Fourth of July on the Pier

Whistling for Fish

I am totally convinced that fishing is a genetic thing. Either you understand it at a primal level -- or you don’t. I always thought that Brett got all the fishing genes for the entire family, but last week I suspected that perhaps I ended up with a few left over fishing chromosomes. It happened like this:

When school was finally out on June 22, we decided to get away to our new favorite playground … CANADA!

We drove along the majestic golden coast highway admiring the fjords and mountains until we arrived at our first camping spot .. Alice Lake.

I untangled the 6 bicycles tied to our 4 bike rack, and the kids were off! Zach and Alex to Jack’s Trail, a narrow path over rocks and slippery tree roots which I found a little challenging and Zach pointed out was only a green circle (“easiest”).

After thoroughly exploring the area on bikes, the two kids who HAVE the fishing gene, Alex and Nigel, wanted to give it a try. I sat down on a bench and after about 20 minutes I was able to successfully tie on two hooks and bait the poles. About that time, Julia wandered down to the lake to see what this fishing thing was all about.

Compared to Julia who has zero fishing experience, I am a relative expert (meaning that even though I never catch anything I have spent lots of hours hanging out on docks and shores talking with the guys and I have spent several hundred dollars on bait and hooks) and I patiently explained to her that fishing consists of (1) casting (keep it out of the trees) (2) waiting for an eternal 5-10 minutes until you reel in your line to discover that the weight you felt pulling your line was really just a twig and (3) untangling your line and replacing whatever got lost. If you are lucky it is just your bait, if you are not you have to re-tie a new weight, spinner and hook. I then showed her a sample cast and handed her the pole while I turned back to setting up two more rods for the other two boys who would be along shortly.

Julia took the pole and said, “So what do I do now, just sit around? Maybe I should go get a book.” Just then I noticed the tip of her rod jerking back and forth and side to side, easily the most lively stick I had ever experienced. “I think you have a fish!” I yelled.

“What do I do next?” Julia asked, panicked. “REEL it in!” “How?” “Turn the handle!”

Well you’ll never believe it but about 30 seconds after the cast hit the water, we had pulled in nice fat rainbow trout, Julia’s first fish – ever!

That was when I first suspected that perhaps there were a few latent alleles of the fishing gene in me after all. I got so excited, I hooked up the remaining poles and all the kids began casting wildly. Tim’s first few casts were in the tree, but hey, he had to learn somehow, right? Similarly Nigel had several snags which required me to retie his whole setup, but he is only 4 so I tried be patient. Zach crossed Alex’s line several times requiring me to cut the line, and as I tied more hooks and replaced more bait I became increasingly frustrated. Every cast seemed to result in a snag requiring me, the only one who knew the fishing knot, to re tie. This went on for several hours until I had completely exhausted the large supply of hooks and bait in the yard sale tackle box. By that time, my enthusiasm for fishing had wilted considerably. Still we ended up with 3 nice rainbows. Julia baked one in the coals stuffed with bacon and onions. The next two we ate for breakfast.

The next day dawned cloudy. I have read that in Alaska, the Eskimoes have over 20 different words for snow. In the great Northwest, we have over twenty different words for rain. A typical description of a camping trip might be like this:

On the first day, it started out lightly overcast but we caught a couple of nice sunbreaks in the afternoon and it only drizzled through the night. The next day was grey, but we got by with light jackets and it cleared up considerably by evening. We saw white clouds and blue sky on the third day.

I realized that I was indeed camping in the great northwest when I saw a group of Canadian kids trotting down to the lake with their damp towels under a grey and dreary sky for a nice swim in 60 degree weather.

In other words, in the great northwest, we deal with the rain by pretending it is not there. That’s what we did when we decided to bike all of Jack’s trail. Slinging down the slippery tree roots on my bike and thinking about the x-ray of the broken collar bone which our home teacher proudly showed us kept me on my toes (literally). I kept wondering, as Zach and Alex barreled down the hill in front of me, how I would be able to carry a kid and two bikes down the mountain if someone got injured. I answered this question by reasoning that this scenario was unlikely, since if anyone was going to be injured it would probably be me.

Through a combination of luck, minimal skill and walking on the steepest and slipperiest parts of the trail, we made it all the way down and Julia met us in town at the bottom of the mountain.

We bought several more packs of hooks and bait and went back to fish. After several more hours of tying line, breaking hooks, re tying and untangling snags, I decided that any fishing gene fragments I had probably came from fishermen who used NETS rather than LINE. We didn’t catch anything, which I found reassuring to be back to normal. The previous day had been like a bad fever -- hot in order to burn away any desire to make fishing a way of life.

That night, it rained. Now, for many campers, the fact that your tent has puddles in the corners and water is soaking in to your clothes would be a deterrent to further camping in the great northwest. We just call it sleeping in a waterbed.

We packed up our wet stuff and headed for our second destination – Whistler. Julia had carefully researched lodgings and had reserved a fabulous campsite right next to the river – coming straight off the glacier. The day was cool and overcast and with out wet tent and bags, the prospect of getting rained on again was daunting. But, in true pioneer spirit we refused to turn back and considering our options and being resourceful, we quickly upgraded to a cozy heated cabin.

That night, as we sat in our cabin playing games after warm showers, Nigel prayed that the next day “the rain would go away and the blue sky would come” and so it did. Our prayers were answered with a glorious day biking in Whistler. The highlight came at the end, when two bears walked right by us on the bike path. We went to Whistler village to watch the extreme biking championship and topped it off with dinner at the old spaghetti factory. Everyone slept on the 3 ½ hour drive home and they all missed some of the most incredible scenery I have seen as I watched the sun set on the Howe Sound.

All in all it was a great family vacation and I now feel that summer has finally come.

PS On the Fourth of July I discovered where my latent fishing talent lies. We threw our crab pots off the pier and went biking and in a few hours we had caught 9 crab. Nobody else on the dock caught much at all. At the barbecue that night we all ate as much crab as we wanted and there was lots left over for crab pasta and crab salad the next day. I never thought I would tire of eating crab, but we have about ½ pound in the freezer for the first visitor who wants to come to Whistler with us.