Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 10

Fishy Business

“How’s the fishing up there?” When I was a kid in the fifties and sixties that would be the most common question when you were in Vancouver and said you were from the Sunshine Coast. If an outsider had heard of the Sunshine Coast at all, chances are they’d heard it was a good place to fish. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

I was never interested in the fine points of the piscatorial pursuits but anybody who lived here any length of time could fake a fish conversation without half trying. You could say fishing was great pretty much any time, and never be far wrong. If you wanted to set the hook and play them a little, you could say, “Well, there’s a lot of grilse right now but you can get clear of them with a six-ounce weight,” or “The bluebacks will be coming in any time now,” or “The northerns should be showing up in the next week or so.” You didn’t have to be part of the in-crowd to know such things; you only had to know the date because the fish runs in those days were as regular as clockwork.

And fishing was great. I hesitate to admit it, but I remember one 24th of May when we were having the rellies over, my dad and his pal spent an afternoon bobbing around off Martin Island with a case of beer and caught thirty of those tender little immature coho called bluebacks. I guess you’d go to jail for that now, but there were no limits then. Every evening you would see a flock of kickers out mooching for spring salmon in the “hole” a mere stone’s throw off the main steamer dock at Irvines Landing. There was no need to go outside the actual harbour.

First you’d toss out a jig consisting of a short, light line festooned with barbless hooks. This was to catch a few herring for bait, which never took more than a couple minutes. You’d pick the friskiest-looking herring, spear it on a treble hook, lower it to the bottom, reel it up a few turns and wait. If you had to wait more than fifteen or twenty minutes you were having a bad day. Once I didn’t have to wait at all; as soon as I dropped my jig over the side I hooked a herring and it was immediately swallowed by a twenty-three-pound spring salmon. Somehow I got the tangled mess of hooks, leaders and fish safely into the boat.

There were times even in those days when you went a whole hour without a bite. In that case, you’d putt out to Temple Rock, drop a cod jig and inside of five minutes the line would be thrumming with a fat big red snapper. You didn’t show it off, though. You carried it home in a sack and hoped nobody asked what you had, because mere cod was poverty food. What I’d give for one of those tasty devils now!

I can remember the panic that struck the chamber of commerce types sometime along about the eighties when it became clear the fabulous sport fishing was coming to an end. The thinking was that if outsiders couldn’t be guaranteed easy boatloads of fish there would be nothing at all to attract them to this area. The outside world would forget us entirely and all the motels would go broke. The few who suggested this area had a few other attributes that people might still come to enjoy were dismissed as impractical dreamers.

Funny how we could have been so wrong. Outsiders did eventually stop asking about the fishing, but they did find some other interests. Now it’s “How are the property values up there?”