Salmon of Silver and Gold

For 30 years Jim Gilbert reigned as one of the world’s top salmon fishing guides as he worked the deep green waters of Saanich Inlet, near Victoria, on British Columbia's Vancouver Island.

Between 1939 and his retirement in the late ‘60s, Jim guided thousands of clients, who were attracted by his cheerful good nature - and a remarkable guarantee: “No salmon, no fee.”

Jim couldn’t make that promise today. In fact, he probably couldn’t catch a single salmon in the Inlet now. Saanich Inlet, a protected arm of water that cuts deep into Vancouver Island's mountainous backbone, has become a virtual dead zone for the salmon that once made it one of the world’s great fishing spots.

“There’s just nothing there,” says Jim, who just before we visited had spent three days fishing - without getting a bite or seeing a salmon jump.

The Inlet once produced some of the greatest salmon fishing to be found anywhere, helping Jim to become one of the best known guides on Canada's West Coast. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker came to fish the inlet with him and caught 24 chinook in one day.

"He didn't care about the limit," laughed Jim. "The whole thing just blew his mind." Prime Minister Lestor Pearson sought him out; so did jazz great Oscar Peterson and hockey legend Gordie Howe.

From the time he was a boy, Jim, who is now nearly 70, was on Saanich Inlet almost constantly, except when he went away to university to get a degree in marine biology. "When we were kids we used to treat the water as our garden. If we needed a ling cod for dinner we'd go catch one. We could get a blueback (salmon) anytime," he said.

In the Dirty Thirties, his father rented row boats for 50 cents a day, and people would come out from Victoria to catch salmon to sell door to door. Jim said the fishing was so good most people would have their limits by noon and he can remember the image of them, walking off with their catch in heavy, wet potato sacks. Then he'd clean the boats so they could be rented for the afternoon, for another 50 cents.

The Inlet produced year round. There were big chinook in the summer, coho and chum in the fall and young coho, known as bluebacks, that swarmed through the area in the winter and spring.

One year Jim's clients caught salmon on 332 consecutive trips. Getting “skunked”, or going fishless, was unheard of and on weekends sports boats could be seen bobbing from one end of Saanich Inlet to the other.

But catches started to decline in the 60’s. By 1965, Jim was guiding in Cowichan Bay, outside Saanich Inlet, just to the north. He could still run to the fishing grounds from the family marina - but the salmon weren't on his doorstep anymore. Fewer and fewer boats were seen on the inlet.

Soon after that Jim quit guiding, sold the marina and subsequently moved away from Saanich Inlet, breaking a family tie with the waterfront that stretched back over two generations.

"I just got tired of living next to a cemetary," he said in an interview at his studio, in Metchosin, near Victoria.

Jim has re-invented himself as an artist, painting and carving silver or gold into shapes inspired by native culture and by his life on the sea.

"This is the sort of thing I do now," he says, holding an exquisitely formed silver salmon in the palm of his hand. He can now make more money carving salmon than he could guiding for them.

Jim isn't sure what went wrong on Saanich Inlet, but he cites three things - El Nino, bad fisheries management and pollution - that he thinks all converge at some point in the water.

"I'm talking about the meshing of the complexity of nature, about how things are all tied together," he says.

Jim believes the changes brought about by El Nino are significant, but dimisses those who want to blame everything on the warm water that routinely comes sweeping up the coast from South America.

"They can talk about global warming but there's more to it than that."

The El Nino events of the past few years don't explain, for example, long term trends that have developed in Saanich Inlet. The loss of eel grass beds is a case in point. Jim says the eel grass vanished 20 years ago, and he suspects a garbage dump that leached pollution into the inlet until the mid-80’s.

Herring spawned in the Inlet a few years ago, for the first time in decades, indicating the water is clean. But Jim didn't see any sign of young herring, which suggests they didn’t survive.

"I have had a stinking hunch for 20 years that the effluent from our pulp mills had an impact on (salmon) fry survival and on plankton and herring," he says. Not far north is a pulp mill the discharges into the Strait of Georgia, and its smog can sometimes be seen, coloring the sunset. Could other pollutants be drifting south in the water column?

In 1985, he recalled, the Strait was flooded with coho fry when the federal fisheries department bumped up stocks to coincide with Expo 86, the world fair held in Vancouver . The fish arrived in Saanich Inlet in mass that winter, but soon vanished. They never showed up as adult fish in the Strait later - posing a mystery that fisheries managers were never able to solve. Where did all those fish go?

"Man, I think they just died," says Jim.

When he's in an optimistic mood he thinks Saanich Inlet will one day return to its former glory, that the herring will return, the eel grass beds will grow back and the salmon will follow. Other times he looks up from his carving bench, to see the ocean glinting in the distance and fears those days are gone forever.

One thing he knows for sure, he can make a perfect silver salmon now, easier than he can catch one.