The salmon come to the Pacific Northwest every autumn-thousands upon thousands of squirming pink/red bodies filling local rivers until the mat of fish is so thick, you could virtually walk from bank to bank on their backs.
People crowd the bridges to watch the heaving, living carpet. And some of them wonder: What is it like down there? What does it look like and feel like beneath the water?
Up in Canada off the coast of mainland British Columbia, along Vancouver Island`s Campbell River, some folks are finding out. And last September, we joined them.
It was a brilliant fall, dry and sunny, with a hint of crispness in the air and the first touch of orange on the trees. There are plenty of motels in the town of Campbell River, but we decided to stay with Dennis Rhodes, who runs a boarding house for divers.
The idea of taking in divers as house guests is a local quirk in Campbell River, started years ago by someone with extra bedrooms. Dennis has seven bedrooms with three full baths plus a drying room and TV lounge downstairs. It`s a nice setup and there`s space for 10 visitors.
”Consider this your house,” Dennis` wife, Shelly, said, as we trooped into her living room. ”Feel free to raid the fridge. Help yourself any time of day or night.”
”But first,” Dennis cut in, ”you`ve got to see the river.”
The Campbell meanders through the center of Vancouver Island. By the time it hits the coast, it`s wide, shallow and green. Every fall, a variety of salmon fight their way 3 miles up this and the Quinsam to the local hatchery where they spawn.
We walked two minutes to the Campbell and stood on its sloping bank. Every couple of seconds, a brown body sliced out of the water.
Brown? We thought salmon were silver.
”The silver is nearly all gone now,” Dennis replied. ”And soon they`ll turn red.”
And then, suddenly, a huge chinook jumped almost at our feet. He hung in the air for a slow-motion second, his sleek body frozen in an arch. ”That`s a 30-pounder, at least,” Dennis yelped. We stood there, trying to imagine what it would be like the next morning in the center of hundreds of those 30-pounders.
Hard-luck fish stories
That chinook was a survivor, one of the solitary 1 percent that make it back to the river. Life for a salmon, quite frankly, isn`t fair.
First, they`ve got to hatch. That means surviving floods that can wash them away and rocks that can squash them and fungus that can infect them and fish that can eat them. Once hatched, they`ve got to survive more hungry fish and birds and the poison of pesticides. And for the 10 percent that make it to adulthood, there are otters, killer whales, seals, fishermen and oil spills.
But even so, the relative few survivors turn into throngs at the rivers. In 1990 in the British Columbia interior, 2.5 million salmon returned at once, turning the Adams River into a living, heaving blanket that choked the water from bank to bank.
And along the Columbia, too, the yearly show can get awesome. By the time the salmon (mainly pinks, chinooks and coho on the Campbell) get back to the river, they`ve already started to change. They`ve stopped eating and as they hit fresh water, they turn a variety of special spawning colors, from brown to blood red. Males develop a hooked nose and jaw. Their backs grow huge humps. Anyone dumb enough to catch one will find the meat has turned mushy. Their muscles are wasting; their internal organs have shriveled. They are starting to literally fall apart.
And so the salmon spawn. The females scoop out shallow depressions in the gravel and drop eggs by the million. Males hover nearby, then swoop in to fertilize.
Then the aging process speeds up. And within weeks-sometimes days-the exhausted fish are dead.
Starting the last trip
But that`s in October and November. And now it was mid-September. A few early pinks were undoubtedly hard at work laying eggs. But mostly, the fish were just arriving, fighting their way up the end of the Campbell.
Mid-morning the next day, Dennis drove us to a spot 2 miles upriver where the bank slopes gently and there`s a handy log to hang on while adjusting gear in the fast-flowing river.
The river temperature averages 60 degrees, which is warm for Canada but cold enough for serious shivering. We were covered from head to toe: wetsuits with hoods and gloves, snorkels and masks, and fins with booties.
Even as we sat there, pulling on our gear, we could see large salmon flitting to and fro among the roots of the submerged tree. Then one final tug on our fins, a shiver as the cold water seeped down our backs, a kick as we pushed free of the log, and away we went.
Yow. It was fast. We zoomed along at 4 knots, which doesn`t sound like much on land (about 5 m.p.h.) but is near the speed of light if it`s just your body in water. Rocks rushed past in a blur as we hit a series of small rapids. It was a real carnival ride. Foam boiled above and below the water; white froth hit us in the face.
”The water flows over the rocks, so you will too,” Dennis had said.
”Just remember to keep your knees up.” It was good advice because in some places there was hardly a foot of water in the river.
Then we cleared the rapids and shot under a bridge. And suddenly, the river bottom dropped away and we hit an eddy and slowed.
”When you hit those calm spots,” Dennis had said, ”you want to lie sideways and look forward. Keep your arms in close to your body and try not to move at all. That way you look like a log rather than a seal and the big fish will come close because they don`t think you`re a danger.”
Off to our right, a ghost fish flitted by. Then another. And another. And suddenly, they were not ghost fish but a whole school, a river of large fish, hundreds of them swimming above, below and beside us. As Dennis had said, most of the fish were spooked. The column broke and scattered. But one came right up to us and stopped inches from our eyes. It hung there, mouth agape, back arched and tail askew. Then time started again. The fish flexed, shuddered just a bit and was gone.
We floated on and the river slowed again. More fish came by and we could see they weren`t really brown. More like soft silver. Some had white spots, some had jagged streaks. We dived beneath the water, getting down to fish level and face-to-face with another unending column of bodies.
The small silver ones were pinks, averaging 4 or 5 pounds. The large dark ones that looked like herds of submarines were kings, also called chinook. Most were 30 pounds but some hit 60. A 60-pound fish is 4 feet long and as wide through the middle as a fat man.
Upstream struggle
We tried to stop in the current by grabbing onto boulders. But neither of us could hold on. We didn`t even slow down. But the salmon flowed past, barely twitching their tails and moving upstream against the monster current. It gave us new appreciation for their strength and determination.
As we floated those last several hundred yards, we were thinking about what Jim van Tine had said. Van Tine is manager of the Quinsam River Hatchery. Twenty years ago he was trying vainly to count fish from riverbanks when some bright soul got the idea of jumping in with them.
”A lot of rivers are deep and you can`t see much if you`re standing on the bank. But if you get in and float down, you get a much better view,” he had explained.
About a dozen years ago, locals started noticing all the fun. They, too, jumped in. And maybe five years ago, outsiders got the word and started showing up. It has gotten so popular, local dive shops now offer salmon swim packages.
Meanwhile, the Quinsam hatchery has been busily making sure there are plenty of salmon for folks to watch. The hatchery raises three types of salmon (pinks, coho and chinooks) plus two types of trout (steelhead and cutthroat). Each year they release 5 million to 8 million pinks, 3 million chinook and 1.2 million coho.
When we hit town, some 100,000 pinks, 3,000 chinooks and 1,000 coho were in the river. Some years, though, half a million pinks come through, along with 20,000 chinooks and 40,000 coho.
But now, we were angling toward the steps of the Campbell River Lodge, floating past a last few salmon. We`d come 2 miles in 25 minutes, joining the salmon in an annual ritual as old as time. And we couldn`t wait to do it again. So we piled into Dennis` van and headed upriver.
On the way to our third run of the day, we spotted a black bear bouncing down the road in front of us. He loped along the trail, hindquarters jiggling, head down, completely oblivious to our presence. Maybe he had salmon on his mind, too. –
