After
yesterday's poor performance, we decided to head back for more torture this afternoon. Chris phoned me at 9:30am for an update. "Lots of bites.", he said. My dad and I headed to the river at 11:00am to catch the afternoon bite, if there is even such a thing anymore.
We arrived at 12:30pm and watched Chris and Nick anchored in the middle of the river. While he was giving me another update, a nearby angler landed a beautiful coho salmon. I was eager to fish so we left them to our chosen spot. The day didn't start out as smoothly as I wanted. Dad immediately lost a float, which was retrieved by Chris and Nick later on. He then caught up on a couple of snags soon after, plus donating a spoon to the river. The canal can be a easy place to watch the float, but snags can be a nuisance if one is not used to it. He wasn't able to cast precisely so it became a pretty big challenge after awhile.
We decided to make a move further upstream to where
I connected with a jack spring on Monday morning. We arrived to find Rhino already fishing the run. He and I shared our results from today. I reported nothing while he had some success with springs and jacks at a mid river spot where we have fished together a couple of times. After fishing for awhile together, we concluded that there were no fish in this run so I decided to take my dad further up to where he was fishing, just so he could at least possibly connect with a fish on this last fishing day.
We arrived to find no one occupying the spot as usual. Clouds were moving in fast, so there was no reason that they wouldn't bite. There were some jumpers and I soon noticed some finnings very close to shore. They looked like a mixture of chinook, coho and chum salmon. Some were in fact quite silver. I told Dad that the spoon wouldn't work as well here because the current was too fast, but he grabbed the spinning rod anyway to give it a try.
I drifted through where I thought the fish would be resting and it didn't take long for the float to dive twice, but I missed them both as usual. I quickly passed the rod back and urged him to make the same drifts. He placed the float along the lane where I had found some life and it only took two casts before it went down again. The float dive was not hard to miss after seeing it above water for three days.
He set the hook and the fish headed for the tailout like what any chinook salmon would do. Line peeled off his reel while he frantically asked me what he should be doing, I'm not sure why since he has caught a few salmon in the past. I told him that he should be pointing the rod sideways and hold back some more as the rod can actually take more abuse than what he was giving it. Once he got used to it, he had full control of the fish so I could grab the camera to capture the moments. It was a chinook, just slightly bigger than the size of a jack. He slid the fish into the shallow as I instructed him so we could take a photo of it before letting it go. The fish was semi-coloured but it was worth a million bucks after so many hours of experimenting.
By the time he let the fish go, we only had a bit of daylight left so we tried to make the most out of it. I could see more fish were cruising through the run so was hopeful that we would have more bent rods. It was not meant to be unfortunately. The highlight of the day did come near the end. While we were almost calling it a day, a big black bear emerged on the other side of the river (kind of funny, since I asked Rhino if he had seen signs of bears before we left for this spot). It patrolled the bank, most likely seeking for food at dusk. I don't think my dad has ever seen a bear in the wild so that brought just as much excitement as landing the fish earlier.
So the week of Vedder fishing with my dad is over for another year. With only a couple of jacks to show, I am reminded that I do not have the desire to quit my day job and become a fishing guide.
I'd end up hating fishing a lot and have pretty disappointing clients every time.
Author
Topic: Chilliwack River, October 7th 2010 (Read 3858 times)