A River Never Sleeps

Sometimes during high water the Cowichan River slips over its banks, creeps up through the cottonwoods and crosses Joe Saysell’s lawn until it is lapping at the foundations of his deck.

Joe doesn’t mind. He just drags his drift boat up a little higher, confident that the river will subside and the trout will be waiting when it does. Sometimes he marks the retreat of the river by pushing willow sticks into his soggy lawn. He gets mad when the river drops too quickly - because it signals that a weir, built at the outlet of Cowichan Lake, is holding back too much water for a pulp mill more than 20 kilometers away, on the Strait of Georgia. When the river drops too quickly it can strand salmon and trout fry in gravel bar pools.

If that happens it won’t be long before he’s on the phone, alerting biologists, hectoring government bureaucrats, or protesting through the media.

For more than 40 years, the Cowichan has been running through his life, and for almost that whole time he’s been fighting for the river and the fish in it.

Joe first fished the river when he was five, at the elbow of his late father, Ron Saysell, who was a legendary guide and boatman on the river.

Prior to 1956, when the weir was built, the Cowichan fluctuated the way other coastal rivers do, to a natural rhythm that saw flows peak in January, with winter rains, and then taper slowly over the spring.

In those day Joe and his dad could drift the river until early summer, fishing dry flies for big trout that had dropped down out of the lake to feed on salmon eggs the fall before, and that had stayed over to spawn.

The fishing was so good in those pre-weir days that throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Flyfishers Club of London and the Theodore Gordon Flyfishers in New York posted weekly bulletins on the Cowichan.

Today serious fly fishers around the world still have the Cowichan on their “must fish” list, but they know the prime season will be short, and will be dictated by the water releases controlled by the weir.

March, April and May are what Joe calls “the magic season” when the river’s flows are just right for drifting and the Mayfly hatches are on.

The river still drops too fast in the spring for Joe’s liking, but over the years his lobbying and protests have convinced the government to arrange a more beneficial flow regime.

Joe also played a key role in convincing the government to buy large sections of forest land along the river, creating a linear park that runs for much of the Cowichan’s length.

Just this spring the government purchased an 80-acre block of timber from Abby Bains, a developer who postponed a planned housing project after talking with Joe about the importance of his land to the health of the river. The delay allowed the government time to secure the parcel before it had been developed.

Joe had been pressing the government to get the land since 1982.

“It’s a key to the whole river corridor,” he said this spring. “That land lies along the prime spawning area in the Cowichan. And now it’s protected.

“The river is in extremely good shape. We’ve got a huge chunk of corridor on the river now.
“You have to give the government credit. You know, 50-years from now, people are going to look at this river and way, ‘Wow. Somebody was really thinking ahead’.”

Although many government officials and politicans have worked to protect the river, over the years few people have done more than Joe Saysell. He has fought doggedly not only for the Cowichan, but for other rivers in the southern Vancouver Island area that he calls home.
And in a logging town, that hasn’t been easy.

“There are some hard feelings, that’s for sure,” says Joe. “But I go my own way. You’re not going to sit by when the environment’s being mistreated.”

A faller for 20 years, until he broke his back in an accident on the job, he once convinced a local of IWA-Canada to form an environmental watchdog committee - and then he blew the whistle on logging companies that were trashing steelhead streams.

That led to a grievance against him by a forest company, which tried to fire him for being unproductive. After harassing him through a series of hearings, the logging company eventually had to withdraw its complaint. Through expert testimony it was shown that Joe was actually one of the most productive fallers, and he was praised by his colleagues for the quality of his work.

Joe Saysell, they said, would never drop a tree where it would break by falling across downed timber or pitching over a steep bank. He dropped his trees clean, and with precision.

He runs his drift boat in the same way, slipping through the fast water, pivoting around boulders and cutting the angle just right so that his clients can lay their casts up along the banks.

He had his first boat by the time his was 12, and has been through about a dozen since then. He now drifts the river in a 16 foot Lavro, talking to his clients in the bow and stern as he goes, so that they know what’s coming up.

“Right side,” he says to the fisherman in the front, “up against that cedar branch.”

And then to the guy in the stern.

“Hold your line right there. Wait. Wait....There you go!”

And up comes a big brown, taking the fly down in precisely the spot it was supposed to.

Joe makes drifting the river seem easy, but he says it’s a deceptive piece of water that is much faster than it seems.

“It’s very dangerous out there. It’s extremely dangerous if you don’t really know what you’re doing.
“The Cowichan has a lot of velocity. It drops a lot in a short space of time. It’s deep and narrow. It really pushes you fast. You get a lot of sweepers and log jams, and if you’re not ready for them, you will be in trouble, real fast.

“Last year in three weeks I pulled out three different parties of rafters who went into log jams. Luckily nobody was killed.”

Joe used to be active in the Steelhead Society of British Columbia and the B.C. Wildlife Federation, but he became fed up because neither organization, he felt, was working hard enough to represent fly fishermen.

Working largely alone, he convinced the government to create a fly fishing only section on the Cowichan, and to impose strict catch limits. He continues to press for better stream flows, and to watch for bad logging practices.

People come from around the world to fish the Cowichan River with him.

They come for the big browns, rainbows and steelhead he puts them into. They come because the day-long drift from his lawn to the pullout at Skutz Falls, takes them through a beautiful green corridor that is almost as wild and beautiful as it was 40 years ago, when Joe fished the river with his dad.

Unlike most guides, Joe Saysell is very particular about who he takes out.

When people call, asking about a drift, he sounds them out, tries to get a feel for them.

“I’ll take ‘em out if I like ‘em,” he says. “A day on the river is pretty special to me. You don’t want to go with just anybody.”

Field Notes:

Joe Saysell lives in Lake Cowichan, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. He can reached at 250-749-3062.

He specializes in dry fly fishing for brown and rainbow trout in the spring. Before the hatches become prolific, he fishes the emergence of salmon fry, using bucktail patterns fished on a dry line. Trout of 5-6 lbs. are not uncommon. The Cowichan has winter and spring runs of steelhead.