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Story by Mark Hume, with Photography by Margaret Munro “I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush. . .” - Aldo Leopold.
Fishing guide Raul Poole, of Drifters Rod’n River Adventures, has laid the boats perfectly so that when we have all shuffled into place with the camping gear, the Old Town canoes balance neatly on their keels, rocking gently. With the sterns still resting ashore, we are teetering between two worlds. Behind us is the familiar one of ringing phones, traffic jams and work deadlines - ahead, where the bright, lively current runs, is the unknown; a new river, waiting to unfold its tapestry of dancing light, birdsong and rising trout. “Ok?” says Raul with a quick backwards glance, “just follow me.” Then he’s gone, the river running off with his boat through a flurry of white, choppy water that swirls through a rock garden and vanishes between ranks of green trees. A quick shove gets us launched before he’s gone from sight. And the river has us. There’s a whoop from a young girl in the bow as we race along - there’s no stopping now - following the route Raul is tracing down the river. The main stem of the Kettle River rises high in the Monashee Mountains in a thick forest of Douglas Fir. It comes down through Christian Valley, fed by Hellroarer, Lost Horse and a myriad of other small creeks that tumble down from Midway Range, to the East. At Westbridge, on Highway 33 between Rock Creek and Kelowna, the river is joined by its main tributary, West Kettle, which is fed by Trapping Creek, off Big White Mountain, and other crystal streams with names like Taurus and Big Goat. Some of these small, cold feeder streams provide ideal rearing habitat for juvenile rainbow trout. The river winds through a valley cloaked in fir and Ponderosa Pine, where blonde bunchgrass gives way to irrigated hay fields in the flat bottom lands. It is an interesting mix of forest and agrarian landscape, a place where big Mule deer come out at dusk to feed with the ranch stock. And it is as gentle and wild and pretty as any river you’ll ever find. The Kettle, as we were about to find out that August day, is a perfect summer river, where long, chattering runs link deep golden pools.
Like all the best fishing guides, Raul knows more than just where the trout lie on hot summer days. He knows too, where there are back channels that kids can explore, looking for snakes and frogs, and he knows where there are quick runs that will race a swimmer through a chute before plunging her into a calm eddy. As we idled along he repeated what he’d warned of us earlier when we’d booked a trip for mid-summer, that the fishing would probably not be very good. The Kettle River lies in a region that is in the rainshadow of the Coast and Cascade mountains and it usually has warm, dry summers under clear skies. That, together with water withdrawal for ranch irrigation and with the warming caused by logging, makes the Kettle a perfect swimming river in the summer. But it’s too warm for good fishing, except in the earliest hours just before dawn. Over the years the summer warming of the Kettle has had a detrimental affect on fish stocks by concentrating the larger trout in a relatively few big pools. “The Kettle is an interesting river,” said Dave Smith, a provincial fisheries biologist stationed in Penticton. “I know there’s big fish in there - but it’s got nowhere near as many as it should have.” Mr. Smith said that because the big fish school up in the summers, it’s been easy for local anglers to knock down the population. “When it comes to low flow time there’s basically no habitat left for the rainbows,” said Smith in an interview. “They are concentrated in a few pools and those pools, over time, have become well known to resident anglers. “There are fish up to two pounds in the Kettle, but I think they’re taking those big guys out pretty easily.” Smith says there are still a lot of what he calls “old style fishermen” on the Kettle, which is to say, those who like to kill their limit without much thought for what happens come spawning time. When the big fish have pooled up, it doesn’t take a lot of skill to drift a night crawler down into the depths at night and pull out trout after trout. First you catch the one or two 16 inchers in the pool, then you catch a few 14 inchers, then you get down to the 12 inchers. After that, you move on to another pool, and the next guy through wonders why, in a river as wonderful as the Kettle is, he can’t seem to catch anything big. Several years ago Mr. Smith managed to put the smaller West Kettle under catch-and-release regulations. The results have been interesting, resulting in greatly increased catches of medium-sized fish and a slight improvement in fishing for big trout. “The size and number of fish has definitely increased since we brought in those regulations. We’ve proved it works.” Mr. Smith has no doubt that the West Kettle would produce a lot more big fish if it wasn’t being poached so heavily. “We still have a lot of non-compliance on the West Kettle,” he says. “It’s a shame.” The ministry of environment doesn’t have the budget to patrol the West Kettle and stop the poaching problem. The only hope is that local anglers will come to appreciate what a remarkable river the Kettle is, and adopt a conservation ethic that will allow the trout population to flourish. “Man, it’s just full of (small) fish,” says Mr. Smith. “It’s a high energy system. The bug life in there is fantastic. There’s lots of stone flies everywhere.” Despite that, the Kettle is far from producing to its potential.
Mr. Smith says surveys have shown there are lots of fry in the system and many of them are surviving to the six inch to eight inch range. With a healthy base population of young fish like that, and with a rich food supply, the Kettle should be growing lots of 14 to 16 inch trout. Instead, the fish are mostly around 10 inches. There has been some habitat damage caused by logging, but by and large, the river valley has recovered from old harvests and new logging operations are showing a lot more concern for the environment. Mr. Smith says a survey of temperature data back to 1914 shows that the Kettle has always been a warm stream with low summer flows. A study in the 1980’s, by biologist Dale Sebastian, found the mainstem of the Kettle had an average temperature in August of 18 degrees C; the West Kettle was slightly warmer with a temperature of 20 C. Although logging and water withdrawal haven’t helped, that can’t be blamed for the lack of big fish in the river today. The main problem seems to simply be over harvest - that is, the majority of fish are being caught before they reach maturity. “Back in the 60’s there was a conservation officer who used to check the West Kettle regularly,” says Smith. “It was gravel road in there and the fishing pressure was increasing. There were fish to five pounds and lots of fish coming out in those days. “The issue to me is they fished it at that level and put the population down to a point where they (the big fish) couldn’t come back. “If you’ve got a depressed population, it doesn’t take a lot of guys to decide not to follow the (catch and release) regulations - that will keep the population depressed.” In the study by Sebastian, in 1987-88, it was estimated there were approximately 6,200 “catchable size” fish in the entire mainstem of the Kettle . But the river was capable of supporting 32,000 catchable size trout! He called for measures to protect the larger, older spawners and hoped that anglers would buy-in to the catch-and-release regulations once they saw it was producing bigger fish. While many do support it, the few that don’t are capable of depressing the entire river’s population. All of this isn’t to say the Kettle isn’t a wonderful fishing stream or that you don’t have any chance of hitting a big trout now and again. Certainly, even in the doldrums of summer, under the guidance of someone like Raul, it’s easy to catch lots of trout. Ten and 12 inchers come up for dry flies and pluck at nymphs drifted along the bottom. They are spirited fish, some coming from Blackwater and Upper Dean River stock that were introduced. Kamloops, Gerrard and Pennask stocks have also been stocked at times, either to the river or its headwater lakes - and all of them are strains capable of producing large fish.] But a 14 inch trout is often a big one for the day on the Kettle. Still, as you wade this stream, covering late evening rises, or sinking flies down under log jams in the heat of the day, you can sense its potential for great fishing. The runs are so beautiful, the pools so full of character, the water so crystalline and golden that if the Kettle regularly gave up 16-18 inch rainbows, it could become one of North Americas great trout streams. Not only does the river have rainbows, but there are also big browns taken occasionally. “They used to catch 8 to 12 lb browns in the Kettle,” says Mr. Smith. “We still get reports of browns, but not in that range. Mostly they are near Midway (just above the U.S. border.)”
Raul confirms that browns have become increasingly rare, although there are a few caught each year. He agreed that most are caught in the lower river, and said the fall, October and November, is best, when the fish seem to move up across the border, looking for spawning beds. Curt Vail, a biologist with the Washington State department of fish and wildlife, said his department has been aware for some time that the Kettle has great potential. For the past several years the state has been augmenting the fishery by stocking rainbows taken from wild Kettle River stock. Mr. Vail said that even south of the border the Kettle is predominantely a rainbow trout stream. “There are a few brown trout in the river, but generally speaking not very many,” he said. “The only planting of browns we made was back in the 70’s. But they do seem to be hanging on and occasionally some big ones are caught. There are some areas on the river that are prime big, brown habitat.” South of the Canadian border the Kettle River slows down somewhat, but doesn’t change dramatically from the riffle-pool-riffle character that makes it such a delight in the run down from the mountains, to Midway. Mr. Vail said fishing pressure on the Kettle in Washington State is relatively light, and mostly comes from locals. It isn’t - yet - a river with a reputation that will really pull in visiting anglers. But he agreed that could change if the Kettle was brought back to what it once was. And he thinks that’s possible. “The trout population, the rainbows in particular, was in bad shape until recently,” he said. “And it had been that way for awhile. “We never had an acceptable regulation package on that river until the early 90’s. We’ve now got that, and with the results from the latest stocking I think there’s some hope.” The minimum length for a keeper on the U.S. side of the border is 12 inches. It’s a regulation designed to let the mid-sized trout grow bigger, to reach their full spawning potential and take back the stream that was once their’s. Mr. Vail says that most Kettle rainbows on his side of the border are small. But now and again an angler hits a trout of 18 to 20 inches - a reminder of what the Kettle once had - and is still capable of. Drifting down the Kettle with Raul we went through one perfect pool after another. When we felt like it, we’d stop to fish and swim. We’d drift nymphs under log jams, and just where the golden-toned water turned black, you could expect to see a glint of silver and feel the pluck of a small, spirited trout. In the fast water at the heads of the pools, a dry fly would usually prompt a slashy rise. Early one morning, before dawn, Raul rose and fished a long, deep run just in front of our camp, where our tents were set under the canopy of a huge cottonwood. It was cool and misty. And it was so quiet that I could hear his fly line cutting the air, then the splash of a nice-sized trout. When he came in to light the campfire and make breakfast he found several bright, green frogs sitting on the warm stones ringing the fire pit. That’s the kind of surprise we came to expect from the Kettle, a river that paints a beautiful pathway through southern B.C.’s dry interior, and makes up for in charm whatever it may lack in big fish. |
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There are provincial parks and forest service campgrounds scattered along much of the river’s length, but Raul knows where the secret sandbars are, where you can pitch a tent under the canopies of great cottonwoods and fall asleep to the gentle whisper of the Kettle.
