The Toughest One-Day Hunt I've Ever Done: A 2022 Perspective On My 2020 Spring Black Bear

One of the very best days of my entire life, and I was miserable for almost all of it. I’m glad I managed to figure out the timer on the old camera I was using, and got this rare smiling pic.

In early June 2020, I went on the toughest one-day hunt I've ever done. I'll lay some groundwork for the story first, then things will start to get kind of insane fairly fast. Spring black bear season was winding down, and I had one last chance to fill my tag. I had already gone out a couple times during the season, and hadn't managed to get a bear for the freezer. Not having any vacation days left before the end of the season, I had to try to get it done over a weekend. There are many ways to hunt black bears, and on Vancouver Island, the bear population is dense and widespread. If you spend enough time in the right general areas, you will likely encounter a shooter bear without much trouble. On this hunt though, I had one day to locate, kill, and pack out a bear, and one day back home to process it before I had to be back at work at 6:30am the following morning. I didn't have time to spend looking for bears; I had to go to a place where I was reasonably sure a bear would be, and try to kill one quickly. The surest way I know to find bears is to cruise the water around remote ocean beaches by kayak. By paddling into long inlets, and maintaining a good distance from the shore, you can survey large swaths of beach without announcing your presence in any way. Unlike berry patches or salmon streams, ocean beaches provide food sources for bears year-round, in the form of shellfish and grasses. The bears' attention is often focused on their food, leaving the opportunity to land a boat on the downwind side, and work your way on foot toward the animal for a shot. I figured that would be my best chance to get my bear, and would provide some good adventure at the same time. Hunting by kayak is extremely enjoyable; it affords the ability to travel unimpeded to areas that would be inaccessible by any other means. You feel like the whole ocean is your highway. So that's what I planned to do; kill a bear, stuff it into my kayak, and paddle home as quickly as I could.

The night before the hunt, I got off work at 10:30pm. I had my truck packed and ready to go as soon as I got off. I had to drive for about four hours to get to the place I had planned to launch my kayak. Now remember, this was in June 2020, still the relatively early days of Covid-19. At that time, people were being advised not to travel outside of their communities, and all kinds of things that made no sense to close, were closed. Come to think of it, we still haven't progressed past that stage. Anyway, I made sure that before I left, I checked that the public boat launch I intended to use was still open. The Government of Canada website that published information on the launch's availability explicitly stated that the launch was open. Other facilities in the vicinity were closed due to Covid, but the boat launch was supposed to be open. At 2:30am, when I arrived at the road that turned off the highway and led to the launch, I was met by concrete barriers. Perhaps the public boat launch was open, but the road that went there was closed due to Covid-19. All I wanted to do was put a boat in the water and paddle as far from human contact as I could, and here I was in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, being blocked from doing so. My first thought was to simply find a place to leave the truck, and carry the kayak the rest of the way to the ocean. A quick look at the map showed that that would not be as easy as it seemed. There was nowhere in the immediate vicinity where the highway came close enough to the water to make an impromptu portage feasible. In fact the closest place that a road came near the water was off a logging road 30km away. With no other option presenting itself, I drove to the spot on the map that showed the road coming closest to the ocean, and hoped I would find something other than a steep cliff, or the typical west coast 10-foot wall of underbrush. At 4am, after much probing in the dark of possible places to put the boat in the water, I found a small creek with a low bridge over it. There was a pullout on the other side to leave the truck, and it was possible to scramble over the guardrail of the bridge and climb down a jumble of boulders to a small rocky beach. Setting my alarm for 7am, I planned to get 3 hours of sleep, and figure out a way to get the kayak down to the water in the daylight.

After waking up and immediately crushing a citrus-flavored Beaver Buzz Energy, I felt ready to tackle the task of getting the kayak and all my gear over the side of the bridge and down to the water. My boat is a 17-foot ocean kayak, weighing about 60lbs. Even at the best of times, it is an unwieldy craft to haul around solo. Trying to climb over the side of the bridge and down several metres of boulders to the beach was not fun. I was very surprised not to have the boat fall on me, or to have snapped an ankle, or simply to have dropped it and cracked the fibreglass hull. It took about an hour to transfer the kayak and my gear from the truck to the beach, and to load the boat and get dressed for the day's activities. Now, when hunting long distances from an unpowered boat with limited storage capabilities, there are tough decisions that must be made. First, you have to factor in the fact that if all goes well, there will be over 100 extra pounds of meat taking up space on the return trip. Everything that is brought must serve a vital purpose, there is no room for extras. On this particular trip, I planned to paddle about 30km to the head of a bay deep in the inlet. It was 8am, and there would be usable daylight until 10pm. I figured 14 hours of light would be enough time for a 60km round-trip paddle, even if there was a two-hour stop to shoot and field-dress a bear. Worst-case scenario, I would have to finish the last couple hours of the trip in the dark. In hindsight, that sounds insane, and as you will read, it definitely was. So, having determined that I could do the whole trip in a single day, I decided to leave my sleeping bag, tarp, and tent in the truck to save space in the boat for meat. The thought did occur to me that if the weather got bad, or if I couldn't navigate as effectively as I imagined I could in a kayak on the ocean in the dark, I might need those items to make camp somewhere. I did have some experience kayaking long distances on the ocean at night, so I was reasonably satisfied I could handle that if necessary. I had a GPS unit, and had used it to navigate in pitch-black conditions before. As for needing to make camp due to bad weather, I figured I would just turn the boat upside-down on a beach somewhere and sleep underneath it, hopefully with a bear hide to snuggle with. Most of these thoughts were probably fueled in some part by lack of sleep and being fired-up with Beaver Buzz.

At 8am off I went, extremely excited for what the day might hold for me. The weather was good to start out, with very little wind, and I was glassing the shores for bears within an hour. As I travelled further up the inlet toward my target bay, however, the weather got steadily worse. Band after band of rainclouds passed through, bringing sheets of rain and hail in twenty-minute bursts, followed by brief glimpses of sun, then plunging back into darkness and rain. It's very humbling, to be in a tiny boat inches above the ocean, with giant snow-capped mountains towering overhead, and to be pelted by alternating bouts of rain and hail. Far from any person or anything man-made of any kind. In that situation, you are fully responsible for everything that happens to you in a very immediate way. It's a valuable feeling for a person to experience from time to time. It certainly changes your perspective about things. It puts into sharp focus those things that are important and real, and reveals the things that might have seemed important, or scary, but may have just been imagined to be so. I paddled for several hours through the worsening weather, eventually catching my first glimpses of a few solitary, smaller bears on the shoreline here and there, as well as a sow with two cubs. Good signs that despite the rain and hail, bears were out and moving around.

I spent most of the day cruising several hundred yards from shore, glassing promising-looking, grassy beaches. On two occasions, I located legal bears, and made my way to shore to attempt stalks. Both times, the bears finished their feed and moved off into the bush before I could get to within shooting distance. So both times, I got back in the boat and continued toward the bay that marked my turn-around point. I finally arrived at the bay at 4pm; later than I had anticipated, but with all the stops to make food and to pursue bears factored in, it was an acceptable halfway split. From more than a kilometre out, I could see a bear on the beach at the head of the bay with the naked eye. Glossy black bears stick out really well on green fields of beach grass. I confirmed with my binoculars that this was a bear I could go after, and began paddling toward a spot that would allow me to make a covert landing. I pulled my kayak up onto the beach, prepared my rifle, and started toward the bear. It was on the other side of a small point of land, which I planned to use as cover for my approach, and then to peer over top of and shoot from once I reached it. While I was slowly making my way along the beach toward the point, the bear was out of sight, and I wouldn't know whether it was where I had last seen it until I looked over the top. When I eventually did get there, and carefully craned my neck over the rocks to look down the beach toward where the bear had been, it was empty. I trudged back toward my kayak dejectedly. Had I not sacrificed enough to the hunting gods to deserve to be looked upon with favor? I pushed the kayak back out into the ocean, and paddled out a few hundred yards to observe the beach from a distance, hoping for more bears to show up.

At 6pm, without another bear sighting, I had a decision to make. I could stay longer, and take advantage of the last few hours of the day, which are always the best producers for bears. That would almost certainly leave me out overnight in the rain with my very limited equipment. Or, with only 4 hours of light left, I could paddle as fast as I could back to where I had left the truck. The second option would still mean paddling until midnight, but at least in six hours I could be warm and out of the rain, and only have to navigate in the dark for the last two hours of the trip. Ultimately, I decided on a compromise. I would leave the bay and start back toward the truck, but I would take my time, glassing until the light ran out, hoping for a last-minute bear somewhere along the way. As luck would have it, I spotted one within half an hour of starting back.

At 6:30pm, I spied a bear on a very small strip of beach with not many options for a landing area. If I was going to have a chance, I would have to bring the kayak in downwind of the bear, at a spot only about a hundred yards from him. Between that spot and where the bear was feeding was a large downed tree that I could keep between myself and the animal to prevent direct line of sight while I hauled the boat out and readied my gun. Once ashore, I crept as quietly as I could up to the tree, knowing that the bear was not far from the other side of it. When I slowly poked my head up over the trunk of the horizontal tree, I found that the bear had been steadily feeding closer to it while he had been out of sight. He was now forty yards away, and walking straight toward me. I rested the barrel of my .30-06 on the tree, and paused to wait for a shot while my heart tried to jump straight out of my body via my throat. I briefly contemplated what I would do if the bear just continued walking straight toward me, and we suddenly found ourselves feet away from each other, with just a tree in between. Luckily, as he crossed a small creek that cut through the beach and emptied into the ocean, he turned broadside and put his head down to take a bite of grass. I shot, and he ran about ten yards before dropping and expiring on the spot.

I was absolutely jubilant. I had a bear down, there would be plenty of meat to go around until fall, and I had gotten the job done on the only day I had left to do it. I skinned and quartered the bear right there on the beach, loading his meat, hide, and skull into the boat. All that room I had saved by not bringing camping gear provided ample storage! But, the reality of the situation then started dawning on me. I had no tent, no sleeping bag, no tarp. I was nearly 30km by boat from my truck, and it was 8pm. Two hours of daylight left. In perfect conditions, in daylight, with no wind or tides to fight against, if I paddled continuously, I could maybe make it in 5 hours. With a kayak bogged down with over 100 pounds of meat, the wind in my face, the tide flooding into the inlet, and in the dark, though? I had no idea when I would make it back. I just started paddling, and said to myself that if it got too dangerous for whatever reason, I would find a place to land and construct a shelter for the night. After all, I was now the owner of a brand new bear blanket. Despite the continual rain showers, everything was good for the first two hours, while it was still light out. I made some good headway, and was even able to see well enough to navigate by sight for another hour beyond sunset. Once the darkness finally did set in, I had my compass to go by, and I occasionally turned on my GPS to make sure I was where I thought I was. The inlet I was in was full of islands and deep narrow bays, some of which were kilometres long. If I made a wrong turn, I could potentially waste hours of paddling time. I couldn't see anything besides the distant mountains on the horizon, which appeared as a faint silhouette against the backdrop of clouds and stars. To try to stay on track, I would pick out a mountaintop far off in the distance that matched the course I needed to keep for a certain amount of time. Every so often I would re-check my course on the GPS, use the compass to pick out a new mountain, and paddle towards it. At one point, I almost rammed my boat straight into a rock pile, because I mistook the profile of the rocks that were only hundreds of yards away as being that of a mountain range hundreds of kilometres away.

Eventually, some time after midnight, I couldn't even see the mountains on the horizon anymore. I navigated solely by the compass that's set into the deck of my kayak, and by double-checking against the GPS to prevent wandering. For long periods of time, I would be several kilometres from land on any side, unable to see anything except the water that I could illuminate with my headlamp. It was extremely disorienting. Imagine paddling in pitch black, without the ability to judge speed or relative distance. The small amount of water that you can see is being whipped by wind, so it doesn't even look like it's slipping past you, as it normally would. At times, it even looks like it's passing you, as though you were travelling backward. At that point, you just have to trust your instruments and ignore what your eyes are telling you. But for long stretches of time, I was just blindly paddling, exhausted. My shoulders burned, my legs were cramped, my face was numb, and I was in complete darkness for hours, unable to ascertain whether I was even moving at all. It seemed as though my arms were just pushing a paddle through nothing, and I was just stuck in an abyss. When I eventually did see land again, and realized it was the shoreline that I could follow all the way to my truck, I finally felt like I was getting somewhere. A couple more hours of paddling, and one accidental detour into a bay instead of across it, and I sighted the creek that marked the spot where the bridge was, and where my truck was parked. A bridge! And a road! And my truck! A vehicle that didn't require physical exertion to power! I pulled up to the rocky beach at 4am, 20 hours after I had left it. I got out of the kayak and walked for the first time in 8 hours, since I had left the beach where I shot the bear. I nearly fell over with every step. After a short rest, I pulled myself together enough to haul all my gear, meat, and eventually my kayak up the boulders, over the guardrail, and onto the road. I loaded everything into the truck, tied the boat down to the rack on top of it, and basically collapsed in the front seat.

I slept for 2 hours, woke up shortly after 6am, and crushed the second citrus-flavored Beaver Buzz Energy drink of the trip. I found my way back out of the logging road network and onto the paved highway, and started the four-hour drive back home, where I would have to butcher all the bear meat and vacuum-seal it for the freezer. Then sleep for a few hours, and head in to work. Can you imagine, after all that, how it felt to sit at a computer and do spreadsheets? How it felt to read emails? Restful, but purposeless. Or to read that gyms or other businesses are closed because regular life is "too dangerous?" Too dangerous to whom? Who gets to decide that for me? It's jarring to go from situations where every decision is critically important, where you're responsible in a very direct way for your own life, to being back in a world where many seem devoid of responsibility. I didn't get a bear this year, in 2021. I tried; I even started out on a kayak trip very much like the 2020 one. Even had multiple days set aside to do it! The weather was significantly worse, though, and produced waves that simply could not be paddled through. So I returned home and fished and tried other things. I went turkey hunting for the first time, which was awesome. I keep having to come back to this other world, though. The one where we're increasingly told that any level of risk is not tolerable, and that we're incapable of making decisions for ourselves. And I wonder how anyone can know what they're really capable of, if these kinds of barriers are erected in front of them. Sometimes you have to be beat down and exhausted, but choosing to be there, of your own free will, and fully responsible for what happens next.

2019 Spring Black Bear Hunt: Nootka Sound

I have this same picture up on instagram, and they didn’t blur it out, but they did blur a picture of a squirrel that I have, which is weird.

I have this same picture up on instagram, and they didn’t blur it out, but they did blur a picture of a squirrel that I have, which is weird.

With the fall hunting season fast approaching, I thought I’d take the time to post about my latest trip to Nootka Sound now, before I have a bunch of other things to write about. I drove up there the first week of May, and it was nice to check out the area again. I hadn’t been up that way for two years; not a lot has changed, except that there are a lot more grouse than I remember there ever being before. Like, so many that I might be tempted to make a trip up there this fall just to hunt birds. It’s a five-and-a-half hour drive to my preferred spot; about four hours on paved road, and then an hour-and-a-half on progressively worse logging roads. That small barrier is enough to turn most people off, and ensure I have a pleasant, solitary hunting experience. I drove up in the afternoon, with the intention of getting there in time for an evening hunt. When I arrived in the area, I pulled right up to the base of an old, overgrown spur road that I’ve had success with before. It winds its way up a steep slope for a few kilometres, and is normally covered in grass in the springtime, with salmonberry bushes overhanging on both sides. Perfect conditions for still-hunting bears. I got out of the car, loaded my rifle, and was creeping up the spur within minutes of arriving. Making camp can wait when there’s bears out there to be hunted. I was somewhat dismayed to find that the grasses and berries were way behind schedule. The salmonberries were barely green nubs on the bushes, and the grass was only a couple inches long. After half an hour of climbing up the old spur, I hadn’t seen any fresh bear crap. As I muttered to myself about the less than ideal conditions, I encountered a downed tree across the path that had two large branches blocking the way. As I stepped over one branch, and ducked under the other, I tripped, and reached out quickly to grab hold of the tree and stop my fall. The whole thing shook as I stumbled out onto the other side of it. Sure enough, standing there on the other side of the tree, twenty yards down the middle of the path, was a nice big bear. The tree had obscured him from my sight, and I became aware of him kind of mid-stumble as I erupted from inside the thickly-leafed branches. He, of course, ran away immediately, never to be seen again. If you’ve read any of my other hunting posts, you may be familiar with my habit of throwing away the first good opportunity of most hunts. This was no exception. That was a great-looking bear, and he was only a half-hour hike from the car. Slightly rattled, I trudged the rest of the way up the spur to its end, turned around and walked back down, then walked along the main part of the logging road until it got too dark to see, turned around once more, and returned to the car. I set up camp, opened the first Mountain House meal of the trip, which I believe was pasta primavera, enjoyed it thoroughly, then went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning half an hour before first light, enjoyed the second Mountain House meal of the trip, then set about hiking back up the same spur as the night before. This time, I encountered no bears. I then walked down the main logging road, away from camp and the direction I had come, with the intention of hiking up every old, overgrown spur I came across, until I found a good bear or ran out of daylight. Two hours later, I found myself on the second spur of the morning, looking down the trail at a bear’s rear end sticking out of a bush. I tried laying down prone, and found that there was too much brush in the way. I rose up to a seated position, with my elbows resting on my knees, as I glassed the bear to determine its size and see if there was a possible shooting lane. It was definitely an adult bear, but I couldn’t tell much more about it. There was no opening through which to shoot and hit a vital area. I decided to just sit and wait. Surely the bear would move at some point. Twenty minutes later, with my ass starting to go numb, I found that the only moving the bear was doing was slowly inching further into the bush as the sunlight crept up behind it. I got impatient and decided to slink up the path toward it, and see if I could get a better angle for a shot, or maybe try a fawn distress call and see if the bear would sit up. As I got to within forty yards, I could see that a shooting lane was not going to materialize. I could see only a big bear rump. As I was pondering what to do next, the bear suddenly sat bolt upright, then charged directly toward me. I raised my rifle as quickly as I could, and found the bear’s chest filling up the entirety of the sight picture in my scope. Before I could pull the trigger, the bear veered to my left, crashed into the brush, and ran for what sounded like a kilometre off into the distance. In the space of that two seconds, he had winded me, startled, ran in precisely the wrong direction, then we both got a bit lucky for different reasons, and then he was gone. And I was back to hiking.

At about the ten hour mark, I began to have some concerns. The berries were not even close to ripe. The grass was patchy, and barely even lawn-length. The bear sign was sporadic at best, and mostly very old. The grouse were abundant and annoyingly out-of-season. I had seen only that single bear all day. I tried hiking down to the ocean at several points, thinking the bears would turn to seafood while they waited for the vegetation to grow sufficiently to move up in elevation. That was problematic, because there weren’t really any beaches in the area; the land just steeply fell away into the water at all the spots I inspected. The few places where you could actually walk down to the shoreline, the bush was thick all the way to the water. And when the tide went out, instead of revealing eelgrass and kelp and mussel beds like I hoped, it just uncovered more steep, barren rocks. I hiked back to camp to have a Mountain House dinner and recover for a bit. While eating, I decided I would once again go up the first spur and check it out for a third time. I had an hour to go before sunset, just enough time to quickly go up, and get back down without walking in the dark for too long. At this point, I was just counting on the gods of the hunt rewarding me for the dozens of kilometres I put in, hiking up and down hills and through thick, crappy bush in the heat. And you know what, more often than not, that’s exactly what happens. If you keep stubbornly going ahead, adjusting the plan, trying everything you can think of, and putting in the work to hunt from sunrise to sunset, eventually you make your own luck. Twenty minutes after leaving camp to hike up the same spur for the third time in 24 hours, I spotted what looked like a good bear. Not quite as big as the one from the evening prior, but still a very nice, mature boar. I saw it as I was walking up the path; it seemed at first to be a shadow, then as I crept closer, it seemed to become a bear. That’s the opposite of what usually happens; normally I immediately think something is a bear, then I come to the realization it’s a shadow, or a stump. As I was slowly raising my binoculars, and making a final determination of whether to shoot or not, the bear suddenly bolted. This is the danger when you’re still-hunting an animal with the kind of sense of smell a bear has in this kind of terrain. By the time you see it, you’re almost always inside fifty yards already. And you have no control over your direction of approach. This time, though, I got lucky. I continued slowly coming up the path, and as I peered around the next corner, I saw that the bear had decided to stop and take a look to see if whatever it had sensed was still pursuing it. I took full advantage of this lapse in his judgement, raised my rifle and shot for the lungs. He died within five yards of the spot where he was hit. I was very relieved and grateful at my good fortune, not only for finding and shooting a bear just before the end of the day, but for not having to trail it through that nasty brush to recover it.

I skinned the bear with head and paws on, rug-style, and had its meat hung in a tree shortly after sunset. One other bear did come sniffing around through the bush looking for it while I was working, but a couple angry shouts had it running off down a ravine. I packed the meat, skull and hide the short distance back to camp, and decided to pack everything up, and drive the five-plus hours home that same night. I wanted to wake up at home, and be able to immediately begin processing the meat in the kitchen and have it in the big freezer as quickly as possible. With a quick stop in Campbell River for gas and a caffeinated beverage, I was able get home by about 3am. I slept for six hours, then got back to business. The processing went quick and smooth, and I vacuum sealed all the meat for future enjoyment. A lot of that meat is already gone at this point, but the hide is still in the freezer, waiting for a time when I’ve got a good long stretch to devote to tanning and rugging it out. I don’t know if I’ll go back up to Nootka Sound this year, but I’m sure I’ll be back up there at some point in the next year or two. It’s an awesome place, remote enough that you don’t have to worry about running into people, but accessible enough that you can make something happen even if you only have a couple days. That, and I can’t stop wondering about all those grouse.

My 2018 Fall Hunting Season

The sun rising on a river of mist flowing through the San Juan valley, near Port Renfrew.

The sun rising on a river of mist flowing through the San Juan valley, near Port Renfrew.

In September, I started off the fall season with a trip to Ghost Lake, in the Cariboo region of BC with two of my cousins and my uncle. I had a bull moose tag I had been drawn for as part of a group limited-entry application. We took the ferry ride over from Vancouver Island, and drove up there for five days of camping, hunting, and fishing. It was great to see all the wildlife that I don’t usually get to see, because it doesn’t occur on the island. Things like mule deer and coyotes, which are probably common sights to most western hunters, but which are pretty novel to me. I’ve seen a fair number of mule deer over the course of various trips to the mainland, but there are usually spans of years in between those trips. It’s always eye-opening how much bigger mature mule deer are than the blacktails that I’m used to seeing. We never did get a shot at a bull moose on the trip; we saw only one, and a shot opportunity never presented itself. We did see many cow moose, though, and it was awesome to watch them. There are lots of differences, but there are a few similarities between the Cariboo and Vancouver Island, too. There are a ton of black bears in both places. And the ubiquitous rainbow trout in every little lake. There are a bunch of grouse in both places, too, but with a bit of a difference. Whereas there are ruffed and sooty grouse in both spots, the mainland also has spruce grouse, which are absent from the island. I love spruce grouse. Their go-to survival strategy when threatened is to fly up into the nearest tree and sit as still as possible. Usually at eye level. With no consideration as to whether there’s any cover in from of them or not. This dovetails well with my preferred method of bird-hunting, which is to shoot sitting birds out of trees at short distances.

Spruce grouse haul in the Cariboo.

Spruce grouse haul in the Cariboo.

We shot a couple dozen grouse over the course of the trip, and brought them back to camp every night for camp food. Combined with the rainbows we caught in the lake, and the wild blueberries and mushrooms we picked, we barely needed to have brought any food with us at all. Still, we didn’t harvest a big game animal on the trip. So it makes sense that the morning after I got home, I drove 30 minutes from my house, and shot a deer 15 minutes into a hike up a nearby mountain. The hunting gods are like that. You put in a bunch of work, planning and hunting hard for a long period of time, often in adverse conditions, and come away empty-handed. Then you go out the next time and get a gimme. The deer I got was a small spike buck that I shot with my Remington 870 12-gauge. It was in a zone where any deer, buck or doe, is open, but you’re restricted to archery equipment or shotguns with buckshot only. It was great to get that meat in the freezer. The rest of September I mostly spent trout fishing in the local lakes, jigging for rockfish, and crab trapping.

During the month of October, I hunted a fair amount, but most of those “hunts” could be characterized more accurately as long walks in the woods while carrying a gun. I went out on several early mornings and hiked for hours, sometimes until sunset, with the main goal just to be out in the forest. I’m never more at peace than when I’m walking in the bush, watching and listening, and switched-on to my surroundings in the wilderness. During the whole month of October, I killed a total of one duck and one goose. But that wasn’t really the point. Sure, I would have loved if a monster blacktail presented itself for a shot, or if I got a bag limit of grouse. But I had a great time just slowly walking along the overgrown old deer trails, and being out there. Climbing around and through the salal and the thorny devil’s club, and the massive, slowly-rotting trees that make up the forest floor. I don’t always need to have a plan or a destination; just large expanses of wild places to wander around in. It could turn into a deer hunt, or a bear hunt, or a grouse hunt at any moment, but it doesn’t need to. I just love the feeling of being part of the energy of nature, and of the possibilities that go with it.

The first week of November, I once again got down to actually planning a focused deer hunt. The plan was to kayak from Yellow Point, south of Nanaimo, across about a 7.5 km stretch of ocean over to Valdes Island. I made the same trip two years ago, and decided to give it another go, this time with more days available to hunt. The kayak is one of the best tools available to a hunter on the west coast. You can use it to access areas that are just not available to those hunting on foot or from a truck or quad. It’s perfectly quiet, and it requires no fuel. All it takes is a bit of an adventurous spirit, and you can paddle to some completely remote areas where practically no one else is going. A big ocean kayak has plenty of room for a few days’ worth of camping and hunting gear, and with a little bit of pre-butchering, you can fit quite a bit of meat in and on one, as well. I paddled across to Valdes on November 4th, in the evening, using a lighthouse and the lights of a big, anchored freighter as reference points to guide me across. That was the first time I tried kayaking in the dark, and it was pretty straightforward, if a bit spooky. I did have a GPS available in my bag, roped to the top of the boat if I needed it, but I managed to get across and land within 200 yards of where I wanted to be, without any assistance other than the aforementioned lights. I set up camp at Blackberry Point, and settled in with a delicious Mountain House freeze-dried dinner, looking forward to a few days of solo hunting adventure on the mostly unpopulated island. The first day of hunting, I hiked directly inward from the beach, to get to an overgrown dirt road that I had found on my earlier trip. This time around, I had committed the Google Earth satellite imagery of the island to memory. I had several promising spots I wanted to hit, but first, I had to negotiate my way around a large, sheer cliff that runs a good distance along the length of the island. The satellite imagery wasn’t too helpful with this, because any sufficiently steep slope just doesn’t really register on an overhead view. On the GPS, however, I could see a spot where the elevation lowered, and there might be a way through. I hiked up to the base of the cliff through a boulderfield of truck-sized rocks on a steep slope. I found a spot where a crack ran horizontally through the cliff wall, which one could climb up into and through, and come out on the other side able to get onto the top of the cliff. After navigating that tricky bit, which I have many photos of, posted on my instagram page, it was a simple matter of hiking through a thick temperate rainforest and trying to find a tiny, elusive deer. I hiked for ten hours that first day, seeing a handful of deer, mostly just for a fleeting moment, and mostly obscured by various obstacles. None appeared to be bucks, which is what I needed to find. Being conscious of the fact that I didn’t want to try to descend back to my side of the island in the dark, I got back to camp in a timely manner through the same crack in the rock that I had come up. For dinner that night, I tried a new brand of freeze-dried food that I hadn’t had before, Backpacker’s Pantry. I believe I sampled their kung pao chicken offering that night, and it was very satisfying indeed. Two thumbs up for the Pantry.

The next morning saw me doing the same as the first, waking up before dawn, eating freeze-dried food, and climbing up a steep boulderfield. This time, I started from a couple kilometres away from the crack in the cliff, and worked my way toward it along the base of the rock. This was based on observations I had made two years ago, where I had seen deer using the base of the cliff as a bedding area. They could sit facing outward, and see and smell everything coming up toward them, and have their back protected by the wall of rock. Turns out this was a great strategy on their part, because there sure were a lot of deer up along the base of that cliff, but I sure as hell couldn’t get close to them. I bumped about a dozen deer off the approaches to the rock face, and didn’t manage to settle a crosshair on any of them. I’m sure, given the opportunity to find a good route up with good sight lines and the least possible amount of forest debris to crash through, this could be a successful option. Not on that day, though, that’s for sure. So once again, I ventured up and through the pass in the rock, to the other side of the island. It was a virtual repeat of the previous day, walking for hours through soaking wet salal and hoping each step wouldn’t have my foot breaking through rotten wood and getting stuck up to my armpits in forest floor biomatter. This time, however, I got back to camp with enough time to have a quick meal and head back up to the base of the cliff for an evening hunt along its base. As previously stated, the hunting gods will often reward hard work with a gimme, and only a couple hundred yards from my camp, I spotted a deer making its way down toward the ocean. As luck would have it, the wind and rain had picked up considerably through the day, and weather that I had previously cursed gave me the advantage in this situation, and the deer couldn’t have heard me if I were ten feet away. I kept out of sight behind a tree, and waited for the deer to pick its way around and over some boulders, and present a broadside shot. In short order it did, and a few seconds later, I had a deer down just a short drag from camp. I spent another day and night on Valdes with the deer meat hanging in game bags from a nearby tree, while I waited for the weather to cooperate enough to paddle back across to Vancouver Island. Many more freeze-dried meals met their end. When the time came to leave finally, the deer packed nicely into the boat, and I enjoyed a triumphant, if slightly choppy paddle back toward home.

In the next couple weeks, I made a few trips up the Malahat on weekends and in the mornings before work. I flushed and didn’t get a shot at an alarming number of grouse during this time. I have a tendency where I can sometimes allow something like missing a grouse to stick in my head and distract me for the rest of the day. I have to remind myself to have a short memory, and not go stomping around the woods thinking about a bird, and chasing deer away. On one of these occasions, I had been climbing all over a ridgeline, from one side to the other, for hours in the wind and rain. I had found a little group of three grouse in this same area a few days before, and had flushed and lost the first one, then the second and third ones in quick succession, just through sheer impatience. I was thinking about finding more birds in that spot, and had not been successful yet. I was reminding myself to stay focused and work slowly. Then it started hailing. And there was thunder and lightning. I could not have been more soaked and frozen if I had jumped in a glacial lake. The weather report had only said there might be brief showers, and I wasn’t going to be out overnight, so I had some pretty thin gear on, and not all of it was waterproof. I got turned around while trying to drop down into a drainage and come up the other side onto the next ridge on my way back toward the car. In the ravine bottom, the vegetation was so thick, trying to find my way through ended up getting me pointed about 90 degrees in the wrong direction. So I ended up travelling way down-valley before popping back out the other side. When I got to the top of the next ridge and realized this, I just started trudging straight through everything, on a beeline for the direction of the trail back to the car, regardless of what that sent me climbing through. I popped out onto an old overgrown portion of a trail I didn’t previously know about, and promptly flushed a grouse straight down a hillside and into a stand of eight-foot-high evergreens. There was no way I was getting that bird. I could laugh about it at that point; it was so cold and wet it transcended miserable and went to kind of funny and ridiculous.

I trudged through the bush for another hour or so, and finally made it back to the main trail. After walking downhill on the relatively cushy trail for awhile, my focus drifted again. In my mind, I was already in the car, getting changed, warming up, and planning where to eat. Sure enough, back in the real world, I came around a bend in the trail, and there was a deer standing in the middle of it. The doe was as startled by this as I was, and stumbled as it started trying to climb a steep slope off of the side of the path. I had bird shot loaded in my 12-gauge, but I had a 00 buckshot shell in the side pocket of my bino harness, and a couple more in the various other pockets of my gear. I walked toward the spot on the trail where the deer had scrambled up, looked in that direction, and there it still was, 40 yards uphill, mostly obscured by brush, giving me the look-back that I had been hoping for. I was fumbling around with my wet, frozen fingers, trying to eject the #6 shot, and load a buckshot shell. Miraculously, the deer was still standing there when I got finished with that project, and I drew a bead on it. There was too much brush. It was no good. I tried to shift around and find a better angle, but the deer was already gone. I climbed up to where it had been standing and took a look around, and climbed around a bit on that hillside, but didn’t uncover any more sign of hoofed critters. Once again, I started back toward the car on the main trail, thinking that that would have been perfect; to get the last of my three-deer limit for the year right close to the car, after a long day of wandering in the rain. When I got to a fork in the trail where I had to turn left to get back to the road, I decided to turn right and take a quick look down a long, straight stretch of trail not far away. I figured I had a half hour of daylight left, and if that deer had been up and moving, there might be more doing the same. I might as well take a look. I rounded the bend and crept slowly toward the straight stretch. Two does ran from the left to the right across the trail, and disappeared into the bush at the bottom of a hillside. Well, I thought, they’re definitely up and moving, maybe I can make something happen after all. A second later, I spotted another doe standing near the edge of the trail, at the base of the hillside. She was looking straight at me from about 60 yards away. I raised the shotgun, and closed the distance to about 50 yards, with a little slow shuffle forward, ready to shoot if the doe gave any sign of bolting. At 50 yards with a broadside shot, I felt comfortable that I would get a pretty instantaneous kill, and aimed for the lungs and squeezed the trigger. The doe toppled over dead, and I marched toward it feeling pretty pretty darn good about the whole situation.

The last blacktail of my 2018 season.

The last blacktail of my 2018 season.

That was the end of my 2018 blacktailed-deer season, with three animals in the freezer. I’ve already enjoyed a some pan-seared backstrap with mushrooms, some grilled venison on the BBQ, and some sliced deer sandwiches with chipotle mayo and pickles. I’m looking forward to all the many more meals those deer are going to provide going forward. I’ve got plenty of meat now, and I won’t need to be in any hurry to go out early for the 2019 spring bear hunt. I can enjoy it at a leisurely pace, and have fun at it, as I should. All that there is to do now is try to get a few more of those pesky island grouse knocked down, and maybe get out for some cougar calling with the FoxPro. It’s been a great year of hunting and fishing in 2018. I learned a lot, had an incredible time on many different adventures, both solo and with family, and really enjoyed my time in the woods; I can’t imagine a life without it.

Smokin' 'Bows

The Big Chief crushes it once again.  Who needs timers, temperature settings, and automatic wood puck dispensers?  Just plug it in and dump in some wood chips, man! (Check out my Instagram at the top left of the page for more images).

The Big Chief crushes it once again.  Who needs timers, temperature settings, and automatic wood puck dispensers?  Just plug it in and dump in some wood chips, man! (Check out my Instagram at the top left of the page for more images).

 I recently moved from the sticks, 45 minutes outside of town, down to Victoria in December.  I'm used to being able to walk to my favorite freshwater fishing spots right from my door.  I lived a couple minutes from Spectacle Lake, and an hour's walk from Oliphant Lake, for over five years, and had gotten quite accustomed to being the only angler on either lake.  I love to fish out-of-the-way spots, and I have many times in the past left a lake entirely, to go someplace else upon finding that a single fisherman had gotten to a spot before me.  I like to imagine that I'm somewhere deep in the backwoods, accompanied only by my preferred fishing enthusiasts, the eagles and the weasels and the bears.  The presence of other anglers makes that relaxing state of mind more difficult to achieve; so if that means I have to hike five or ten more kilometers to get some solitude and a couple trout or bass, so be it.  What that means, however, is that I had totally ignored the many suburban lakes that surround Victoria.  Now that I live in town, I decided to give some of them a chance, because it's either that or not go fishing at all, in most cases.  I don't have enough time to drive up-island after work and hike for an hour just to get a little fishing in.  

What started as a begrudging compromise, turned out to open my eyes to some great fishing that I had been writing off for years as too crowded and not "wild" enough.  True, when you can see cars driving past while fishing, and there are rowing teams practicing right next to you, it takes a little away from the experience, but if the fish are biting, I found that you tend to block most of that other stuff out.  The first lake I tried was Elk.  It's the largest lake in the region, and also the most well-used for all sorts of recreation.  I decided to start out by taking my trusty raft to the northwest arm of the lake, where there is a motor restriction.  That way, at least the larger boats wouldn't swamp me, and I had a chance at finding some calm water to fish.  Once I got out there, it was actually pretty enjoyable, with very few other people on the water.  Pro Tip: It helps if you go at 5AM if you want some peace and quiet.  My normal efforts at casting spinners were ineffective, though, as was the traditional bait-and-bobber routine with some power bait.  Only when I returned a few nights later, on June 15th, did I start to get into the fish.  After some YouTube research, I switched out my spinners for crankbaits, and started trolling them in deep water, rather than flipping them around shore.  I got results pretty much immediately.  That night, I caught three 12-inch rainbow trout in a short span while rowing the raft and trolling two crankbaits with two different rods simultaneously.  Pro Tip #2: This is legal in BC only if you're by yourself in a boat on a lake.  There is no other freshwater circumstance where you're allowed to fish with two rods at the same time.  I returned two days later with my kids, and we caught a couple more rainbows, one of them a 15 inch dandy which really had the effect of legitimizing this suburban lake fishing thing in my mind.  I was sold from there.  The next day, on the 18th of June, I tried Langford Lake.  I had fished Langford a few times in the past, mostly from shore, and mostly catching only profuse amounts of weeds.  I decided to try my double-barreled crankbait trolling technique that worked so well at Elk Lake, and after some trial and error concerning the depths and locations of the weed beds, I ended up with three nice rainbows in about an hour's time.  Despite the fact that it has a huge weird aerator thing in it, I decided to add Langford Lake alongside Elk Lake to the list of places I had misjudged over the years.

Now that I had eight good rainbows, I figured the best thing to do would be to fire up the smoker and get a cure ready, and smoke some 'bows.  I filleted the fish, which now numbered seven, after I got impatient and cooked one in the oven and ate it with some butter and lemon pepper.  I then prepared the cure, consisting of four parts brown sugar and one part kosher salt.  Layering the fillets with the salt and sugar cure in a plastic bin, I covered the whole works and put it in the fridge to do its thing overnight.  In the morning, I rinsed the fish and patted them dry with paper towels, then racked them and let them sit for an hour at room temperature to develop the all-important pellicle, which is a tacky layer on the surface of the fish, that allows smoke to adhere more readily.  I then loaded the cured and racked fillets into the Big Chief smoker, which is the official budget smoking appliance of self-respecting Canadians everywhere.  I loaded the smoking pan with alder chips, and plugged that baby in.  Two-and-a-half hours later, after a glorious-smelling smoke, I took the front panel off the Chief, and taste-tested the first fillet.  They turned out perfect; I was looking for a sweeter-tasting result for this batch than ones I've made in the past, and the 4:1 sugar to salt ratio really hit the bulls-eye.  That was seventeen days ago, and since then the weather has heated up substantially, and the trout fishing has predictably slowed down.  It looks like I got in right at the end of the cooler spring season weather, and those kinds of favorable conditions are most likely done until the fall.  Freshwater fishing from here on is going to have to turn more toward bass, as they start to ramp up their activity at the same time the trout become more difficult to catch.  

I wasn't quite ready to give up on the trout yet, though.  After returning again to Elk Lake a week ago with no success, I tried fishing Kemp Lake in Sooke five days ago, on July 1st, with my wife and our daughter.  The wind was blowing like crazy.  I was in the raft with Loxley, my wife Sandra was in a bellyboat, and we were getting blown straight across the lake toward the eastern shore the whole time.  It required maximum effort to make any progress against the wind, and deploying my double-crankbait trolling strategy was miserable work.  Every time I stopped rowing to cast the lines out, the wind would blow the boat on top of the lines before I could resume with the oars.  This resulted in many tangles, which I would have to stop rowing to sort out, and before long, we'd be blown to the far end of the lake again.  Despite all this, I still managed to boat a little 11 inch rainbow somewhere amidst all the tangled lines and desperate rowing and attempts not to curse in front of a small child.  She, of course, was thrilled; bonking fish and threatening them that she's going to put them in the microwave are two of her favorite things.  We got out of there early, after less than an hour of fishing, but in that time, I got the one fish, plus I lost another one right near the boat.  I'm wondering if maybe because of its location, Kemp might stay cool enough to extend the trout season there for a while longer.  In any case, even though it's a little further away, add Kemp Lake to the growing roster of (semi-)local fish sources I'll be returning to (on a less gale-force day).  It seems to be the only one still producing rainbows this late in the season, as both Langford and Elk have dried up for me in recent days. 

To end off, I'd like to mention a lake that I will definitely not be returning to for the purpose of catching fish.  It's a decent-sized one near Bamfield called Sarita Lake.  Ironically, I took the whole family there specifically because it's way out in the bush, far from pretty much anywhere.  Usually this equals more, albeit smaller, fish.  I love to try these kinds of high-risk, high-reward places, because if they pan out, it's an awesome place to return to again and again for camping trips and glorious, isolated wilderness fishing.  I get great satisfaction discovering new fishing spots that not many people have heard of.  On the other hand, when it doesn't work out, you get what we had the weekend of the 24th and 25th of June.  After driving for a significant period of time on a series of logging roads, we arrived at Sarita, and found a great place to camp, which was definitely the highlight of the trip.  We set about fishing pretty quickly after arriving.  I trolled crankbaits in the rowboat, and Sandra did targeted casting around the perimeter of the lake.  After hours of trying every lure in my arsenal, both Sandra and I ended up with nothing.  I tried Blue Foxes, Panther Martins, Rooster Tails, Black Furys, all my crankbaits, plastic tubes, power bait, everything.  A beaver kept doing a warning tail-slap on the water at me, and that was the most noteworthy part of the whole initial foray.  We arrived back at camp in our boats after sweeping the entire lake with every technique that I could think of, with not a single bite.  Slightly discouraged, but with plenty of time ahead of us to work on a new strategy, I baited a couple of rods with chartreuse power bait and cast them out with bobbers for us to watch while the kids played in the water.  I did this with no expectation of anything coming from it.  After all, we had just fished the whole lake with every lure, bait, and soft plastic imaginable, and came up with nothing.  What are the chances of then catching fish on a bobber right in front of our camp?  100%, of course.  We got two small cutthroat trout within about ten minutes of each other, and those two would hold up as the only fish we caught that entire weekend.  We fished plenty more, including a ton with the same chartreuse power bait and bobbers, and never got another bite.  

That night, our camp was overrun with marauding mice.  You could hear them in the dark everywhere.  Each time i turned the lantern in a new direction, there they were, scurrying off into the bushes.  It didn't help that the kids left bags of snacks open on the ground in random places.  It was a mouse fantasyland; they probably got enough popcorn, chips, and marshmallows to last them through two winters.  On a couple of occasions, I had to shoo them away from the tent that my wife and kids were sleeping in, because they kept climbing up it, trying to get in.  I tried sleeping in the truck bed, because there was no room in the tent, and the mice got up into there, too.  Three times I got woken up by mice climbing around me, trying to get to what I found out in the morning was an open bag of dill pickle chips my daughter had thoughtfully left in there.  I eventually gave up on the truck bed and slept inside the actual cab of the truck,  hoping the mice couldn't get in there.  It could have been worse; a bear could have been trying to snuggle up to me in the truck bed instead of mice.  We did see one bear cub fairly close to where we were staying.  I'll have to review the bear-aware rules with the kids again before the next trip.  On the way home the next day, we got not one, but two flat tires.  We were still a couple hours from paved roads or any kind of civilization.  One tire I switched out with a full-size spare that we luckily had, and the other I had to keep stopping every 15-20 minutes to blow back up with a portable compressor we had brought with us to use with the boats.  The tire would stay inflated for less and less time each time I re-inflated it, and it took longer and longer to inflate it, as the hole got bigger.  By the sixth time we stopped to inflate it, it would barely hold half the recommended pressure.  We finally limped in to the Duncan Wal Mart by the grace of the fishing gods, and I promised never to speak ill of them again.  And so, it came to be that by some unimaginable twist of fate, I had a month where fishing near the city beat the hell out of fishing in the wilderness.  Thank you, Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC, and keep those stocked fish coming to a lake near me.