Fishing the River of Time

by Tony Taylor

  Dick Stoker built a house in Duncan and then later a summer bungalow, in an Indian style, on Cowichan Lake. Each year, as one did in India, he moved to higher country in the summer season. He bought the best piece of land at Marble Bay. It stretched right across the Bald Mountain Peninsula, which separates the south arm from the north arm of the lake. It was good land because of a small patch of that rare rock limestone at Marble Bay. The area, like the chalk streams of England, consequently had its own highly specialised insect fauna that attracted large numbers of trout.

  The newly married Henry March, an Englishman who arrived at about the same time as Dick Stoker, built the first house in the area, a few kilometres down the lake on the southern shore. He made it out of hemlock logs that nobody wanted and the locals laughed at him for years. This wood was hard to work with and the general view was anyone who used hemlock for anything, except firewood, was a damn fool. People said the house would fall victim to rot, that it was an architectural disaster. But Henry knew what he was doing and had the last laugh, for the house still stands. The community is now called Honeymoon Bay.

  Others who arrived later settled where the Cowichan River left the lake, near the small store run by Syd Scholey, but because the trees grew right to the river’s edge the rest of the people lived in the twenty or so houses built on log rafts. Scholey’s sister married an Englishman named George Simpson. He was knowledgeable about zoology and botany, and was unpopular because he became a kind of self-appointed game warden. The Simpsons were the first to build a float house. When others followed suit, the Simpsons moved down the south arm to Marble Bay from time to time to ‘avoid the crowd’. They moored near Doctor Stoker’s large log bungalow, for Mrs Simpson and the doctor’s wife were good friends.

  In 1968 when I went to the lake, the float houses had disappeared and the village of Lake Cowichan had a pub plus a few shops. There were a couple of dozen houses on the side of the river, but the inhabitants still depended on Duncan, thirty kilometres away. To do any extensive shopping one was forced to travel along a very dangerous, narrow and twisty road.

  I wanted to live on the water and was lucky enough to be able to rent an old cabin once lived in by a man named Meade. I knew he was a pioneer, but I knew nothing about the literary side of the lake then. Later I gathered this Irishman had a possible connection with the Stokers, but I never discovered what it was.

  The cabin suited me; there was a fabulous view down the North Arm. I was surrounded by granite, and every night I watched different sunsets followed by millions of stars that, because there were no other lights, seemed brighter than any I had ever seen. Living simply leads to understanding.

  Now, in another century, I was back in this beautiful land living a simpler life once again. The large modern cabin I had rented was a couple of hundred metres away from the river, sensibly built on a piece of high ground. Although I could hear the river, I couldn’t see it. The first thing I did was get the fire going and then, ignoring the four bedrooms at the far end, fell asleep on the couch in front of the big iron stove. Sleep I had found impossible on the plane. It had been thirty-six hours since I left my home in the northern suburbs of Sydney. Apart from getting up and throwing another log on the fire once or twice, I didn’t wake until well into the next day.

  I had plenty of time to prepare for fishing as my grandson would not be delivered to the cabin for a couple of days because of important sporting activities at school: I had chosen an inconvenient time for our trip. Nevertheless, the sun was shining, so after a rather late breakfast I decided to chop more wood before starting to fish.

  While I was chopping I wondered what my grandson would be like. I had seen a recent photograph of him and could see a strong resemblance to his father, Matthew, when he was young. It occurred to me then that Matthew must have been about Ned’s age when our family had broken up. It was an odd feeling and I felt life was playing a strange game. I had missed out on a great deal of my son’s life and now, by going fishing with his son, I felt I was being given a second chance.

  Ned had his father’s slight build and I think his mother’s smile. Looking carefully at the photograph I also thought I could detect a delightful look of mischief in those eyes. I couldn’t wait to take him up the river.

  2

  The Beautiful Simplicity

  Fishing is analogous to life and it is best to keep both as simple as possible. The tackle used is always a guide to the angler’s character: I use an eleven-foot (3.36-metre) rod with a progressive action. It weighs less than six ounces (156 grams), has a fairly flexible tip and gets stiffer as the strain goes down the rod. Under extreme stress it bends right down into the cork-covered handle at the butt. The curve when a big fish is pulling on the rod is a parabola, identical to the upper quarter of an egg.

  Long parabolic rods like this have always been favoured by the highly skilled French market fishermen as well as amateurs like Charles Ritz who, when he returned from America, patented the ‘Parabolic’ fly-rod and claimed to have invented it. Interestingly these French rods from the home of the metric system are still eleven feet long.

  Long before Ritz, in the late nineteenth century, the great F. K. Wallis perfected this type of rod on the Hampshire Avon. It was the first rod light enough to be used with one hand when fishing for trout but long enough and powerful enough to land any salmon. Wallis became famous by using it to cast a small bait weighing only one eighth of an ounce 235 feet (that’s three and a half grams, maybe the weight of a worm, cast seventy metres). Allcock’s, the fishing tackle manufacturer, later sold copies of the rod as the ‘Wallis Wizard’, and as far as I know seventy metres is still a record cast. Wallis, however, I am sure, would have been the first to point out long casting has very little to do with actual fishing. He called his rods Avon rods. It’s a good name because avon is an old word for river.

  Rods that bend this way cast well and have recently come into use in America, the original home of the short rod. They are now widely used for steelhead in the American west where they are called ‘switch’ rods because the angler can use them with either one or two hands.

  Fitted to my rod is an old-fashioned free-running ‘Aerial’ centre-pin reel. It is ten centimetres in diameter and mounted ten centimetres above the butt allowing me to grip the rod’s cork handle with two hands if necessary. This centre-pin can be used in two ways for, unlike similar looking ‘fly’ reels, it can either be allowed to spin freely or prevented from spinning by using the check. Gear like this can cast live bait, worms and lures as well as artificial flies and can be used for any style of fishing in any kind of water. Once mastered, the reel is infinitely superior to either the special fly reels with a built-in drag or the now-ubiquitous complicated and fragile fixed-spool reels. My outfit—the rod, reel and heavy silk line—weighed 450 grams, the same as a cup of coffee.

  Fish are remarkably successful creatures having colonised water almost everywhere. Some, such as northern- hemisphere salmon, live and feed in the open ocean but they always return to northern rivers to spawn. Others, like southern-hemisphere bass, live in fresh water but make a reverse journey down river into salt water to spawn. Fish are hard to see which is why sometimes I draw them out just to admire them. Many people fish from curiosity, pulling the beautiful out of the invisible, and only kill when hungry.

  Most fish have lots of cartilage around the mouth, which is where the skilful angler hooks his fly. When a fish is properly hooked it feels no pain. It is rather like a human having his or her fingernails trimmed—an inconvenience that we soon get over. Fish are quick learners though, and they soon avoid hooks, so anglers are continually forced to fish remoter places.

  Now the rod is ready to fish I lean it for a moment against the cabin wall. In front of the deck is a small trail going to the left, and fifty metres away a narrow bridge across a gully leads to the water. To the right is another trail and another bridge, over another gully, leading to the end of the logging road where I left my car.
Despite the fact it was the smallest, cheapest and most ecologically sensitive transport I could find, I still felt guilty about burning fossil fuel. It added to my guilt about travelling from Sydney to Vancouver Island. I have always been acutely aware of the environmental cost of transport: I was writing about it fifty years ago but so far everyone, including me, has found it easy to ignore.

  The bush is fairly thick and hard to push one’s way through so it is best to stick to the small trails. Salal and the ubiquitous devil’s club are everywhere. This latter plant has huge maple-like leaves and strong stems covered with thousands of barely visible needles that fester beneath the skin if you are foolish enough to try to pull or push the plant out of your way. Also fairly common is the Scotch broom introduced by the early settlers. Fortunately the Atlantic salmon they introduced at the same time did not survive. The biggest trees are maples and most of these are covered in moss. Alder is also common.

  The giant cedars and firs that were growing here when the first settlers came to the valley are gone. This part of the river below Skutz Falls was logged the old way by floating timber downstream. All that is left now is second growth; it will take the forest a thousand years to grow back to the way it was. Tiny pentamerous blue and pink flowers grow close to the ground at the edges of the occasional trails. Despite the destruction, seeing nature trying to heal its wounds is rather beautiful.

  I am glad I am not burdened with tackle. Anglers are now supposed to need a number of rods instead of one—most wear fully loaded fishing vests and use guides who carry a hell of a lot of extra equipment unheard of years ago. Worst of all, they wear chest waders and wade in on top of the shallow spawning gravels destroying the eggs.

  Lone fishermen, like the kind I used to be, are getting rare. Since the movie A River Runs Through It, the number of anglers has increased exponentially. Rivers like the Cowichan are riddled with anglers and there are hundreds of professional guides modelled on Brad Pitt. Nowadays many books and most magazines emphasise fish capture by showing, without remorse, pictures of giant fish held at arm’s length by successful trophy-hunting anglers. A hundred years ago anglers were obsessed with numbers but today it is size. The truth is neither is important, but fishing is.

  So as I sat on the deck of the cabin, looking down a small gully to the right, I thought of many things. I was doing what anglers have done since the beginning of time. It may be called fishing, but a large part of the activity consists of shedding one’s daily worries and letting one’s thoughts roam free. That is what all land dwellers do when they start to fish—enter another world.

  I thought of Dame Juliana Berners, the Abbess of Sopwell Priory, freed for a short time from her religious duties, fishing the River Ver in 1408. This river was near Saint Albans and not far from where I lived as a boy, but I had not heard of her then because I didn’t discover her book The Boke of Saint Albans, printed in 1486, until I was an adult. I imagined her with her pilgrim’s staff that turned into a six-metre rod; the three-metre hollow butt, with the tip stored inside, somehow fixed to the butt piece, dapping her simple artificial fly close to the bank. Being an intelligent woman, well aware of the acuteness of the fish’s vision, she would have been standing well back from the water, probably up to six metres away. Anglers did not cast in those days, because the rods were too heavy, and reels and other sophisticated tackle used in China were unknown in the western world. In England, the silk line had not yet come into use, so instead a lighter and weaker horsehair line was just tied to the rod-tip. It had to come from the tail of a stallion so as not to have been weakened by urine. The fly was probably the one she favoured for odd days in May when there was no hatch. It was the one she called the stonefly, with a body of black wool and, in her words, lappid abowte wyth blacke sylke.

  I thought how, just before I left Australia, I had used the same material tying the few stoneflies that I thought might be needed on my trip. I prefer tying these larger flies because they are easier for me to see. Stoneflies, as their name suggests, are more common on the faster rivers where there are lots of stones. They also need more oxygen, and faster rivers supply that too. These flies can appear in any month of the year and as they are larger than most other flies they offer the trout a better reason to take.

  May is usually considered to be the prime time for trout in the northern hemisphere because of the great mayfly hatches described by Frederic Halford in the 1880s. These spectacular events, which cause the fish to ignore all the other flies on the water, mainly occurred on the world’s purest limestone, the chalk, and are far less frequent today. ‘Matching the hatch’, described by early chalk-stream anglers as when the anglers actually tied artificial flies on the river to represent the fragile natural ones of a hatch, is rarely done in the twenty-first century. Nowadays we try to carry a representative collection of artificial flies in a small box.

  Less-pure limestone occasionally does have the odd hatch. Angling writers write about them a lot, but it is mostly wishful thinking. As I was fishing the largest mass of granite on the planet, with no limestone in sight, there was no point in using one of the many smaller mayfly imitations sold in most tackle shops, so I tied on one of my thumbnail-sized stoneflies.

  Maybe the abbess used larger flies for that reason too. Anyway, I now had a fly almost identical to hers at the end of my line six hundred years later. The Cowichan was a much bigger and wilder river than the Ver; even in Juliana Berners’ time her river, being quite near London, would have flowed through cultivated fields with hedgerows and perhaps a few cattle and sheep. There were still bears and cougars here and it was still relatively wild even though parts of it had been logged.

  As always happens when one travels from one time zone to another, my biological clock was taking time to adjust. I did not feel like walking a long distance and certainly did not want to fight my way through lots of thick bush. But I picked up my rod and decided to have a cast or two. Anglers often do this sort of not very intense, exploratory fishing and say to one another, ‘Let’s just wet a line.’ I walked towards the river to do just that.

  As I got closer, I knew it would be impossible. The roar of the water was so loud it was clear that the river would be unfishable and dangerous. Then I saw the water. Despite the fact I had known the river well forty years ago, I had never seen it flowing with so much force. While the biggest river in Australia was barely flowing at its mouth, this much smaller river in Canada was washing its banks away and carrying trees and large boulders down to the sea. More important, no fish would be able to see the fly because the water was so full of new sediment. It would probably take days to clear.

  I remembered I had bought a newspaper in Duncan and the headline had said something about a missing tourist so I went back to the cabin to read it. A couple of days earlier a young man and his rubber raft had apparently disappeared trying to descend the Marie Canyon which was immediately above the section of water I had just been examining. He had been visiting from Mexico and I wondered if he was a member of the large group that had rented my cabin a week earlier. The newspaper said that the police had thoroughly searched the lower section of the river but so far had found no body.

  Perhaps it was a good thing that young Ned would not get to the cabin for a couple of days yet; it would give the river a little time to settle, although there was so much water I was fairly sure it would not be possible to fish for about a week. This was a pity because rivers teach the angler so much more than lakes, ponds and canals can.

  Maybe the sensible thing to do would be to go into the town of Lake Cowichan and have a look round. It would be interesting to see how it had changed in forty years. I replaced my rod on the deck against the wall and walked out to my car. I followed a couple of logging roads to the north and soon found the new highway. It was so much better than the old narrow twisty road and the trip took only fifteen minutes.

  I parked the car at the Riverside Inn and went to look at the water just below. The pool there, right near whe
re the water left the lake, was much smoother than the river further down, and although it was full to the brim and moving fast I could see the salmon. At first I was surprised but a passer-by reminded me that it was the force of the water that made the salmon run. I thought for a moment, then realised he was right. I could not believe I had forgotten so much.

  The salmon were what Canadians call spring salmon or tyee (‘chief’ in the Chinook language) and the Americans in the republic to the south call kings. The correct name for the spring salmon is chinook. Every one of the six different species of Pacific salmon has more than one name and this causes a lot of confusion. Chinook salmon are always the first to run and are the biggest of all salmon, weighing up to forty-five kilograms each. They are usually fished for at the mouths of rivers while the fish are waiting for enough spring melt-water to come down to allow them to go up. I have never enjoyed fishing for them, as although great to see they are not a lot of fun. And I don’t like eating them, as they are just too damned big and they taste rather bland. Many people, though, value them for their size. Chefs love them for banquets—they decorate them like wedding cakes—and big fish are now worth thousands of dollars and are usually exported to places like Paris or Tokyo.

  What struck me about this run was that it was so small; instead of the river being packed as it was in the past, there were now only about a dozen fish. The local told me that the run, always triggered by the melting snow, was now complete. But he pleased me by saying that fishing in this pool, where the salmon spawned, had been prohibited for twenty years.

  I decided not to cross the bridge to explore the town. I would save that pleasure until my grandson arrived. Still somewhat jet-lagged and rather blurred about what day it was, I worked out if today really was Monday he would probably arrive on Wednesday. I don’t cross date lines that often so I forgave myself for being rather stupid about the time. After looking downstream for a further view of the salmon gently hovering near the places where they would soon spawn, I looked upriver. The river left the lake about a kilometre upstream and the Riverside Inn was just upstream from the bridge. I started to allow my thoughts to wander and, like geologists do when they look at anything, I went back in time.