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).

 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.