| The Bold Man and the Sea
by
Jack Kintner
For some reason, perhaps inspired by the talking fish mounted
on your dentist’s office wall, you’ve decided
to go out and catch a salmon,and have enlisted a local
charter fishing boat to aid you in your cause.
The phone rings at 5 a.m. on the appointed day, and a cheery
voice on the other end begins yelling about fish to catch
and don’t be late ays grope for the handset to answer
and confirm your spot on the boat. You find your way into
your clothes,grab your gear and head down to the marina.
Traffic is light.
A genial old salt who’s part Ernest Hemingway and
part Steve Martin looks up from the stern of his compact
boat and welcomes you aboard with a properly seafarin’ squint
into the sun, just now popping over the eastern mountains. “Looks
good for today. They’re knocking’ em dead over
west of San Juan, if we don’t run into killer whales.”
The rest of the party arrives, a 90-year-old tourist from
Texas and a local friend of his with whom he served in WW
II, plus his daughter and son-in-law, and once settled,off
we go, roaring west into a chilly pink dawn at 25 knots.
After an hour and a half of threading our way through the
northern San Juan Islands, with pauses to look at the unusual
transplanted Asian deer and sheep on Speiden Island, we reach
the appointed spot where the roar of the engine is replaced
by the quiet drone of the trolling motor,the bouncing of
the trip out by the hammock-like swing and sway of a small
boat bobbing like a cork on this little corner of the wide
Pacific Ocean.
A fog bank extends from Whidbey Island west out the Strait
of Juan de Fuca and appears to be creeping our way. A few
other boats are out fishing near us, off the lighthouse on
the west side of San Juan Island in a part of Haro Strait
that’s over 1,000 feet deep in places, though there
are more boats off the bank south of Cattle Point, at the
island’s southern tip near a shallow underwater bank.
In a kind of fisherman’s sign language that hasn’t
changed in centuries, all the nearby boats report no luck.
The skipper furrows his brow at this while getting four
custom 10 and a half foot rods the skipper built himself
out and into holders in less than two minutes. If you were
yawning (and you were) you missed it. He uses light gear,
a small bright orange plastic mini squid tied a couple of
feet behind white herring flashers on stout, 25-pound test
mono filament line.
The fishing line is connected with a clip that resembles
a large safety pin to a down rigger, a 10-pound cannon ball
suspended on a braided stainless steel line. Viewed from
the side the line would describe a giant letter “L,” going
more or less straight down to the clip and then trailing
15 to 20 feet behind the stainless line. The clip is designed
release when a fish strikes, leaving you with less line to
reel in and no lead weights between you and the fish to deaden
the experience.
The skipper goes through all this and more in a kind of
lecture/travelogue but you’re listening with half an
ear since you’ve been up now four or five hours, and
the morning sun and comforting motion of the boat has you
nodding off like you’re inside a warm boring church
when the skipper suddenly yells,“There’s a fish!
It’s on your rod!Pick it up! Pick it up!” Awake
now, eyes like saucers, you pick up the rod, “but don’t
pull too hard,” the skipper cautions, “because
the fish either got the lure or he didn’t, and you
might pull the hook out of his mouth.” All hooks are
required to be barbless.
“Keep your rod tip up,” commands the skipper, “and
hold him,let him run if he wants to but when he comes toward
you, reel in.” You learn to keep your fingers away
from the handles on the direct-drive“ knuckle buster” reel,
little more than a blur when the fish runs. If it begins
to fight or behave like a bigger fish then the other lines
are reeled in to get them out of the way. Often one or two
others will also have a fish on.
Your wrist is beginning to ache,and the pull of the fish
is surprisingly strong, but soon the water breaks a few yards
behind the boat,and the skipper makes an identification, “looks
like a nice sockeye.” Your rod goes almost straight
up as you lead the fish toward the side of the boat, trying
to lift its head out of the water, while the skipper leans
over the side and adeptly snaps the fish into his net and
aboard in one easy motion.
What will from this moment on always be referred to as “your
fish” lies wrapped in the netting, the lure still caught
in its lower jaw. The skipper stuns it with a whack on the
noggin, untangles it from the net and lure and shows you
how to hoist it on your thumb for a photo that will likely
hang on your fridge until tattered with age.
The Skipper
In fishing, as in life, there are no guarantees. “Which
makes it all the better when we do catch fish!” roared
Jim Jorgensen, dean of small boat charter skippers north
of Seattle and south of Vancouver. Within a few days of writing
this story he’d taken out several parties, all of whom
caught fall run fish on days that ended with his boat, the
26’ cabin outboard named Polar Bear, surrounded by
the local pods of fish-eating killer whales going after the
same runs.
This time of year his clients catch primarily pink salmon,
since it’s an odd-numbered year when pink salmon are
returning to spawn at age two and are therefore plentiful.
There are other fish, of course – a few days before
this magazine went to press one customer tied into a 42-pound
Chinook, the largest salmon caught on Jorgensen’s boat
this year. “Her husband was rubbing her shoulder because
she was starting to cramp up,” he laughed,“because
that fish ran and ran, probably taking about 150 yards of
line, but she eventually landed it, a real nice big King.” Jorgensen
also catches a fair number of sockeye this time of year.
A Spokane native who was raised in south Puget Sound and
taught to fish by his father, Jorgensen honed his friendly,
approachable and somewhat corny style teaching scienc eat
Blaine high school. With backing from a local refinery he
got his outdoor education class to build a major salmon enhancement
facility on a once highly productive salmon stream, Dakota
Creek in Blaine.
Built in the early 1980’s, the complex became known
as the aquaculture project, and it continues to be a permanent
part of the science curriculum a decade after his retirement
from active teaching. It also led to his being named both
conservation teacher of the year and science teacher of the
year for Washington state. “When we started,”he
reflected, “we got eggs from all over, but have since
found out that fish are more strongly imprinted for their
home waters than we realized. Habitat restoration’s
very important, of course, and these days the role of hatcheries
is changing more habitat is restored and more is learned
about how fish live and how to protect native wild stocks.”
Jorgensen’s got an enviable track record at helping
customers catch a salmon. “Or two or three,” he
quickly corrected, “like the time we once had six on
at once. Boy, when you hit ’em like that, it’s
chaos on deck.” Which is, of course, what he’s
after, a fun day idyllically trolling on the water often
interrupted with shouts of “fish on!” The more
the merrier. He’s been at this almost four decades,
and carries the oldest charter fishing license in the state
of Washington.
His paying customers have ranged from the highly skilled
to the klutzy first timer, from the obscure to the famous.
He often sees whales and porpoise. One customer, a Texan,was
knocked over by a splash from a killer whale that jumped
out of the water right next to the boat.
Golfer Arnold Palmer, a regular visitor to the golf course
he designed for nearby Semiahmoo Resort, once stayed an extra
day to fish. The resort recommended Jorgensen, who tells
a story on himself about getting so flustered in such famous
company that he got his boat stuck in the mud on the way
out. “I had to jump out and push,” he said. And
how was the fishing? “Well, yeah, we got limits,” he
answered dryly, “I mean it was the least I could do
for him after a start like that.”
What kind of salmon?
There are five species of salmon found in this part of the
Pacific Ocean: Chinook, Chum, Coho, Pinkand Sockeye. All
are classified as Oncorhynchus, a genus of the “Salmonidae” family
that also includes steel head and cutthroat,even though
both are considered to be trout. If they spend part of
their life cycle in salt water they’re termed “anadromous.”
The runs, or populations of a given species that come from
the same spawning event and location, are fragile and suffer
considerable attrition. Typically, if a female lays 4,000
or more eggs, 800 or so hatch into tiny salmon fry. As bigger
smolts, about 200 of them make it out to sea. Only 10 of
those will reach adulthood, and of those only two will return
to the river to spawn.
Chinooks are the biggest (commonly to 50 pounds but can
be over 100) and range in age from two to eight years before
returning to spawn. Coho (5 to 10 pounds) are popular sport
fish because they’re the best fighters on rod and reel.
They spawn in the third year, and in salt water develop bright
silvery sides that give them their nickname,“Silver
Salmon.”
Pinks are the most plentiful, smallest (4-8 pounds) and
perhaps the most easily caught of the five. They spawn in
alternate years at the age of two, and in this area are much
more plentiful as a game fish in odd-numbered years.
Sockeye, a little bigger than pink sat eight to 10 pounds,
were not normally caught by sport fishermen until Canadians
developed a technique of trolling a small artificial squid
behind a small white dodger or red and white hot spot flasher.
Not a fighter but delicious, it’s the most valuable
commercial species because of the reddish tinge to their
meat from their diet of squid and shrimp. A landlocked form
is known as “Kokanee” in B.C.
Chum are a little bigger than Coho when mature, and are
the quickest to leave their spawning streams after hatching
and the last to return. They normally spawn close to salt
water, and are a common subsistence fish for natives but
are not normally considered to be a sport fish. They’re
often called “Dog” salmon because of the prominence
of their canine teeth and fierce disposition when spawning.
Fishing Tips
Jorgensen teaches a class every fall he calls a “Salmonar” on
how to catch the fish. As a charter operator, he spends February
through July or early August fishing north of the border
in British Columbia for Chinook, usually in and around Active
Pass in the Gulf Islands. “Iuse flashers and coyote
spoons,”he said, “fished 100 to 150 feet down,often
near the bottom.”
He spends more time from late August through November in
Haro Straight on the west side of San Juan Island and near
Lighthouse Point on Point Roberts, when theCoho begin to
show up. Coho fishing is done at a slightly faster speed
than trolling for Chinook, with flashers instead of the larger
shiny brass dodgers, at depths of 60 to 90 feet.
“For Sockeye,” Jorgensen said,“the trick
is to use a small mini-squid lure on a 26 inch leader behind
a flasher. Canadians often use a hotspot (red and white)
flasher, but Ialso use an all white herring dodger,which
is smaller than a flasher, at depths of 50 to 75 feet.”
Jorgensen makes his own rods out of fiberglass blanks he
describes as “limber.” He sets up the reel and
cork grip much like a large fly rod,with a direct drive single
action large mandrel reel, “an overgrown fly reel,” he
said, set forward of the butt much like a two-handed spey
rod. A normal fly rod has the reel at or very near the butt
end of the pole. He uses 25-pound-test mono filament line.
His boat is a 24-foot outboard with a small utilitarian
cabin that has a head (toilet) in the forward area. He named
it Polar Bear after a line of fishing lures he once manufactured.
Jim can be reached at 360/332-6724. |
