The Campbell River slips into the ocean over broad flats. Where the current and the tides meet, the gravel bar is cut away and you can see the line where the water gets deeper, turning a dark green.

When the tide is running, you know it. It's like a river churning past, with the kelp fronds streaming out in the current and surface chop slapping at the boat.

It's here that some of the greatest fishing in the world is done, in the tyee pools that lie just off the mouth of the river.

The tyee -- chinook weighing 30 pounds or more -- start to arrive in early August and the run builds, with the best fishing often coming in the last 10 days of the month.

You can't mindlessly troll through the tyee pools. You have to row. Rowing puts a boat handler in intimate contact with the currents -- and with the fish that move mysteriously along the drop-off, tasting the river in which they will later spawn.

Rowing takes such skill and demands such concentration that many expert tyee fishers would rather be on the oars than holding the rod that fights the fish.

Rowers watch the water and the birds and the surface, but mostly they watch the steady pulse of the rod tip. Through its beat they divine what is happening in the depths. Good rowers can tell when the lure has been fouled by even the smallest thread of seaweed, and they'll tell you to reel in and clear your line.

They can tell when a fish has taken, gently mouthing the lure. With a deep, sudden pull on the oars they can sometimes set the hook for an inattentive and blissed-out angler who has been busy watching the boats fly past in the strait.

Off the west coast of Vancouver Island in August, the coho sometimes gather in schools over the plateaus that rise from the ocean floor, creating rich, shallow feeding areas. Sometimes they move in to hunt through the kelp beds, or they herd herring into clefts in the rugged shoreline.

You can troll endlessly back and forth, burning up gasoline and hoping to stumble across a fish by blind luck -- or you can read the tides and search for the salmon, then stop to cast to them or to drift a live herring amidst them.

If there aren't any salmon around, you can always drop a lure to the very bottom, probing the depths for God knows what might be lurking there.

Sometimes there will be an incredibly hard yank and you'll reel in to find your herring mangled or your line cut right through. Sometimes a big ling cod will take you on, or a halibut, which pulls like a horse and is strong enough to kick the floorboards out of a cheap boat.

In August, salmon are moving in most rivers, opening up a whole different kind of fishing. There will be chinook, if the river is lucky enough to support a run, and coho (growing scarce); some rivers will have pinks, arriving in waves, and some will have sockeye, which are becoming increasingly popular as a game fish.

A few special rivers will have summer steelhead, the rarest and most wonderful of all the salmon.

You can wade the rivers in summer, drifting your offering through the tail-outs, hoping for a big, solid salmon. The water will be clear, the light will play across the rocks -- and sometimes you'll see a fish rise up from among the stones to strike. Not a bad way to spend a day.

In August, the Interior lakes slumber. On clear days the sun can be searing. No fish here, you think.

But wait until evening. Then, ringing in the darkness, you hear big fish splashing. They are feeding on sedges as they flit on clumsy wings across the surface.

You paddle out, cast a fly toward the sound, then see your line jump out of the boat as something suddenly takes a pull.

In time, you learn how to hook a fish in the dark. When you do, it's an incredible feeling. The rod bows, the line vanishes into the darkness.

Finally you get the fish close and can't believe it -- a big, silver rainbow, flashing in the water.

Some people say August is the slowest month for fishing, but that's not true. The fish are out there. You just have to go looking