When there aren’t many fish, there often are also not many bears, so I wasn’t expecting to see many, particularly as the crew had said they hadn’t seen many. But maybe the bears weren’t finding much elsewhere either, because there was definitely no shortage of bears for the rest of the week.
Day 4: Click on the first photo to launch the gallery
Today’s agenda was hunt for fall chum. The hatchery typically does a large production of summer chum salmon, but the past couple of years there has been an interest in fall chum, specifically if there is such a run and, if it exists, what does it look like and how should we enhance it.
First challenge is….catch some.
We didn’t do all that well….a couple of bucks, no does, and lots of pinks….a painful number of pinks…painful for my hands that is, because of those teeny tiny little razor blades they have for teeth….
But lots of bears, some uncomfortable.
And lots of carcasses. Furry fish. fish covered in mounds of moving maggots. Fish skeletons. Bits of fish. They may seem gross to some people, but they are crucial to a healthy ecosystem. Their decaying carcasses release nutrients back to the river and the organisms that live within. Their flesh feeds bears, birds, and any number of other animals up and down the food chain that you can think of.
I did have one adventure today. What should have been our last set, the one we said we were done on, was a messy set. We were tired and not too far from the last corner of the river before we were to pull out. We’d put the net back in the bucket and left twigs and leaves in it because we didn’t intend to pull it out again. But then we saw a school of fish and we got greedy.
Chris, in the dive suit, took the end of the net, Shantal took the raft down to a pull out around the corner, I took the far end of the net and walked it, and Andrew….all 6’2″ of his 16 years of age, went to the middle of the river and dealt with snags in the middle of the net in the deeper water. Eventually the water was getting too deep and I was coming up on some logs in the river, which would snag the net. I dropped my end to let the river float the cork line around to the opposite shore where Shantal had landed the raft, which would eventually cross to get me.
Except things didn’t quite go that way.
The net caught and Chris had to go out and go under water a number of times to free it, and I was impatient and started to wade upriver looking for a place I could cross without dunking myself. Andrew was standing easily in deep water and I did a quick bit of math in my head
“OK, so he’s 6’2″, which is about 8″ taller than me, and he’s at the top of his waders, but his waders are a few inches shorter than mine…..yeah….I can do this!”
No, I couldn’t.
For the record, I’ve never gone underwater in my waders, don’t ask me how, because I’ve had my share of ‘almosts’.
I got to my chest and asked Andrew if he could see the depth….he pointed a little upriver and said it was shallower there and might need a “little hop”. That gave me a moment of pause. It wasn’t that the current was strong or dangerous in any way, but there WAS a little bit of current, simply by virtue of flowing water, and at chest depth it was enough for a small but embarrassing challenge.
I took another step and realized I was lifting off the bottom.
I’d been in water this deep before, but I’d not factored in the recent weight loss.
I was at least an arm’s length from Andrew at this point and I just turned to him and yelled “ARM!”
His arm shot out and I grabbed it for support as both feet floated off the ground. He, in an attempt to be helpful, said he’d move upstream from me and break the current, but that only did two things….shifted my weight again (since I was hanging onto his forearm) and turned me so that I was facing the river.
At that point I pretty much abandoned all hope that I wasn’t going to fill my waders so I spun myself to get my back to the flow so it wouldn’t be quite as fast a fill.
And, as I did so, Andrew, a perfect 16 year-old gentleman, grabbed me and hoisted me into his arms and filled his own waders with cold river water as I was grabbing at branches overhead to try to salvage some of my dignity. But he just forged on to shore before placing me in shallow water.
If you put on waders and head out on a river to collect fish, you are always prepared to get wet.
I got damp, Andrew got soaked.
At least it was a really warm day so he wasn’t cold once he got his waders off, and thankfully all of that happened “just” around the corner and out of sight from the dozen of so people sitting in lawn chairs with cameras at the ready for grizzly bears …..or dunking DFO biologists…..
So that was the day’s adventure.
And, thanks to my fireman-like hero Andrew, I still haven’t gone underwater 😉
