Sharphooks
Well-Known Member
I’m a number seven kind of guy. That’s always been an important number though-out my life. I’m embarrassed to relate that I’ve made multiple significant life decisions based on the presence or absence of sevens in the equation. I travelled from London to Seattle to attend the UW School of Fisheries because the Dean’s phone number had 4 sevens in it. I overpaid for two cars in my driveway that have multiple sevens in the VIN. MY house was built in 1977, had multiple sevens in the listing number..... I overpaid for that privilege, too.
So here it was October 7 and I was stepping into the Skeena. I knew I had to be prepared—-sound knots, sharp hooks, careful fishing. Wow, October 7th!
And I’d have to try and pretend all the jet sleds coming and going across my water (four of them that morning) didn’t exist.
So trapped by a jet boat and clients in the hole below me and a jet boat in the hole above me I had no choice other then to to lavish the wafter at my feet.
A few casts into my hole for the morning and this happened to me:
I haven’t seen a big doe steelhead like this in a number of years. In this day and age, this is an incredibly rare fish. When I first started fishing the Skeena and its tributaries in the mid 70’s the returning steelhead population was 35,000 fish. In 2021 the projected return was 6,000 fish. This year, a few thousand fish more then that but basically, the Skeena steelhead run is on the verge of collapse. And the size of each individual fish has been shrinking. Anecdotal reports support this. With Skeena riparian habitat not the obvious culprit, it is a combination of commercial fishing operations killing steelhead as bycatch in their nets and various (suspected) changes occurring out on the high seas during their migration (ocean acidification, warming trends of the surface water they migrate in, reductions of forage fish etc)
So to have a gorgeous specimen capable of laying up to 10,000 eggs in the gravel on the end of my rod then lying at my feet: the lucky seven was not lost on me that morning.
The Skeena in October is a stunningly beautiful place. I missed 2020 because of the pandemic border closure. I missed 2021 because the steelhead returns were so poor I couldn’t with good conscience go up and pound on them. Now I was finally back. A painfully long span of time had passed without having stood in swirling Mother Skeena waters....I drank it all in, like a parched man crawling through the desert who just stumbled into an ice cold bottle of Dr. Pepper hiding in the sagebrush
So here it was October 7 and I was stepping into the Skeena. I knew I had to be prepared—-sound knots, sharp hooks, careful fishing. Wow, October 7th!
And I’d have to try and pretend all the jet sleds coming and going across my water (four of them that morning) didn’t exist.
So trapped by a jet boat and clients in the hole below me and a jet boat in the hole above me I had no choice other then to to lavish the wafter at my feet.
A few casts into my hole for the morning and this happened to me:
I haven’t seen a big doe steelhead like this in a number of years. In this day and age, this is an incredibly rare fish. When I first started fishing the Skeena and its tributaries in the mid 70’s the returning steelhead population was 35,000 fish. In 2021 the projected return was 6,000 fish. This year, a few thousand fish more then that but basically, the Skeena steelhead run is on the verge of collapse. And the size of each individual fish has been shrinking. Anecdotal reports support this. With Skeena riparian habitat not the obvious culprit, it is a combination of commercial fishing operations killing steelhead as bycatch in their nets and various (suspected) changes occurring out on the high seas during their migration (ocean acidification, warming trends of the surface water they migrate in, reductions of forage fish etc)
So to have a gorgeous specimen capable of laying up to 10,000 eggs in the gravel on the end of my rod then lying at my feet: the lucky seven was not lost on me that morning.
The Skeena in October is a stunningly beautiful place. I missed 2020 because of the pandemic border closure. I missed 2021 because the steelhead returns were so poor I couldn’t with good conscience go up and pound on them. Now I was finally back. A painfully long span of time had passed without having stood in swirling Mother Skeena waters....I drank it all in, like a parched man crawling through the desert who just stumbled into an ice cold bottle of Dr. Pepper hiding in the sagebrush
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