A River Never Sleeps

After a long drive we finally came to the lake and set up our tent in the truck headlights. It had been a tiring, six hours from Vancouver to reach the lake district north of Campbell River and most the party was soon in their sleeping bags. But looking out at the calm surface, glowing under the moonlight, I soon made other plans. Dragging the canoe down off the roof rack and stringing up a rod, I set out to go fishing - at 4 a.m.

It was still dark but I knew in a few hours the first light of dawn would show and in the stillness I could hear rising trout, even if I couldn’t see them. As the canoe coasted to a stop droplets fell off the paddle blade and for a moment that was the only sound there was. Then a loon called on a far lake and its voice came over the forest, crossed the water and bounced back off the shore. Just where a small stream tumbled through a reed bed a fish stirred the surface.

There was just enough light now that I could see the rings, spreading towards me. I false cast the Muddler Minnow a few times, working out the kinks, then laid it down on the water. Before it had a chance to sink there was a ripping noise, as the trout took it down. Nice 16 inch cutthroat came to net, splashing noisily. A few minutes later another trout took in the same place. It was so strong it turned the canoe and pulled me out to deeper water before it came in. Not much bigger, just 19 inches and about three pounds, but the lake was so calm it was easy for it to tow me, at least for a short distance.

I heard birds start to sing later. The dawn chorus. And somewhere in the bush, unseen, a bear made a rough barking sound. About 9 a.m., a blue haze of campfire smoke drifted past me, signaling that the others were awake and making breakfast.

Through habit, perhaps through instinct, most of us retreat from the wilderness at night. We shutter ourselves in cabins or campers, zip ourselves inside tents, and don’t emerge again until its light. But you can see remarkable things by breaking the routine every once in awhile, and you can have some pretty good fishing too.

Once, in the Northwest Territories, I stayed up through the twilight of summer solstice, fishing for pickerel all night and drinking a friend’s Drambuie. We built a campfire at the waterline, which didn’t hurt the fishing any, and passed a tin cup around while we waited for the lines to jerk. Just after midnight a fog formed on the northern shore and poured down over the trees onto the dark lake. There must have been a warm swamp back there.

Then a wolf pack began to howl and by the speed they were moving you could tell they were hunting - probably running a moose. We listened to them move across the landscape, then silence fell. It was a reminder that there is another world that moves parallel to our own through the darkness. At dawn the fog melted, slowly rising up and vanishing into the sky, while faint calls of nesting gulls rose, then grew quiet. The sleepers missed all that - and they missed the best fishing too (not to mention the Drambuie).

A friend tells of fishing his home stream, the Cowichan, at night for the first time. Hearing a splash across from him on a familiar shoreline, he swept a flashlight beam along the bank - six raccoons, each 10 yards from the next, were eating crayfish in the shallows. He’d often seen raccoon tracks before, had stopped to wonder at the slender prints in the mud, but he’d never seen one on the river, until now. Their eyes reflected the beam of the flashlight for a moment, then they dropped their heads and went back to eating. They didn’t run. He hooked a fish later that night, a big brown trout probably. Whatever it was ran down through the pool and into the swift water below, tearing line off until the distance between them became untenable. It broke off in the darkness and is in his dreams still.

Another friend tells a story of fishing the sedge hatch at Peterhope Lake one night, and of hearing another angler casting nearby in the darkness. There was the sound of a line cutting the air, the splash of a fighting trout. They started talking - even though they couldn’t see one another - and a long friendship began, which isn’t surprising when you think of how much two guys must have in common to end up on the same lake, over the same weedbed, under the same moon, fishing the same hatch.

A few summers ago I fished until well after dark on a lake in Tweedsmuir Park. Saw the moon come up to illuminate the forest. Watched the wind stir the lake surface off the point, and saw a cloud of pale, gray sedges drift out over the lilly pads. When they started to brush the water, the trout began to launch themselves, falling back with loud splashes all around the boat. For two hours I caught a trout on almost every cast.

You don’t have to canoe a lake at midnight or wade a stream under a full moon to experience the night. Once, camping at Pachena Bay on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, I dragged my bag out of the tent on a clear evening to sleep on the sand behind a drift log. The wave curls were phosphorescent. An otter crossed the beach, with its hurried, humping gate, pausing to turn over a dead crab.

I fell asleep and woke with dew on the bag as a peregrine falcon passed overhead, wings swept back, falling slower than a shooting star, but not by much. I listened to the surf and realized that it was fainter because the tide was out. Later, during breakfast around the camp back in the woods, I heard the waves getting louder and knew slack had turned. Taking my rod out across the sand, scuffing the otter’s tracks on the way, I cast small spinners out to where the current of Pachena River met the sea and took some big silver, surf perch. Solid, sudden takes followed by short, vibrant fights.

Not all night fishing trips are a joy, of course. First time I tried to fish the Cowichan at night I managed to stumble and nearly break my rod, lose several flies in bushes and one in the back of my coat and startle a deer that nearly gave me a heart attack. The next day I went back to the same spot - and realized I’d been fishing in totally unproductive water. Get the lay of the land before you go, prepare your tackle ahead of time, take a good flashlight - and slow down. You can’t cover as much water at night .

Fishing in the summer can be best at night because it is cooler and some of the best insect hatches happen then. Experienced sedge fishermen know all about that. But what about night fishing on rivers in the spring? I keep thinking it has to be good, because the mass of outmigrating salmon fry wait until dark to move. If scientists know that, surely the trout must too.

On the Campbell River trip, after being awake for 24 hours, I slept lightly. The sun woke me and I crawled out of the green glow of the tent, shortly after noon, to blink in the brightness. The world seemed to have a strange stillness to it. I washed in the cold lake and saw my friends signaling across the water - the two hands up sign that universally is understood by anglers to mean: No fish, what gives? Standing on the shore I heard the wings of a bird and looked up to see the loon go by with a fast, whistling beat. It stayed low over the surface until it reached the far shore, then rose to go over the trees. It was going back up to the nesting lake it had been singing on earlier, in the darkness, but only I knew that.