The coast of British Columbia leading up to Alaska is one of the world’s premier sport fishing grounds, an excellent place to catch salmon, halibut, lingcod, flounders, crabs and shellfish. Even Andrew has landed a 13lb salmon here in the past. So while we were cruising north along the coast during May and June 2008, Lyn thought it high time she demonstrated her fishing skills. This is her account of how she went about it ...

Preparation

The first thing you need is a fishing licence. Foreigners have to pay five times as much as locals, which makes it expensive. Along with the licence comes a large booklet containing a byzantine set of rules. There are open seasons and catch limits for every different species of fish in 29 different coastal zones. There are minimum fish measurements, rules on tagged fish, places where shellfish can be caught but are not fit to be eaten etc etc. From careful inspection of these rules I determined that the only places you are allowed to fish are miles from anywhere at impossible times of the year when no right-minded fish are expected anyway.

Undeterred, my next step was to get some second hand books and read with growing excitement how to catch my fish. There was one book for salmon, one for bottom fish, and one for crabs so in all I had quite a library.

Now all I needed was the equipment. Sentinel has an old rod and reel, but I needed a crab pot and of course some bait. Everyone I asked turned out to be an expert on the best kind of crab pot. The man in the hardware store strongly recommended a dusty old one that looked like it had been lying in the

corner for years. And what would I need for bait? Well prawn are best he assured me, and for that I would need a prawn pot, like a crab pot but smaller. Somehow in the excitement I forgot to ask what bait to use for prawn.

How Not to Catch Salmon

Load some thick line onto the reel of the fishing rod. Attach a heavy, one pound weight, and below that, a hook on a spoon or spinner. Whilst sailing along, pay out the line so that the hook stays under the surface and wait, keeping a hold on the line to feel its movement. Try different speeds so that the weight is at different depths. Try when near the shore. Try anywhere you might see other fishermen. Try anywhere you sea birds, seals, dolphins, whales all catching salmon. Anytime the line feels heavier, reel it in and remove the seaweed. Reel in when bored or entering shallow water. Remember it gave you something to do whilst travelling.

NB. When the reel broke seizing the line, I had to remove all the line winding it onto something else like a cushion, repair the reel with super glue and amalgam tape, rewind the line and hope it would be good for next time. It wasn't.

How Not to Catch Bottom Fish

Tie a moderate weight onto the end of a line. About eighteen inches above this attach a boom from which hangs another short line with the hook inside a brightly coloured rubber squid, guaranteed irresistible to your average halibut. Around seven in the evening, when snugly anchored, sit on the deck with your line, bouncing the weight up and down off the seabed. Sometimes weave it back and forth just to alleviate the boredom a bit. If it is sunny, a cold G&T goes down well, but if it is cloudy, a hot cuppa is much more welcome. After an hour, pack up and go down below to cook plan B (canned mackerel) and get warm.

How Not to Catch Crabs

We bought a fold up wire mesh cage type of pot. It had a square base and two sides making a triangle with the base. The two ends have flap doors about the height and width of a good size crab. They hinge at the top and should let a crab in and then close stopping it from leaving. The bait, some cat food or chicken scraps in a container with holes, is held in the middle of the floor. Attach twenty metres of line to the top of the pot and two empty plastic milk containers with tightly screwed on pink lids (a concession to the red and white float the ‘book’ said we were supposed to use). The pot can then be dropped into the water. If dropping it off an anchored yacht, the line can become entangled with the anchor chain. When that happened, after much cursing Andrew tied another line around the crab pot line so that he could winch the pot up level with the deck, then I could pull the chain off the pot. Alternatively the pot can be dropped off the yacht before anchoring, and picked up later like man-overboard drill, being careful not to catch the line in the propeller, or anchoring where the boat can swing into the floats which bump down the hull keeping you awake all night. At least we have been spared these last two problems. The best method is to go out in the dinghy to drop and recover the pot. I got a lot of exercise rowing.

Sometimes it could come up with the bait still there and sometimes with it gone, but always empty. I think perhaps one crab held open the trap door for another to get the food and get out again. When I used elastic to hold down the doors, weak enough for the crab to push open but making sure it closes behind it, the crab was smart enough to cut the elastic. The tinned cat food perhaps did not have enough holes in the can as it never worked. The chicken was usually cleaned out but not every time. Actually I did once get a crab, a tiny one too small to eat, sitting on top of the pot on some kelp. To finish this exercise, I was trying to drop the pot but kept finding the water too deep. I was dragging it under the dinghy closing the shore when it hit the bottom. I let go of the floats and left it there, while an inquisitive seal swam around and took a bite at the floats. Later I could not pull up the pot. We tried to haul it up with the winch on the yacht but only succeeded in

breaking the line. So we had to leave it there along with the seal.

How Not to Catch Prawns

Forget catching Ghost Prawns for bait, by this time we were hungry enough to eat anything. The prawn pot is properly called a minnow pot and made from two wire cones joined together, such that the two points face one another a few inches apart with a round hole at the end of each, the whole thing covered in tight mesh. The theory is that anything going in through either hole will never find its way out again. I put some cat food in a piece of nylon stocking and tied in the middle of the pot. I dropped the pot onto the seabed on a long piece of line, pulled it out later and found nothing but a few pipe worms attached to the food.

"In your dreams, Lyn"

The Bottom Line

All bookkeepers have a profit and loss account on their enterprises, so here's mine!