I have always enjoyed fishing as far back as I can remember. I can’t speak to when the lifelong pleasure officially began, was it when under 5 my parents took me and my slightly older brother to fish from the old train bridge across the Pitt River? Perhaps, as they secretly hooked two minnows on a bare treble hook and got me to reel them up. Beaming at their playful praise claiming how I was the “best ever” fisherman. Probably not the start though due to a 5-year old’s attention span.
Maybe my love of fishing stemmed from catching Coastal trout in the ditches that paralleled the South Burnaby roads of the flats after school let out for the day. While it was cool catching those trout but if I am being honest here, I probably spent more time catching Sticklebacks than sitting along those ditches waiting for a fish to take the bait. I’ll site that whole attention span thing again as a mitigating factor against this period as the beginning.
My best guess would probably have to be when my older brother and I were shipped off by our young selves via rail to visit our grandfather at his property in northern Manitoba. Our grandfather had enough property up near Flin Flon, ”the farm” as he called it, completely surrounded a decent sized lake. Sounds awesome but being Manitoba, land of 100,000 lakes, it is more common than you think. Still, given the remoteness combined with the inaccessibility meant good fishing and boy did we fish. Northern Pike on Red Devil spoons as we trolled about the lake. Sure, there were other fish in there, but we were after those fanged torpedoes that had to be over 3 feet long before you could keep em. Pretty sure this “sans adults” cross country adventure with my brother did it. Nothing promotes fishing to the young better than success and those huge Pike’s gave us legitimate bragging rights!
As the years progressed from grade to grade, from elementary to junior high my brother and I, along with other neighborhood kids, would continue to fish along the Fraser River banks and log booms of New Westminster and South Burnaby every chance we got. It didn’t matter what was running, pink spoons off the log booms when the pinks were spawning. Bar rigging for Coho and other salmonids at specific bars during the preferred tides. We knew all the spots and when to fish for them but the fish we were always on the hunt for were the big sturgeons. We didn’t get much luck with those, but we tried anyway. We knew where the best spots for a chance were, but they were a little far away from our usual haunts and certainly not within earshot our mother’s whistle calling us home to dinner.
Prior to 1994, when sport fishing for sturgeons was legal, I would occasionally fish for them. Most of my fishing time was directed towards the salmonids. Predominately I was after the Coho and Steelhead, but I also did a lot of still water fishing up country. Naturally, as I aged my priorities shifted, work, children and more responsibilities meant less time for fishing, traded in for stress. Talk about your raw deals.
When enough of my children got old enough to hold a fishing rod I tried to instill an interest in fishing. My daughter was simply not interested but my boys, they were not afforded the luxury of choice. I took them to a trout farm out in Ladner where all 3 of them landed a fish and got a lesson on cleaning fish followed by cooking and eating what you caught. A year or so later I took all three of the boys to a “hidden in plain sight” sturgeon hole that hundreds of people would unknowingly walk by every single day. The kind of spot you had to grow up around before all the developments sprung up along the shores of the Fraser River. That day each of my sons caught a nice fish. My oldest landed a juvenile King salmon (jack) and my youngest caught the largest white fish I’ve personally seen caught on the river. It was nice when a little old Chinese couple came out of their new condo to see if they could have the white fish for dinner, we said sure. My middle son caught a 2.5-foot sturgeon. If this kind of fishing success didn’t inspire the kids, then I would be at a loss for what might.
Despite many further attempts to pass on my love of sport fishing, only 1 of my sons seemed to enjoy the feeling of having a fish on the hook. Of the thrill of being able to provide sustenance for oneself with only the skills you honed through patient perseverance through many presentations. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed all the attempts with the other two, even if they didn’t. My oldest and I share something special even though most of the time spent on this shared hobby was done in companionable silence.
Over the years between back then and now, my son and I have done a lot of still water fishing. I had a couple of Colorado Creek 8 ft pontoon boats that we would take out but sadly, he never really caught anything over a couple of pounds. He had heard countless stories of reeling in big fish but hadn’t had the pleasure of an epic battle trying to land an actual lunker. It has always kind of gnawed at me, not having had the opportunity to watch the thrill in my son’s eyes as he frantically fought to land some bragging rights for the first time. With fewer fishing adventures left ahead of me I had been thinking about how to make it convenient for us to scratch this one off the list.
I was on Facebook one day as I am wont to be when an ad showed up on my wall from Lang’s Fishing Adventures out of Mission BC. I looked at their site and I liked what I saw. I thought this might be just the ticket, so I asked my son about his upcoming schedule, then contacted Lang’s about available dates. We booked for May 17th and prepared for an 8 AM start with Austin as our guide.
Let me tell you, Austin knows “some pile” about sturgeon fishing and where they hole up on the river. We didn’t go very far from the boat launch before he dropped anchor at our first location. Our guide informed us that there were about 20 sturgeons milling around the area as he proceeded to position the jet boat for the least drift in the current. We caught 2 sturgeons within the first half hour. The first, a respectable 5-footer that my son brought in. He was all smiles as he fought to bring that fish to the boat. Fortunately, seeing as the first one was only 5 feet, we were able to bring the fish into the boat prior to releasing it so we could grab a picture of my son holding the biggest fish he had ever caught. Before moving to the next hole, we managed to bring in a double header, each of us with a 6 ft beauty.
With 4 white sturgeons under our belt in less than an hour, it was time for us to weigh anchor in search of some bigger fish and Austin, our guide, said he had just the spot. It didn’t take long before we were on a fish at our new location and by all indicators, this was a large fish. Austin, having set the hook, suggested that it felt like a potential 300 hundred pounder. Turns out that this was some wily fish as he kept our guide busy piloting the boat to counter move the fish’s attempts at escape. According to the fish finder we were in a nearly clear area with just one big root clump to be concerned about. At one point the big fish was literally towing the boat towards the root ball and our guide took control of the rod in a desperate attempt to stop the fish from reaching the roots. It was a losing battle as the sturgeon achieved his goal on the deadwood and made good the escape.
We continued to catch 6 and 7 footers over the next few hours as we toured several more “hot spots” on the river. Around two in the afternoon we hooked into what we thought was another middle-sized sturgeon, it just happened to be my turn at the reel. Before too long I discovered that this was indeed a larger fish than we originally credited. The fight this fish put up just about pulled me overboard twice before I got squared to what was on the other end of the line. Battered and bruised I had to turn the rod over to my son to finish the fight. It took us the better part of an hour to tire the fish out so we could take it to shore, measure it and ethically release the nearly 100-year-old gleaming white beauty.
Once we measured all 8-foot 3 inches of this respectable catch, finished with the pictures and revived the fish prior to release, we still had an hour left of our charter. Austin asked if we would like to go try for another and I looked him in the eye and said, “I am perfectly willing to go ride around in the boat for another hour, but I couldn’t risk catching another fish!” I was spent and had muscles screaming at me to stop. Luckily for me my son, half my age, was tired too so we begged off. It was a very successful day of sturgeon fishing. We landed 8 of various sizes and lost 2. I am glad my son had a good time fishing that day. Maybe not as good a day as me because I got to be with him when he finally caught some really big fish. I got to see him light up with a smile plastered on his face as he brought in each of his fish. And while this trip was for him, I got to have a father’s day a little early this year.
