within the section I was trying to find, which is much bigger and probably deeper. There are miles of bassy waterways in here that need to be explored by a future basstravaganza. But tonite, I will make like the geese and head home.
I need to find a way back across the Fraser, but I am terrified of getting lost in the metro traffic. The Chinese guy is really keen on talking bass as we load up back in the parking lot. He has caught 1 bass, about 9", which he has in the bucket he took along with him. He offers it to me. Well, no thanks, I let them go, and besides, I am on the road with no ice or cooler. He tries to give instructions about how to get across the river. It is really easy, just go over the big new bridge. His directions are so detailed that they are longer than the entire Basstravaganza. This will not work, so he agrees to show me the way to the ferry. He is the slowest driver I have ever seen. It took me less than 5 minutes to drive in here from the pavement, but it takes to get out. I could walk faster than this. Don’t wanna wreck that new truck on this rough road. I have 2 and a half hours to get to the last ferry from Tsawassen, which is 30 miles away. If I keep following this guy I am going to miss the last boat!
Once we get to the pavement he, which is absolutely straight flat 2 lane pavement here, he speeds up. To about 15K. There is a government car of some kind where we meet the paved road. A cop or gate guard maybe, waiting with his lites on. By the time we are a mile down the road they other car turns to follow us, and cuz we are going SO slow he is soon right behind me. But he won’t pass. Is he suspicious cuz we are both going so slow? In the minimal attention I pay to mainstream media I am always hearing about Asian gangs in Vancouver. I am sandwiched in here, in the middle of nowhere. I feel like I am in a movie. Is somebody planning a hit on the basstravaganza?
We finally get out to the hwy, and turn R, and immediately cross over a huge new bridge. Ono. My fearless leader and I were miscommunicating. I wanted to find a bridge over the Fraser R, but he has taken me across the bridge over the Pitt R. This is getting worse. We are heading straight into Vancouver. 15 minutes later he pulls over in a maze of flashing construction zone. I get out to talk to him. "You were supposed to turn off at the last light." Duh. He tries to give me more instructions, but by now I realize that the only hope I have is to get as far as I can from this guy. If David Thompson could go from Idaho thru BC across the Rockies to Montreal and back in one summer, I can get to the ferry in time.
Turns out I am in Burnaby now, but I cannot find a bridge across the Fraser. I have to stop and ask for advice at 4 different convenience stores, but I still cannot find my way out of here. Getting desperate now. Once I get across the river I will have to speed to catch the last ferry. Suddenly I am on the on-ramp to the new Port Mann Bridge. Yes! It is still under construction, like everything else around here, and also under constriction as 2 incoming viaducts are forced to merge into a single lane by flashers. Even at 10 PM there is a lot of traffic coming onto the bridge.
Now the old Volvo has been running pretty well on this trip. Lots of minor hiccups, but no major stalls. But just as I get onto the bridge, heading up a grade on a single lane with 2 lanes merging behind me, the car dies. Lucky for me I was going pretty fast, maybe 80K, at the time. But the car will not run. 70K, 60K. I turn the key and the starter whirls. 50K. The traffic is starting to back up behind me. 40K. What is this guy doing. 30K. Somebody is flashing their lites behind me. 25K. Only one thing to do now. Send out a prayer to GGOV, the Great God of Volvos.
This works, as it usually does. The engine restarts and I go racing off to the S. Now I am screaming down the hwy to the ferry, 120K, hope there are no cops out tonite. But alas I have missed the last ferry by 10 minutes. By this time I am ripe for conversion to Rush Limbaugh. If you just nuked China, there would be no Chinese people left to immigrate to Canada and give you bad directions. Win.win, right?
But gradually I realize that the guy was really trying to help me, and that he did not have a clue where Tsawassen was, and was trying to lead me thru the heart of downtown Vancouver to the Horseshoe Bay ferry, which is the way Vancouverites get to Van Isle. Maybe instead of nuclear war, what we really need is to learn to speak each other’s language so we can understand each other. Something he has made a lot more progress in than I have.
I was so looking forward to a hot shower, but I spend another nite in the Volvo Hotel, where there is none.
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