Fly Fishers Find Their Trip A Charge

This is a story about fly fishing for high-jumping rainbows in semi-wilderness British Columbia, a pontoon boat-riding yellow Labrador retriever and a 7-year-old battery that pooped out in the wilderness.

The characters are Clay Findlay, a World War II Air Force pilot who fishes at least 250 days a year; Dwight Tipton of Deer Park, owner of the Evergreen Truss & Supply Co.; and your communicator.

The fourth member of the party was Sierra, a charismatic lab that rode a narrow platform on the rear of Tipton’s pontoon boat day after day and fell off only once. A placid, affectionate dog, he disdained small fish and became animated when Tipton hooked a big rainbow.

Our mission in eastern British Columbia was to explore lakes that aren’t as heavily fished as those that attract almost unbelievable numbers of fly fishers each year. Learning the locations of lakes where a half-dozen fly fishers are a crowd takes a lot of time and cooperation from Canadian fly fishers.

We drove north one sunny morning earlier this month, Findlay riding with Tipton and Sierra in Tipton’s motor home while I drove my pickup loaded with dismantled pontoon boats, fishing tackle and camping equipment.

Our first destination was a group of lakes near rugged, snow-capped peaks that Tipton and I, as well as Jack Pattullo and the late Al Stier, had fished last year. A Canadian fly fisher, Don Stuart of Kimberley, had agreed to meet us at one of the lakes and tell us about the fishing at other lakes we wanted to fish.

We camped at a beautiful lake and the next morning loaded my pickup with three dismantled pontoon boats. Tipton, Findlay and the 90-pound dog squeezed into the cab with me and we soon were at the lake, which is populated by 14-to 25-inch Gerard strain rainbows.

Gerard rainbows, like the Kamloops strain, go berserk when hooked, peeling off line like a bonefish and hurling themselves above the water.

Hatches of some insects, including the big, traveling caddisflies, have been late this year in British Columbia. We saw a few “traveling sedges,” but we caught most of our fish, most of which were 16 to 19 inches long, on chironomid pupa patterns, damselfly nymphs and leech patterns.

Three Canadian fly fishers also fished the lake. When we were ready to return to camp, I turned the key and heard a click. My battery was dead.

Fortunately for us, the Canadians cheerfully stopped fishing to help us. They hauled an extra battery they carried to my pickup and hooked it up to my jumper cable. My engine soon was running.

If they hadn’t helped us and I hadn’t had a jumper cable, one of us would have had to walk 12 miles to get help.

We sometimes call our Canadian friends “Canucks” and they call us “Yanks,” but not derisively. We fly fishers have respect for one another. We’ve rarely met a Canadian fly fisher who, when he learned that we release trout we hook, wouldn’t share his knowledge of his “secret” fishing spots.

We fished another lake the next day, catching some huge rainbows. When we returned to camp, Stuart, who is widely known to eastern British Columbia’s fly fishers, served us pot roast and vegetables in his tiny fifth wheeler, so much that we couldn’t eat it all. He also told us about lakes in another chain not too far from where we were camped. We decided to explore the lakes and left the next morning.

The lakes were under snow-capped peaks, called the Bugaboos, some of which my son, John, had climbed before he began climbing in the Himalayas. Tipton and Findlay fished the lake where we camped and caught numerous rainbows to 19 inches.

The next morning, we again loaded my pickup with dismantled pontoon boats, strapped Tipton’s big pontoon boat on the top and spent the next half-hour crawling over a one-track road filled with deep chuckholes and rocks. Luckily, we didn’t meet anyone. There were no turnoffs.

The long, narrow fly fishing-only lake looked inviting, but the fish wouldn’t cooperate, so we bounced our way back to camp and fished the lake we had left.

Because of the rocky, narrow roads, we didn’t get to look at any of the dozen lakes we wanted to see and fish. That’s for another trip. By 3 the next afternoon, we were back in Spokane.

If there is a moral to this story, it’s this: Never drive into wilderness country in a vehicle that has an old battery and expect your vehicle to take a pounding on some of the one-track roads to lakes filled with big, high-jumping rainbows.