Joe and the Intruders
Joe and the Intruders
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Joe Saysell phones once a year and I’m always happy to hear the sound of his voice. I met Joe years ago when I was on the Board of Directors of the Steelhead Society of BC. We had decided to give him the Cal Woods Conservation Award for the vigour and bravery he’d shown in his fight against the logging near his home on Vancouver Island.
Since the first faller felled the first tree and sold it, the forest industry in this province has been a disaster conducted with almost complete disregard for the natural world. The creation and subsequent professionalization of the forest service didn’t help matters much since the science of forestry in BC was new and unique and, to make matters worse, those who taught trotted out a European paradigm that had had limited success there and whose application in the forests here was dubious.
When, in the middle decades of the last century, the Social Credit government led by W.A.C. Bennett passed legislation that essentially offered up B.C. forests to giant forest corporations to plunder for a pittance, BC’s Forest Service had no choice but to become the servants of the Corporate Forest Giants. The industry was the engine of the economy then and even the most well meaning foresters found themselves cowed by the system.
The overwhelming acceptance of the principles of diversity and sustainability by scientists the world over, as articulated in the UN’s Bruntland Commission, provided a stark contrast to the giant clear cuts and monoculture of our forests at the time. The well intentioned but short-lived NDP government led by Mike Harcourt made a feint in the right direction with its Forest Practises Code, but all that fell to ruin with the advent of the Campbell Regime.
Now BC forestry is as bad as – and possibly worse – than it ever was, but at least in Skeena we have the small comfort of it being prosecuted on a smaller scale.
Joe Saysell campaigned against bad logging before the Code, back when Colleen McQuarry was exposing BC as Brazil North to the UN. One day, Joe came across a grove of ancient spruce near a river, one of those breathtakingly beautiful stands of ancient trees growing from a deep moss carpet. The wilderness tract had been flagged. Joe pleaded with his bosses to leave those trees. Believing his pitch on behalf of the old trees to be successful, he was later shocked and shaken to find them burning on a massive waste pile.
The realization that nothing was sacred to corporate foresters and that they intended to cut every last stick of old growth in the province so they could put plantations in their place led Joe to put down his saw and turn from a faller to an activist, not an easy thing to do in a logging town on Vancouver Island.
Joe is plain spoken and direct. He will never tell anybody what he thinks they want to hear, which is why I enjoy our annual conversations. This year, he asked about the steelhead returns in to the Skeena. I told him I was optimistic.
Joe has guided on the Cowichan River off and on since he was a kid. After his days as a faller were over, guiding became his livelihood. Now, I understand, he augments his income playing poker, though I await confirmation on that.
An avid angler, Joe has made many trips into the Dean River, not by helicopter, as most anglers do, but by boat, carrying his gear up the logging road into the valley. Many steelhead made their way into the Dean this year, Joe told me. He knew this from conversations with guides and their sports and camping anglers.
They’re all using big, two-handed rods. They’re all throwing those giant flies...
Intruders, I said.
Yeah, intruders, they can’t be good for fish, said Joe.
I agreed. I told Joe that I gave up using flies with trailing hooks after having to release two hemorrhaging Copper River steelhead in one season. In thirty years of steelheading before the season in which I experimented with trailing hooks, I had never landed a bleeding fish. When I discussed this with veteran angler, Peter Broomhall, whose steelheading career is twice as long as mine, he told me that he had one bleeding fish in all that time. Like me, and most steelheaders of our generation, Peter never used a fly larger than one dressed on a size two, 2X long hook. Most of the time he used a size four wooly worm. The lethal flies of my design that proved too deadly to continue using were not nearly as long as the intruder patterns I now see on the end of so many young fishers’ tippets. To overcome the leverage problems that come with long shanked streamer hooks, I’d clipped the section of hook extending from the point to the bend and attached a short shanked bait hook in place of the section I’d removed, thereby creating a streamer hook four times as long than the standard length shank with a flexible hook at its end. The ubiquitous intruder patterns have their hooks dangling from one to three inches behind making them from 4 to 6 inches in length. If you hold your hand up with your palm facing your face, the length of the heel of your hand to the tip of your index finger will be the approximate length of a steelhead’s head. If you then hold your hand palm upward parallel to the ground and lay an intruder fly with its heavy metal eye balls near the tips of your fingers, you will notice that the trailing hook extends to the part of your hand where a steelhead’s gill rakers are located.
Their users claim that steelhead take intruder patterns for squid, which they claim are the primary food source for steelhead during the latter’s stay in salt water. They also claim that the fish take these faux squid ferociously, all of which suggests to me a greater chance that the trailing hook can inflict a fatal wound to a steelhead’s gills. This would not be an issue in a kill fishery, but it most certainly is in most of the steelhead fisheries in this province where steelhead must be released.
There is no question that intruder patterns are effective. As Peter Broomhall points out, they are also being fished on more effective tackle than was available to steelheaders in the past. The two handed rods enable greater line control while allowing their owners to cast outsized wind resistant flies with leaden eye balls that make the bottom easier to reach. New, quick sinking lines, some with the sinking rates of 8 inches per second that make these lines plunge toward the stream bed as quickly as lead core trolling line, make it easier than ever to invade those spots where steelhead could formerly expect some sanctuary.
This was Joe’s second concern.
The numbers of fish they are catching are way too large. It’s time we had limits on catch and release, argued Joe. I set a personal limit of two fish then I quit, he said.
Joe fishes a floating line and a small surface fly exclusively, and he fishes it on a single handed rod.
David, he said, referring to his life long friend, former minister of fisheries and minister of the environment, David Anderson, brought in a catch and release limit on some of the salmon rivers back east, and, after some grumbling, the anglers there accepted it.
I told Joe he was preaching to the choir.
Fishing with an intruder, let’s call it intruder fishing, or intruding for short, is so distant from the North American tradition of fly fishing that it is far closer to lure fishing. I write this knowing that advocates of Intruding will quickly point to the centuries old British tradition of fishing salmon with enormous gaudy flies and tube flies cast with two handed rods, but, there too, fishing a brass tube on a 16 foot fly rod has more in common with casting a Devon Minnow with a casting rod armed with a Hardy Silex than it has with casting a Jock Scott on a smaller pole.
The concern over inflicting a lethal wound upon a salmon has never been an issue in Britain where releasing salmon is almost unheard of. There, anglers kill their legal limit then stop fishing, as they used to do here. As Joe points out, If one man goes to the river, casts a lure, kills one fish and goes home while another goes to the stream casts a foot long fly laden with tinsel and carrying a potentially lethal trailing hook, catches a dozen steelhead, lets all of them go, then goes home to brag about his feat to his cronies, it’s not clear who had killed the most fish.
With the advent of the Intruder, flyfishing for steelhead has slipped sideways. Let the debate on limiting the number of steelhead released commence.