Sharphooks
Well-Known Member
Where does one go in this world to see 7 meter tide changes that make the river you’re standing in go backwards? Where do sandy white beaches just keep going on and on and on, stretching to infinity?
Where does moss grow so thick if you step on a hump of it you sink down to your knees? Where do bubbles just randomly spew out of the river gravel miles and miles away from any human habitation? Where do mushrooms grow the size of pie plates, strewn across the forest carpet everywhere you look, fire truck reds, taxi yellows, so garish in color and larger then life that you feel like you’re on the set of an Alice in Wonderland production?
Setting foot on Haida Gwaii I sensed I was in a very special place. There was a crackling harmonic vibration going on in my rib cage and I now thought I understood why such a precious island chain stuck out on the edge of the Pacific would be guarded by the dangerous moat they call Hecate Strait, storied to be one of the most perilous stretches of water on the planet.
The ferry dropped me in Skidegate on Graham Island at 6 in the morning....a heavy dawn shrouded in inky blackness...the M/V Northern Expedition left Prince Rupert in the dark and I arrived in the dark....a completely disorienting experience.
With the help of a powerful flashlight , this was the first piece of Haida Gwaii real estate I laid eyes on:
Once it got light enough to see, bleary eyed from precisely zero sleep on the ferry crossing I drove to the Tlell River. Rolling coho everywhere. Swaying back and forth in the river, doing my best to remain conscious and upright, I hooked and released 5 fish in as many casts. I was in a dream world. There could have been bubbles and humming birds wafting by me on a gently breeze...I couldn’t be sure.
I hiked down to the mouth of the Tlell and on the incoming tide it went backwards. As in Class III curling white water with waves and churning r logs and wads of fish, all going backwards, all this flow going back upstream from where it must have once come....with such firm purpose it seemed physics had been turned on its head. I’d admit all that might have been a dream sequence. I don’t remember.
Then suddenly everything became breathlessly calm. Here’s the Tlell at high slack tide....all the movement had ceased as if someone had thrown a switch...a river frozen in time. The incoming fish might also have frozen in their places in the channel at that moment, holding their breath....waiting. I couldn’t be sure.
Then just as quickly the opposite happened:
When the tide finally flipped again the water flowing over the flats at times humped up into suspicious deltoid shaped “V’s” : in-bound jags of broad-shouldered northern coho nervously skittering back and forth across the river bottom.
It’s one of the most exhilarating things to see if you’re a fishermen: fresh fish powered on an irresistible compulsion of migratory muscle spasm, thrashing their way over tidal flats, and more than likely aghast at that first taste of fresh water.
I can imagine how bizarre it must be for a coho to explode out of Hecate Strait and fin across an alien river flat like that, at times through just a few centimeters of water so its back is fully exposed.....it would be like you or I blasting off into space into a completely spooky new world with no operator’s manual to know how to behave with our new weightlessness and the eerie quietude of atmospheric vacuum.
To help these coho through that delicate adjustment period into their new fresh water world I stood patiently waiting with my fly rod:
N
That evening I drove to Port Clements to the mouth of the Yakoun River. There is a huge delta where it flows into Masset Inlet.
The next morning I launched my inflatable and with the help of an incoming tide got approx 7 km up the Yakoun until I finally got cut off by a log jam:
It’s spectacular scenery in the Yakoun delta: huge flocks of geese; eagles everywhere....and wads of coho skittering across the flats, no doubt with the odd steelhead joining them on the incoming times.
The Yakoun has a true winter steelhead run, some in the upper 20’s and low 30’s like the Skeena fall run. October would have been a bit early but not out of the migration timing question—— I was on high alert while fishing
The lower Yakoun has many abandoned fishing shacks. It was kind of eerie being all alone, no people around for miles, complete absolute silence.....and seeing all these abandoned dwellings with perfectly usable pots and pans and plates strewn in the grass, everything left to melt in the winter storms. It was like there had been some deathly pestilence that had emptied out a neighborhood overnight:
I wanted to grab that big stainless bowl on the floor in the rear of this house but I worried there’d be bad juju waiting for me if I busted such a thoughtless move.
I spent several days on the Yakoun. The way the tide effects it and way way it meanders through thick old growth forest was like no other river I’d ever seen or fished. McMillan Bloedel gave that area a serious haircut back in the 70’s and 80’s but there are still lots of old growth spruce and cedar trees remaining. I caught several coho within hand grenade distance of the stump of the Golden Spruce that Grant Hadwin made so famous, (or infamous, depending on how you look at that bitter piece of street theater he unleashed on the Haida people in 1997)
Paddling across Hecate Strait in a kayak in February (!!) with a chainsaw strapped to the deck of his rig. Swimming across the Yakoun lugging that chainsaw in a plastic garbage bag, then cutting just enough out of the base of that sacred tree that the first puff of wind would drop it, which is what exactly happened.
The stump of that Golden Spruce is on the opposite bank of the Yakoun. No doubt the Haida would prefer nobody sees it. And I’m guessing they’ve spent the last 25 years trying to forget Grant Hadwin and what he did with that gruesome chainsaw of his.
Where does moss grow so thick if you step on a hump of it you sink down to your knees? Where do bubbles just randomly spew out of the river gravel miles and miles away from any human habitation? Where do mushrooms grow the size of pie plates, strewn across the forest carpet everywhere you look, fire truck reds, taxi yellows, so garish in color and larger then life that you feel like you’re on the set of an Alice in Wonderland production?
Setting foot on Haida Gwaii I sensed I was in a very special place. There was a crackling harmonic vibration going on in my rib cage and I now thought I understood why such a precious island chain stuck out on the edge of the Pacific would be guarded by the dangerous moat they call Hecate Strait, storied to be one of the most perilous stretches of water on the planet.
The ferry dropped me in Skidegate on Graham Island at 6 in the morning....a heavy dawn shrouded in inky blackness...the M/V Northern Expedition left Prince Rupert in the dark and I arrived in the dark....a completely disorienting experience.
With the help of a powerful flashlight , this was the first piece of Haida Gwaii real estate I laid eyes on:
Once it got light enough to see, bleary eyed from precisely zero sleep on the ferry crossing I drove to the Tlell River. Rolling coho everywhere. Swaying back and forth in the river, doing my best to remain conscious and upright, I hooked and released 5 fish in as many casts. I was in a dream world. There could have been bubbles and humming birds wafting by me on a gently breeze...I couldn’t be sure.
I hiked down to the mouth of the Tlell and on the incoming tide it went backwards. As in Class III curling white water with waves and churning r logs and wads of fish, all going backwards, all this flow going back upstream from where it must have once come....with such firm purpose it seemed physics had been turned on its head. I’d admit all that might have been a dream sequence. I don’t remember.
Then suddenly everything became breathlessly calm. Here’s the Tlell at high slack tide....all the movement had ceased as if someone had thrown a switch...a river frozen in time. The incoming fish might also have frozen in their places in the channel at that moment, holding their breath....waiting. I couldn’t be sure.
Then just as quickly the opposite happened:
When the tide finally flipped again the water flowing over the flats at times humped up into suspicious deltoid shaped “V’s” : in-bound jags of broad-shouldered northern coho nervously skittering back and forth across the river bottom.
It’s one of the most exhilarating things to see if you’re a fishermen: fresh fish powered on an irresistible compulsion of migratory muscle spasm, thrashing their way over tidal flats, and more than likely aghast at that first taste of fresh water.
I can imagine how bizarre it must be for a coho to explode out of Hecate Strait and fin across an alien river flat like that, at times through just a few centimeters of water so its back is fully exposed.....it would be like you or I blasting off into space into a completely spooky new world with no operator’s manual to know how to behave with our new weightlessness and the eerie quietude of atmospheric vacuum.
To help these coho through that delicate adjustment period into their new fresh water world I stood patiently waiting with my fly rod:
NThat evening I drove to Port Clements to the mouth of the Yakoun River. There is a huge delta where it flows into Masset Inlet.
The next morning I launched my inflatable and with the help of an incoming tide got approx 7 km up the Yakoun until I finally got cut off by a log jam:
It’s spectacular scenery in the Yakoun delta: huge flocks of geese; eagles everywhere....and wads of coho skittering across the flats, no doubt with the odd steelhead joining them on the incoming times.
The Yakoun has a true winter steelhead run, some in the upper 20’s and low 30’s like the Skeena fall run. October would have been a bit early but not out of the migration timing question—— I was on high alert while fishing
The lower Yakoun has many abandoned fishing shacks. It was kind of eerie being all alone, no people around for miles, complete absolute silence.....and seeing all these abandoned dwellings with perfectly usable pots and pans and plates strewn in the grass, everything left to melt in the winter storms. It was like there had been some deathly pestilence that had emptied out a neighborhood overnight:
I wanted to grab that big stainless bowl on the floor in the rear of this house but I worried there’d be bad juju waiting for me if I busted such a thoughtless move.
I spent several days on the Yakoun. The way the tide effects it and way way it meanders through thick old growth forest was like no other river I’d ever seen or fished. McMillan Bloedel gave that area a serious haircut back in the 70’s and 80’s but there are still lots of old growth spruce and cedar trees remaining. I caught several coho within hand grenade distance of the stump of the Golden Spruce that Grant Hadwin made so famous, (or infamous, depending on how you look at that bitter piece of street theater he unleashed on the Haida people in 1997)
Paddling across Hecate Strait in a kayak in February (!!) with a chainsaw strapped to the deck of his rig. Swimming across the Yakoun lugging that chainsaw in a plastic garbage bag, then cutting just enough out of the base of that sacred tree that the first puff of wind would drop it, which is what exactly happened.
The stump of that Golden Spruce is on the opposite bank of the Yakoun. No doubt the Haida would prefer nobody sees it. And I’m guessing they’ve spent the last 25 years trying to forget Grant Hadwin and what he did with that gruesome chainsaw of his.
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