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| Last updated at 11:43 PM on 27/06/08 |
Salmon charms and dreams 
RUSSELL WANGERSKY 
The Western Star
July is racing towards us now, when the dragonfly larvae finally crawl up from the bottom and let their skins harden and split in the sun. Then, like bright needles, they will dart and hover in the air and eat many times their weight in blackflies. The outdoors will become slightly more habitable, until the cow bees hatch as well, to circle you like delta-winged biting drones, and those who fish salmon will occasionally even find themselves suddenly riverside in their dreams.
It’s hard to explain to someone who has never fished, the way I can open the flybox I almost never use and look at the salmon flies that have almost never touched the water, and still know every river that a polar white or a blue charm has been in.
The rows of hair and feathers seem so familiar that I can almost remember why a particular moose-hair fly has a hitch tied so carefully and so tight around its neck — to make it slide sideways and eye-up across the river in a great, long sweep — or why I even bought the orange parachute fly that salmon fishermen on the west coast of this province swear by, even though I’ve never seen a fish take the slightest bit of interest in it.
My salmon flies are in a big flat silver flybox, row after row of thunder and lightnings, of moose-hair browns and sedges, of buck bugs in orange and black and green. It’s always in my knapsack when I fish, in the pocket on the back with the emergency kit and compass and spare leader-line, but I rarely take it out in summer. That flybox is for the winter, when what you’re really trying to catch is not fish, but dreams.
In summer, I depend instead on two small flyboxes that fit in my front pants-pocket, flyboxes with grey adams and blackflies, small royal coachmans and dark Montreals. Trout flies. Effective, sprightly little trout flies that will winkle a brook trout out from under a cut bank, that will pull fat little fish out of their shelter under a big spruce that has toppled into the flow.
I depend on trout flies because I don’t actually fish for salmon. I hike small, fast trout rivers and fish few places where I can’t cast completely from one side of the river to the other.
It’s not that I wouldn’t fish for salmon, or that I don’t love fishing for them — it’s just that I don’t feel right fishing for salmon anymore.
I have fished them in the past, with some success and great joy: they are an amazing fish on the line, striking so hard and so fast that your first thought is, “Don’t let me lose this one.”
Even now, I like to be on a salmon river once or twice a year, and I even enjoy being able to rise one or two of the big silver fish, just to see the bright arc of them under the water. But I don’t feel comfortable catching them anymore — I don’t even feel comfortable hooking them and having them get away.
Why?
Because I can’t help but think that the writing is on the wall for salmon, and I’ll be darned if I’m willing to be just one more little thing pushing them towards extinction.
Once again this year, salmon scientists are saying that salmon stocks, particularly on the island part of the province, are failing. It’s described in that particularly peculiar prose, where the fish are in “a particularly low abundance”. And fisheries scientists are at a loss to say why — salmon don’t seem to be surviving at sea, and in the absence of ocean-going research, no one really has an answer as to where they are going — or more to the point, where they are dying.
It doesn’t really matter to me — what matters to me is that they are dying, and I can’t see taking any part in driving the stock any further down.
One day, trout might well be as threatened as salmon are now.
If that happens, then I won’t fish for them, either. I’ll still walk my favourite rivers and hope for an attendant dragonfly to keep the flies down, still feel the sun on my skin and marvel at the appearance of the irises first and the single-petalled roses afterwards.
You sometimes hear people say about a threatened commercial species, that, well, since it’s disappearing anyway, we might as well be allowed to catch the last few fish; that it’s some kind of twisted right.
I’d rather be able to take my flybox out in winter, show the colourful rows of salmon hooks to my kids and say, this is the way we used catch fish.
Then we stopped, and tried to save them instead.
Russell Wangersky is the editor of the St. John’s Telegram.
He can be reached by e-mail at rwanger@thetelegram.com.
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28/06/08
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John from AB writes: Interesting column. Rather appropriate too as I soon board a plane today to return home to fish for salmon. I may keep one but long gone are the days of killing everything I hooked. I actually feel guilty now in killing a fish as I cannot help feeling a tremendous loss in killing a salmon. They are mgnificent as they fight for freedom once hooked. It just seems wrong to kill it!
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| Posted 28/06/2008 at 10:16 AM | Alert an Editor | Link to comment |
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