Salmon run

“ A man who has once hooked and played a clean-run salmon, and has experienced the thrill of excitement that continues from the rise until the salmon is safely landed, is not at all likely to forget it, or to miss any chance of renewing his acquaintance with Salmo salar.
The contest is such a fair one, there are so many chances in favour of the fish, that no element of sport is wanting. He is so strong in the water, so perfectly built for speed, that unless you handle him both carefully and skilfully you may easily lose him, even if you have brought him exhausted to the gaff. ”

“ When the salmon is mature, the spawning season approaching, it seeks fresh water. Other things being equal, about the same number will run each year in the same channel. With all this, we find some curious facts. Certain streams will have a run of exceptionally large or exceptionally small red salmon. The time of the run bears some relation to the length of the stream: those who have farthest to go start earliest. The time of running bears also a relation to the temperature of the spawning grounds—where the waters cool off earliest, the fish run soonest. ”

“ Indeed, the great bulk of them die of injuries suffered on their upward run or of starvation. Thousands are seen floating later in the season down the upper streams, bruised, torn and emaciated. The people out here have the impression that a salmon never feeds again after leaving the sea in its spawning journey, and that none of the vast millions which commence the voyage ever return. They spawn and die. This fish will spawn in a few weeks in the clear brooks and streams high up among the mountains. ”

“ I fear the canneries are causing too many to be killed now.
An uninitiated person would have thought that great sport could be had just now on the Fraser with rod and line. In this, had he made the experiment, he would have been grievously mistaken. The salmon when on the run never rise to the fly or takes any food. They start from the ocean very fat and live on their fat until the spawning season is over, by which time they become so lean as to be scarcely edible. ”

“ It would appear that the contact with cold fresh water, when in the ocean, in some way causes them to run toward it, and to run before there is any special influence to that end exerted by the development of the organs of generation. High water on any of these rivers in the spring is always followed by an increased run of salmon. The manner of spawning is probably similar for all the species. Usually the fishes pair off; the male, with tail and snout, excavates a broad, shallow ‘nest’ in the gravelly bed of the stream, in rapid water, at a depth of one to four feet ”

“ When the salmon takes the fly, there is no time for picking steps. The line rushes out so swiftly as to cut the fingers if it touches them, and then is the moment when the angler must follow the fish at the top of his speed. To stand still, or to go cautiously in pursuit, is to allow the salmon to run out with an enormous length of line; the line is submerged—technically speaking, drowned—in the water, the strain of the supple rod is removed from the fish, who finds the hook p. ”

“ The rod, reel, and line are those appropriate to salmon fishing, although the line, if it is wet by salt-water, should be afterwards rinsed in fresh to prevent rotting. Some fishermen fasten a float above the fly, and paying out line let it run down stream into distant eddies; but this is not so orthodox a mode of proceeding, and does not require equal skill nor as delicate tackle.
After a fish is struck, the same care has to be exercised if he is heavy that is necessary with the salmon, and he will often compel the angler to follow him a long distance ere the gaff terminates the struggle. ”

“ The dappling of the shadow and sun, however, from the cedar, was a protection to the dwellers in this run; and only twice was the fishing there successful. The second little trout, and one more of the parr, were carried off. Then the birds forsook that particular bit of ripple and hunted easier waters.
In leaping at the flies which came down the surface of the run the little salmon one day got a severe but invaluable lesson. A large and gaudy fly, unlike anything that he had ever encountered before, appeared on the ripples over his head. ”

“ Most trout, however, enter the sea when they can. These sea-run individuals often grow large and look like salmon, and, like the salmon, they enter the rivers to spawn. They do not, however, ascend the streams with as much energy, nor do they go as far, the instinct in these respects being much less perfect. To the large species entering the sea, intermediate in structure between trout and salmon, the name ‘salmon-trout’ is applied in England. ”

“ The following is a tabular statement of the data concerning them, the loss in weight being due to migration alone. No. 34 was 8 days in spawning, extruded all but 20 ova, and lost thereby 21 per cent, more of the Rio Vista weight.
The salmon of the spring run reach their spawning grounds from two to six weeks, or even longer, before spawning, which time they spend lying quietly in the pools. The fall salmon are more nearly ripe when they arrive at the spawning grounds, many of them ceasing to ascend only when ready to spawn. ”

“ The quinnat and blue-black salmon habitually run in the spring, the others in the fall, the two former species having the greater economic value. The spring-running salmon ascend only those rivers which are fed by the melting snows from the mountains, and which have sufficient volume to send their waters well out to sea, as the Sacramento, Rogue, Klamath, Columbia, and Frazer Rivers. They are chiefly adults, but their milt and spawn are no more developed in them when they go up the rivers than they are at the same time in others of the same species which will not enter the streams until fall. ”

“ Why, sometimes they are so thick that you literally can't see the bottom for their backs. A good many people, who have never been on a stream during the [Pg 198] salmon run, think that the stories about their abundance must be lies ”

“ In Fraser River the fall run of the quinnat is nearly worthless for canning purposes, because so many are ‘white-meated.’ In the spring very few are ‘white-meated,’ but the number increases toward fall, when there is every variation, some having red streaks running through them, others being red toward the head and pale toward the tail. The red and pale ones cannot be distinguished externally, and the color is dependent upon neither age nor sex. There is not much difference in the taste, but there is no market for pale-fleshed salmon. ”

“ Its flesh is light-colored, but is of excellent flavor, being not inferior to the eastern salmon. It is caught in large quantities with gill nets and traps, for canning and use in a fresh condition. As a game fish the steelhead enjoys a high reputation in the Pacific States. Its principal run in the rivers is during the fall and winter months, when it ascends the streams long distances, spawning in late winter or early spring. ”

“ We get every winter a few fish from the Atlantic coast that are evidently part of the schools of fish that run up into the Kennebec, Penobscot, and other eastern rivers. During November and December we had about 15 to 20 fish, weighing from 12 to 24 pounds each, that were caught in the mackerel nets in the vicinity of Provincetown and North Truro, Mass. ”

“ The line being held with the paddle, each stroke of the latter gives the bait a spasmodic and life-like movement, highly conducive to success. Many salmon (of inferior quality) are taken in the rivers by spearing; and though the river-banks are frequently offensive from the number of fish that have died from injuries received in ascending to and returning from the spawning-ground, hungry bears and sea-fowl innumerable perform the scavenger's cleanly offices.
The natives have a peculiar mode of catching a small fish which resembles a herring, but is inferior to it in size. ”

“ I make up my mind to do the best, and mentally mark the point, near a footbridge across a runnel, where I must probably come to grief. The salmon, however, is no more inclined to give amusement to the spectators than I am. He cruises about in a sullen humour, and acts as if he is rather anxious than otherwise to come to the gaff. There is no difficulty, in short, in applying the familiar time principle of a pound a minute, and without a serious attempt to try escape per rapids, he comes to land, a fish of 16 lb., that has been some time in the fresh water. ”

“ Thus the charm of salmon-fishing is in the raising and striking; and of all kinds of striking, the striking of the salmon is the most difficult: the fish being so large and silvery, the angler is certain to see him coming at the fly, and is very apt to strike too soon. But if it is borne in mind to strike after the broken water is visible, and not before it, this will soon be overcome. When you do strike, don't let it be a mere tightening of the line, as in trout-fishing, but a decided stroke. Some say that the salmon will hook himself by his own weight. ”

“ In the lakes, and occasionally in pools of the Thompson, I have seen them roll over in the water, but never leap into the air. It seems not unreasonable to suppose that one reason for the leaping of the Atlantic salmon is because he is practising for the time when he will have to jump a difficult waterfall in the river he ascends. But in the inland lakes and rivers the Pacific salmon never leap, and, in fact, are seen but little on the surface. On the other hand the trout appear to leap quite as much as the European species. On Fish Lake the rainbows are leaping continually. ”

“ Great numbers of salmon die on having discharged their instinctive duty; some of them, evidently, because exhausted by their long journey, and others, apparently, because their term of life ends with arrival and spawning. Their six hundred miles of travel against the current, and exertion in overcoming rapids, or jumping falls, often deprives them of sight, and wears off their noses. Of course, all these mutilated individuals perish, besides very many others; so that the shores of the small lakes and tributaries of both branches of the Columbia are lined, in autumn, with dead and dying fish. ”

“ To pull a salmon in shore, immediately after he has been hooked, will never do; the expert way is to give him all the line he wants, never forgetting in the mean time that it must be kept perfectly 40 taut. And this must be done continually, in spite of every obstacle, not only when the fish performs his splendid leaps out of the water, but also when he is stemming the current of the stream, trying to break the naughty hook against a rock, or when he has made a sudden wheel, and is gliding down the stream with the swiftness of a falling star. ”

“ In fishing a cast, the angler casts diagonally across down stream, and draws the fly up stream towards him, softly raising and lowering the top of the rod so as to check and loosen the fly alternately, and to make all its fibres open and shut so as to counterfeit life. When a salmon rises to the fly he either makes a big bulge or boil in the water, or, if he is unusually eager, he throws his head and half his body above the surface, rolling over like a porpoise in his endeavour to seize the fly ”

“ When they come from the deep to spawn in the streams, they invariably return to the same river in which they themselves have been spawned. Fish from, the same water average the same size. A river known for the lustiness of its salmon may rise from the same source as another stream in which only small fish are found. The salmon of the Atlantic coast, contrary to the habit of its Pacific cousin, takes the fly in fresh water. Why they rise to bait at all is an enigma since it has been proven that while in river pools for months at a time they maintain a rigid fast. ”

“ The course of the vast schools on entering the river is directly against the current. When the tide ebbs the salmon all ascend, and with the flood, when the current sets in strongly from the sea, they turn about and swim back toward the harbor bar. There is always a period of from forty minutes to an hour at high and low-water slack, respectively, when the water is at a standstill, or nearly so, and what makes these stages best for fishing is that then, and only then, salmon dart about in every direction, searching persistently for the source of the fresh water. ”

“ Again, a salmon may be got by a less skilled angler fishing immediately behind a redoubtable fisherman; but whether it was the particular hook that caught the eye of the fish, its particular movement at the moment, the accidental proximity of the fish, or all these temptations combined, what man can tell? It seems certain that salmon often follow a hook or watch it from their ‘lie’ without rising to it; and undoubtedly at times their decision ‘to fight or flee’ is determined by the motion of the lure at the critical moment. ”

“ Great fun it is, too, to watch these lordly fish at some point where they must leap clear over some small water-fall or mill-dam if they would pass further up. The water breaks with a mighty swish, and out comes the salmon, his back like black velvet, and all the rest of him like a flash of burnished silver, his tail uncurving from the strong blow that he has struck in his leap, and his fine force and vigor landing him in the top water, where one great whisk and splash carries him clean over and out of all danger. ”