A River Never Sleeps

When he died in 1998, aged 85, Mike Cramond was bird thin, and grown weak with age. But up until the end he had a sharp mind, and a passion inside him for the fish and wild rivers of his home province, British Columbia. A few years ago, while he was still in good health, we were lucky enough to spend an afternoon with him in his beautiful home on West Vancouver's Marine Drive, which looked out over the waters of English Bay. He'd fished those waters as a young boy, and had spent a lifetime fighting to preserve the salmon stocks that had once been plentiful, right there, off his back doorstep. Mike named his home, Caer-Ammon, which is the Gaelic derivation of his name: 'Castle on the Ammon River'. As proud as he was of his heritage, it can be said the waters of the West Coast flowed through his veins as much as the blood of Scotland. For most of his life Mike, the author 12 books and outdoors editor for The Province newspaper for 23 years, had fished in British Columbia's waters. Only old age grounded him. But even then he continued to rail against the "bloody awful" management of coastal fisheries.

"This is a tryst I have with God," he said in his last interview, sitting near his computer o

n which glowed the words of a letter he'd composed, urging the government to stop overfishing in the Strait of Georgia. "I feel if you have the ability to do something that will help make our lives better, you should do it," he said, explaining why, at the tail end of his life, he still hadn't given up the fight. He knew then that he was too old and frail to ever go fishing again, but he fought on - for us - his fellow anglers who, he hoped, would one day catch salmon and trout in the waters he had. "I'm trying to turn this around," he said of the decline in salmon stocks, which reminded him of the cod collapse that took place in the Atlantic a decade earlier. Mike said he first began to notice the decline of B.C.'s salmon fishery in about 1956. And ever since then he'd been attacking, in print, politicians and federal fisheries managers who he felt were "in the pocket" of the fishing industry. What ails the Pacific Northwest, he said, is a rapacious fishing industry that is far too effective for its own good. "Human greed," he said, was at the root of all the problems with salmon stocks. He was nearly blind when we met him, and he needed thick bifoculs and a magnifying glass to read. But when the light reflected off the waters of English Bay, banking off the walls in his book-lined study, he put on sunglasses to cut the glare and stood at the window, bathing in the light.

When he looked out on the glowing sheet of water, he remembered what it was like, not so very long ago, fishing right there, with the city as a backdrop. "When I was a kid my dad would say, 'Mike, go out and get a salmon -- and get another for the widow Penfold living up in the old mill site." He'd go down over the rocks, drag a row boat into the water and start trolling. "In half-an-hour I'd have a couple of coho. If I was over an hour I was foolin' around. You could rake herring anywhere around here. That was how easy it was. "All this water had lots of herring. . .Now they're all gone. All destroyed." Salmon still run through English Bay, and coho headed for a hatchery on the Capilano River can sometimes be caught under Lions Gate Bridge, beneath the hum of rush hour traffic.

But Mike said the waters around the city used to be alive with salmon that held there year-round, feeding on great schools of herring. "It's unbelievable. That's a desert out there. If you went out with a net now for 10 days you wouldn't come back with one herring." Such fisheries, he said, aren't greatly missed because most people don't remember what it was like. "There was an abundance that today people can't understand because it has been destroyed progressively," he said. Local populations of pilchard, anchovy and herring were wiped out by overfishing. Coho and chinook stocks, which have declined drastically in Georgia Strait, are being devastated both by overfishing and a reduction in prey, he said. The solution? "Stop seining of all ancillary feed fish in the Strait of Georgia. Don't allow one more herring to be taken for any reason. Not even for sports fishing." More than 25 years ago, writing in The Province, Mike lashed out at the federal government for its herring fishing policy, which he said was headed for disaster.

He was ignored then -- and the herring stocks crashed, causing a temporary end to fishing. He was ignored again, a few years ago when he called for a drastic curtailment of commercial fishing for herring, arguing it was a foundation species upon which the health of salmon and other stocks depended. The salmon stocks soon crashed, as did other species. "The coho, lingcod, the rockfish, are gone now from the Strait of Georgia," he said. "DFO has the God-damndest record you ever saw." In 1972, Mike Cramond wrote: "Anyone who looks at the statistics. . .and still wants to allow a herring seine fishery in Pacific Coast waters doesn't give a damn for the common welfare, or the future of his country's resources." He fought to the end. When he died, he took those memories with him, of big salmon, slashing into herring balls along Vancouver's shoreline.