One Pine Day...
When my Dad (Pops) mentioned last fall that he was driving from Vancouver Island up to Northern BC to see my younger brother and fish a little; I did what any good and very annoying human would do. I offered to break up what would be a pleasant, silent, relaxing drive by inserting myself into the trip… And boy oh boy am I happy I did.
Fall is without a doubt the absolute best time to road trip through British Columbia. The temperature has shifted away from the super hot summers, the leaves have started to change to their warm autumn colours and the highways are significantly less busy, which, if you’ve ever lived through a tourist season in BC, and the fall that follows you know of what I speak.
For the sake of keeping this post under a million words I’ll start the story as we leave Quesnel, on Day 3 of the trip, starting the last leg, a six hour jaunt into Fort St John. The weather had been a bit touch and go so far and day 3 was no exception. Rain and clouds were the story of the morning which was fine since the first 3-4 hours of the drive is getting to, and over the significant Pine pass.
As we settled into the early afternoon and began to descend the northern side of the Pine pass, some of the cloud cover started to break and patches of sun were moving in more and more. Pops had fished this area pretty extensively while living in Northern BC himself and had a spot picked for us to stop and check out, a good spot to stretch our legs and see if there was any activity.
As we pulled off the highway and crawled over the clunky wooden bridge, scoping the Pine river below, it was clear that by some kind of miracle the conditions were all coming together just right. The river was absolutely crystal clear, the sun was backlighting the run we had picked and the water was running at a perfect pace. We suited up, tied on a few lucky flies and started towards the river.
Because Pops is the way he is and he’d much rather watch me catch fish all day then land any himself, he pointed me in the direction of a spot he’d had good results fishing before and I got my first cast laid beautifully into a group of pillars from an old dock structure. I was fishing a Tom Thumb and it took its place perfectly, drifting right through a rippling seam in the river. It hadn’t been drifting more than a few seconds when BAM! A massive hit from an Arctic Grayling! We celebrated and laughed at a first cast fish and chalked it up to fluke but, man were we wrong…
That first fish gave way to what could easily be described as the single most productive and hilarious session of my life. Between the two of us we caught well over 30 Arctic Grayling, a dozen or so Rainbow Trout and a handful of beautifully healthy Bull Trout. It, was, insane! At one point we switched to my all time favourite fly, The Royal Coachman, because the Grayling were engulfing the Tom Thumbs and we were having to use the hemostats to dig them out of the fish. The sun continued to grace our spot on the river for a couple of hours before moving on and with it went a lot of the fish, but for that little slice of time, it was fish, after fish, after fish. The kind of day that happens to some anglers only very few times in their entire fishing lifetimes.
We rolled into Fort St John that evening greeted by absolutely torrential rain but with a fish tale for the ages. Probably a hard one for others to grasp in that moment since sunshine seemed so long away, but the buzz was infectious.
The next day we took my brother and his girlfriend, both avid anglers, back to the same spot on the pine but the rain had nearly blown the river out and had all but eliminated any visibility in the water at all. We fished every available run, with let’s say… limited success, but we did all land at least one small rainbow and a bunch of good jokes so although it wasn’t a repeat of the benchmark day before, it was still a great day on the river with our favourite fishing crew.
I’m well aware of how rare days like this one on the Pine River was and to be able to share it with Pops means everything, in fact, we’ll still text each other out of there blue with ‘Remember that one day, THAT one day’ followed by electronic chuckles and virtual recollections of a bite that has yet to be a rivalled. It’ll live there I guess, and here, until the elements line up just right again, and all hell breaks loose once more.
