Before embarking on a recent trip into the wilds, it occurred to me that I should take along a reel loaded with fast sinking line should the need arose to kill a few fish for dinner. Because a floating line is so much easier to cast, its use is conducive to top water action, and I can find enough trout and steelhead with one to satisfy my angling needs, I’ve fished with one almost exclusively for twenty years. But in the Kitlope watershed I’d be fishing for other species of Pacific salmon.
The chinook salmon would be finished spawning by the time we arrived, but the first of the coho would be in the river along with humpbacks. Both those species are far more easily caught with a fly fished deep. For that a sinking line would be required.
Sockeye bound for the Tezwa’s lower tributaries would be pushing their way upriver too, but despite the fact that fish cops look the other way as scads of anglers do just that in plain sight every season in preferred spots, like Ferry Island, snagging is illegal, and that is the only way to catch sockeye.
Now before sockeye fishers sharpen their pencils and jot down angry letters to the paper, let me confess that I’ve mistakenly jigged sockeye too. I offer the following by way of elucidation.
Long before anglers were given a crack at them, Skeena’s sockeye had a well-earned reputation for being finicky. Even trollers had a hard time hooking them until one crafty fisherman came up with the brilliant idea to use small, plastic squid imitations called Hoochies, that he modified by amputating all but one of its jiggling legs.
When the Skeena sockeye sport fishery first opened largely due to the unflagging efforts of my two good friends, Tom Protheroe and Jim Culp, I unsuccessfully tried all manner of fly patterns to provoke sockeye to bite. When Jim phoned to tell me that a party of American fishers staying at his lodge had caught a passel of sockeye in the mouth using Black Wooly Buggers they’d brought with them from Montana, I hoped that ungainly looking nymph might just be the freshwater version of the one-legged Hoochie. It wasn’t.
Perplexed, I asked Jim what else his Montanan anglers had done differently. He said they became frustrated in short order because their heavy lines were snagging the bottom, so vexed, in fact, that they gave up angling for the silvery salmon. There was the key. It wasn’t the flies we were using in our futile attempts to fool the lock-jawed socks, it was depth we were fishing them.
With fast sinking lines and all manner of flies, I soon began hooking lots of sockeye. Many were caught by a fin or other parts of their bodies, but for me, at least, it appeared that one in every ten was hooked in the mouth. I kept those and returned the rest to the river. After conversations with Dionys deLleeuw, who was adamant that one couldn’t fairly hook sockeye, and Steve Perih, the experienced Dean River guide who spent a lot of time guiding for Tony Sarp in Alaska, and while doing that had witnessed the technique of flossing up close and personally, I began to carefully examine the sockeye I thought I’d fairly hooked before hastily dispatching them. As a result of those examinations, I was forced to concede that even those poor fish that appeared to have bitten were, in fact, foul hooked.
The regulations forbidding snagging have been widely adopted and in existence for many years for good reason. Formally condoning the snagging of fish would put salmon ripening in low flows late in the year in jeopardy. Moreover, the ethical angler realizes that taking a fish within the legally sanctioned limits is only part of the sport; the challenge of fooling a fish into reacting to an imitation of something found in its habitat or otherwise triggering an instinctual response that will provoke a strike is a huge part of the endeavour. It is what makes angling a recreation instead of a commercial enterprise.
One could make the argument that the skill required to snag a fish in the mouth is considerable and those who have mastered it should be allowed to keep the fish they catch this way, but ultimately, allowing snagging of any kind lowers the bar below what is ethically justifiable.
Perhaps the Central Coast sockeye of the Kitlope would behave differently than their Skeena cousins, but I doubted it. Still, a sinking line would be required, so I drove to the Fish Tales Tackle Shop and discovered that much has changed in world of fly lines.
There were lines designed specifically for Spey casting with single handed rods. And, there were all manner sinking lines so dense they sank like stones. Bewildered by the variety, I sought comfort in a product of yore.
Does Jim Teeny still sell lines? I asked Josh.
To be continued…