June 20, 2004 in Outdoors

Young guide’s zeal untainted by experience

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Just as the runt of the litter can turn out to be the best dog in the kennel, a gem could be hiding in the dregs of the fishing-guide pool.

With five hours of downtime before my plane departed Campbell River, British Columbia, I went to the Painter’s Lodge fishing desk to see if I could hire a guide, over the counter so to speak, without an appointment.

I’d already had several days of good fishing on the northeast side of Vancouver Island, but I needed one more fix.

“All the guides are out fishing,” the clerk said, although she noted that one guide-in-training was mopping up on the dock.

“I’ll take him.”

Will Digard, 22, had just graduated from college with a major in biology.

“I wrote my thesis on marine snails,” he said, and he had a scientist’s eye for detail.

He was an expert on fish but still a student of fishing.

My first fish was a nice “nookie” as he called the chinook, and his first stab with the net was a miss that almost knocked the 15-pounder loose from the hook. He recovered and got the salmon on the second try.

“Half the guides in the hole saw that,” he blushed without looking up at the nearby boats. “I’ll pay for it back at the dock,” he added between multiple apologies.

I liked him immediately.

He and I were on par. Mortal. Fallible. Curious.

He handed me a trout rod with the reel attached by electrician’s tape.

“Try casting for the pinks while I re-rig your salmon rod,” he said, pointing to where a fish splashed the surface nearby. “Where there’s one pink salmon feeding, there’s a thousand.”

A 5-pound pink smacked the small pink Apex spoon on my first cast and fought like a champ. Another fat pink hammered the second cast.

Hooking these fish in a North Idaho stream would pump up an angler for months, but most of the guides I’d met didn’t want to bother with pink salmon even though they are available every summer and virtually everywhere in odd-numbered years.

“Fun, huh?” he said as we switched our attention back to catching the larger salmon species.

Even though his interest had netted him more fish-catching knowledge than I’ll ever bank, Digard was humble and eager to share.

“Fishing has changed dramatically in recent years, but the reason goes way back to when Russian trappers nearly wiped out the sea otters,” he said.

“That allowed the sea urchins to boom without a major predator and they wiped out the kelp forests and raised havoc with the food chain. Combined with over-fishing of bottom fish and herring, that’s left the salmon with no choice but to cruise right through some areas where they used to stop, feed, and be more available to anglers.”

Still, we caught fish.

“It’s a ‘gummer,’ ” he said as I reeled a sockeye salmon toward the boat. “They feed on plankton, so I have no idea why it hit your anchovy.”

The fish went into the cooler, but not before he scrutinized the fish like a father checking out his daughter’s first date.

“Sockeye,” he confirmed. “No spots on back. Large scales. Turns darker after it’s netted and brought out of the water.

“But this is diagnostic,” he added as he opened the fish’s mouth. “No teeth. It’s a gummer.”

On the way back to the lodge, he detoured in the narrows to a set of rapids caused by the rip currents and we whooped and ran them like whitewater rafters in the Snake River.

Then he zipped into an estuary to show me how rockfish are making a comeback. We dropped a line in 20 feet of water so clear I could see one of the “rocks” on the bottom move and attack the jig.

I gave it slack and let it shake off.

“I wish you could stay a little longer for the chums,” he said. “People turn up their noses at them, but they have the speed of coho and the power of kings.”

Back at the dock, he said this was the first job that excited him every day.

I hope he never grows up.

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