Was that a bite? I was sure the tip of the rod had tapped slightly but it wasn’t a fish, just the boat shifting in the current. I was sitting at the back of a small, purposebuilt fishing boat, anchored in the fast flow of the Fraser River on a bright, mild afternoon during the first week of May.
This massive river is around 900 miles long flowing through British Columbia and out to the Pacific Ocean at Vancouver, on the West Coast of Canada. I was fishing with ‘Cascade Fishing Adventures’ on a section of the river alongside a native reservation, above the town of Chilliwack, some 55 miles upstream of the ocean. To my left were the snow -capped Cascade Mountains and to my right the tree-covered Coastal Mountains. A juvenile bald eagle was perched on a dead tree on the Island we were anchored alongside, but I didn’t pay much attention to it as I was focused on the rod that had knocked moments before.
There it was again, another gentle tap-tap. Something was taking an interest in my bait of ditch eels down on the river bed. The Fraser holds five different types of Pacific salmon, including chum salmon and chinook salmon , but I knew it would not be a salmon that was after the bait. For, as prized a catch as the salmon is to many anglers, it was another fish species that I had made the journey to Canada in search of.
The fish I was after have been around some 170 million years, since prehistoric times, and their fossil records show that their physical appearance has changed little since then. This species have been recorded to 15 feet in length, can live to over 100 years of age and can weigh in excess of 1000lbs! The fish in question are the mysterious white sturgeon, which although nearly wiped out in the early 1900s by commercial fishing, now thrive in the Fraser protected by a catch-and-release programme. The sturgeon feed on the bottom of the river, living on a diet of dead salmon, salmon roe and small fish such as the oolichan, their poor eyesight compensated for by a strong sense of smell.
The rod tapped again with more force, so I lifted it slowly from its holder tightening down on the line slightly. Moments later it tapped again, the rod began to curve and feeling the weight of the fish I struck. The rod bent solidly and the line began to whizz off the reel, visibly slicing across the water as the fish headed straight up towards the surface. Downstream of the boat the water erupted as a sturgeon of around five feet in length flew torpedo-like out of the river. What an amazing sight!
Shark-like in appearance, the sturgeon has a cylindrical body, grey back and white underside with a forked tail. They have lines of ‘scutes’ on their sides and back. These look like scales but are in fact a bony armouring which can be razor-sharp on smaller fish. They are very hard fighting, this one clearing the water three times during the 20-minute tussle. I got the fish near the boat several times, thinking that it was beaten, only for the fish to power away again downstream.
We banked the boat on the nearby island and measured the fish in the water at 5 feet 1 inch, somewhere around 70lbs in weight. The fish are not weighed here in Canada. Weights are estimated from measurements and weighing these strong fish would be extremely difficult. I caught several sturgeon over 5 feet during my five days fishing, as well as a few 4 foot fish (around 40 - 50 lbs in weight) plus plenty of smaller sturgeon.
The wildlife in British Columbia is great. I didn’t see any bears but they are around. I did, however, see many magnificent bald eagles, a pair of osprey and some turkey vultures. Seals would pop their heads up near the boat, beaveroccasionally swim by and one morning I watched a deer jump into the river, swim halfway across then change its mind and head back to the bank it had just left.
The mountains provide a great backdrop to the fishing and during my first couple of days on the river we rarely saw another boat, even though we covered a large area searching in various spots for fish.
As for the white sturgeon, they are a truly remarkable fish. Despite having been around for millions of years, little is known about them and they are an amazing sight. I caught fish to around 75lbs in weight, but I lost a couple of bigger specimens on my last day in Canada and fish of six and seven feet in length are regularly caught (weighing 100 to 200lbs). Every year a couple of monster sturgeon are also caught, fish of over ten feet.
One afternoon on the river some native descendent's of the Sto:Lo people we met told of us of a huge sturgeon they had released from one of their salmon nets earlier in the week. They believed that fish to be in excess of 13 feet in length and fish this size have been recorded. With fish like that swimming in the Fraser and the breathtaking scenery, I will definitely return to British Columbia to catch some more of these majestic white sturgeon.
