STORIES

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Nighttime Sojourn with the Salmon

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Community: Sunshine Coast

The beam of the flashlight sweeps the narrow trail along the outlet creek from Sakinaw Lake on BC’s Sunshine Coast. The dark forest smothers my insignificant light and gives little comfort. Suddenly there is a loud splash a few feet to my left. I stop, wide-eyed, and swing the flashlight beam onto a patch of roiled water. Damn beaver, I guess aloud as my heart begins to slow. I don’t feel at ease alone in the forest at night.

After a 15 minute hike along the overgrown path, I arrive at the simple concrete dam that controls the level of the lake. Adjacent is a simple fishway. I shine my light downstream, over the three adjoining pools and out into the black expanse of Malaspina Strait. The incoming tide is creeping into the lowest pools. Soon there will be enough water for any waiting sockeye salmon to make their way into the lake.

A friend and I were contracted to monitor sockeye returns to the lake during the summer. Because this sockeye run is known to enter the lake on incoming tides, under the cover of darkness, every night one of us was to spend four hours at the ladder.

There are no facilities at the ladder, just a couple of weathered planks for a bench. Most nights, a few stars would shine through gaps in the forest canopy, but at ground level, it was black, black, and black. I’d lay out a couple of flashlights, bear spray, notepad and pencil and settle in for the night. As the hours passed, I’d want to doze, but the many sounds of the forest never allowed me that peace.

The most pleasing sound was the infrequent but sudden splash of a sockeye as it leapt into the ladder. I pondered the miracle that saw these fish journey from the lake out into the mid-Pacific and back to the very spawning beds from which they were hatched four years earlier. Sometimes I’d flick on a flashlight and sneak a peek at their sleek, silver-green bodies as they swam calmly in the pools or the ladder. 

Many evenings, the air was filled with the screeches and hoot-hoots of barred owls. Often they’d be perched on branches just a few dozen feet away and sit unconcerned as I studied them under the beam of a flashlight. Other times I’d feel the swoosh of the wind as they swooped expertly among the trunks and branches.

I could seldom sit still for more than a few minutes before being drawn to the scurries of mice and voles or other small creatures. By the time I could jump up and aim the flashlight, they’d be gone.

The beavers were never far away and there weren’t many nights when one of them didn’t startle me from my reverie or slap its tail in alarm next to me as I hiked the trail. At the end of the season, as the lake level dropped, they spent their days carrying branches and mud and rocks in an attempt to block the water from flowing out the fish ladder. I’d begin each evening by clearing away their work.

One time as I walked the pools below the dam, I was startled by an animal rustling loudly just a few feet away in the bushes. Never sure just what surprises my flashlight beam would reveal, I was glad to see it was only a raccoon waddling away from the creek. Another time I watched open-mouthed as a mink boldly clamped onto the snout of a sockeye many times its size. The two rolled over and over, the sockeye’s silver belly flashing in the flashlight beam. I grabbed for a landing net to rescue the fish and the mink disappeared into the night.

The most dramatic events were when the river otters appeared from out of the night. They had no qualms about diving right into the fish ladder or attacking sockeye in pools only metres away from my perch. These sleek and crafty 20 to 30 pound mammals hissed threateningly whenever I tried to chase them off. Unfortunately that was almost daily and I got used to seeing their yellow-green eyes staring at me in the beam of the flashlight. They chased the sockeye with incredible speed and manoeuvrability. At first I yelled at them, then chucked sticks, and finally rocks. Had I been a better aim… I spent many hours contemplating the otters. This sockeye run was close to extinction and only the occasional fish made it to the fishway. Should I interfere with nature or let it take its course at the risk of destroying the entire run? Since it was probably man who messed up the run in the first place, perhaps interfering was actually an effort to re-balance things.

Night after night, life and death struggles took place all around me. Several times as I sat there quietly, there were nearby crashes, certainly loud enough to be bears, but despite sudden outbreaks of shivers and goose bumps, I had no choice but to carry on. Gradually over the summer I became less and less threatened by the night, though I never became comfortable with it.

*Peter A. Robson is an author, journalist, and the editor of Pacific Yachting magazine (http://www.pacificyachting.com). Born in Vancouver, he has travelled BC’s coast extensively and is an avid sailor, naturalist, and fisherman. He is also a trained streamkeeper and salmon-enhancement volunteer on the Sunshine Coast. Peter is a former editor of the commercial fishing magazine Westcoast Fisherman and has written for numerous magazines. He was both an editor and contributor to the prize-winning Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He is the author of Salmon Farming: The Whole Story (Heritage House, 2006) and several others. He invites comment about the salmon farming book at http://salmonfarming.blogspot.com. He lives in Garden Bay on BC’s Sunshine Coast.