A River Never Sleeps

What is special is their style, for if you were to substitute their fiberglass rods and monofilament nylon lines for split bamboo and 9-thread linen cuttyhunk, they might just be in appearance the same enthusiastic anglers that founded the Tyee Club of British Columbia back in the 1920s. And they will be searching the same waters off the mouth of the Campbell River, on the East Coast of Vancouver Island: Tyee Pool, Frenchman’s Pool and the swifting tidal runs along the broad alluvial bar that separate them in Discovery Passage. And they will be rowing, these low tech anglers, like their founders, following in the powerful incentives of tradition.

So what really do they seek? In part, they hope to catch one of the planet’s most illustrious game fish and to do it by the rules written nearly eight decades ago and thereby qualify for membership in the Tyee Club. Membership in this club may be exclusive, but it is never elite. Exclusivity applies only to the “non-catching” and those who follow the rules are cheered on as much or more so by those whose names are already in the register of members. Each year the club awards the Dr. Richard Murphy Trophy to the guide who registers the most new members. They, the new members, are welcomed, they are honored, their names appear in the Year Book life long if their heirs approve, and they are now entitled to wear a button of achievement, a button little larger than a dime. No grand money awards, no fancy boats with mega-horsepower motors to win; nothing in the way of prize little higher than recognition.

This may seem like little incentive, but apparently it is enough, for people the world over still come to Campbell River to fish under the restrictive rules of the Tyee Club. The fish are big. Chinook salmon have to be 30 pounds or larger to qualify as Tyee, an Indian name meaning The Chief.

A bright 30lb+ Tyee caught just before Sun Rise

This glorious fish of the Campbell River is not the same fish that the club’s founders knew. For because of little or no thought to the fish, the watershed was once stripped of its forest cover, the river dammed for electrical energy, the stocks overfished commercially - and most serious of all, its spawning beds poisoned by heavy metal from a mine at its headwaters. The species was likely saved by a hatchery on its major tributary, the Quinsam River, that was taking brood stock several years before the concentrations of copper and zinc meant death to developing embryos in the gravel redds. But hatcheries are not a solution in themselves. True, they can increase production, but the chinook stocks in the Campbell River have changed. No longer do the spawning stocks have 60 and 70 pound fish, seldom even fish in the 50 pound category. I suspect, and I think the evidence warrants, that the genetic stock selected over many millennia no longer exists undiluted. What that means for its future, even given the recent heroic efforts at restoring the Campbell River’s spawning gravels and its estuary, will only be known by future generations.

If today’s runs lack the giants of the past, who can complain of salmon in the 40, or 30 or even 20-pound class? These are big fish, still capable of raising an angler into a state of euphoria and bringing a deep sigh of relief when brought in for weighing and the scale is drawn to 30 pounds or further. But imagine, also, that you have fought and boated a great slab of ocean-silver chinook in the Tyee Pool; your guide has rowed you ashore to the Tyee Clubhouse for the weigh in and you have climbed the rocky beach, your shoulder drawn down by the heft of your prize. The weighmaster places the fish on the scales..... and the dial reads 29 pounds. Your reaction? The possibilities are variable. Should you already be a member, having perhaps two or four or ten registered Tyees to your name, you will probably smile an honest smile and return gratefully to try again. Or should this be the fish that could have got you membership, you might smile too, the smile of regret, yet like the non-piqued member, you return to try again.

For it is the fishing that keeps you with it, more even than the fish. You want that success of achieving membership, sure, and you want the fish of a lifetime fully corroborated, but you want to do it the way set all those years ago by anglers who recognized that following the easiest route will never provide the highest satisfaction. So you return to your rowboat, your regulation rod and line, and the artificial lure with single barbless hook. Your guide has you in the draw of the tide, the spoon or plug working its seductive charm, and your anticipation grows as your heartbeat matches that on the tip of your rod.

The pleasures of rowing for Tyee are as much aesthetic as they are from a conjugation between angler and fish. Out before daybreak you find yourself surrounded by a small navy of quiet rowboats, their bow and stern lights like tiny beacons on the black water. As the sun rises over Quadra Island there is a surface fandango of big salmon reacting to the change of light, or a change in the tide, or whatever brings this herd-like reaction that has every man or woman giving less attention to the rod and the oars. These are the tonal movements that stir the soul, and they are rewards in themselves. And then, if luck be with you, there is a sudden take, the rod is yanked hard down. . .

I should like to leave you with a Tyee story I have written before but which has not been widely circulated. It happened one late evening in Frenchman’s Pool. It is a memory I cherish.

In Frenchman’s the sun sets earlier and the far off mid-Island Victoria Peaks are never in sight, for this pool lies along a well treed bluff on which are widely spaced homes. The ebb tide runs smoothly through it without the sharp riptides that characterize stages of the flood in the Tyee Pool. We were in Frenchman’s Pool along with a dozen other rowboats and there had been nothing remarkable happening throughout the waning light. One by one the tiny bow and stern lights came on and one by one the other boats departed as dusk settled and the water blackened. And then we were alone, the last boat, trolling a big Gibb’s spoon along the edge of the kelp. A few more strokes and we’ll be on the bar and Maxine, my wife and fishing companion, will reel up. And then the rod is suddenly jerked hard in her hands. She strikes back, driving the hook home, and a fish turns wildly at the surface, sending silvered crescents over the dark water.

Rowing the Tyee Pool in the early evening light

The reel is buzzing, peeling line fast, and we work our way out from the kelp line into the tide that takes us North. The fish is in full flight well ahead and the surface is all wrinkles and creases, catching the dim reflections of stars and houselights we no longer have eyes for. It is eerie and the darkness sends its phantoms forth. A log, black and forbidding, floats well ahead where the fish may be expected to be. I row out and around to avoid it, only to discover it is no log at all, but the dark manifestations of reflective glimmers on the shifting sea.

Even being deceived does not end the trials. There are more - and each one is so real I can’t take a chance on a collision. And so I row around them all, disbelieving they are nothing more than the trickery of distant lights on a fast running tide, which every one turns out to be.

Darkness, as it always does, distorts perceptions. The running lights of a distant tug on the far side of the passage appear to be coming right at us, though it is half a mile away and keeping well to its side of the channel. The dreaded Seymour Narrows, a danger in any but a slack tide, seems to be closing in while still a couple of miles away. But we talk of it, worry a bit, for the fish seems determined to carry on.

When the fish slows, Maxine recovers line, and then loses it all back to another burst of energy. Over and over again. Each slowing of the fish’s panic is temporary. Taking advantage of a lapse in its race northward is good only in the recovery of a few yards of line. For long, lost minutes this give and take continues, each flight a renewal of the fish’s determination to escape.

Off Orange Point we see the blazing lights of the pulp and paper mill illuminating the water. Seymour Narrows retreats to a safe distance. There are no more phantom logs, and we begin to sense that the fish is struggling on its last reserves of strength. Maxine is gaining line faster than she is losing it. From the angle of the line we know the fish is near the surface but the vagaries of light and current prevent our seeing it. Then cautiously, ever closer, it appears, 25 feet off the boat. Twenty. A long, dark spindle sliding back and forth, side to side, disappearing in shadow, reappearing as it turns on its side, exposing its exhaustion. Slices of bronze silver, wavering, hanging hard to life, losing its brakes, sliding closer....closer....and into the net.

It is somewhere between 11:30 and midnight when we arrive back at the Tyee Clubhouse for the weigh in. The inside lights tell us the weighmaster, a young, popular son of the Club’s president, has not yet retired. Nor will he soon for there is a small party in progress. Half-a-dozen or more youthful souls spill out of the clubhouse to view the scales - which tip to show Maxine has a Tyee, of 37 pounds.