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).

How Not to Catch Crabs

A crab pot spares you the trouble of hanging around while you fish. Attach twenty metres of line to the top of the pot with two empty plastic milk containers done up tight at the other end, then drop the lot overboard. The rope will then become entangled in the anchor chain and the floats will bump along the side of the hull driving you crazy all night. So curse while you unravel it, put it in the dinghy, row a little way off and drop it again. It's all good exercise.

The pot has a trap door to let a crab in to get at a delicious treat such as smelly cat-food or rotting chicken scraps. The theory is they are too stupid to find their way out again.

Pull up the pot some hours later, and look incredulous that it is empty. The bait has done a vanishing trick. 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 door, they cut the elastic. Crabs are a lot smarter than you'd think. Perhaps they go on pot evasion workshops to learn tactics. Otherwise it's down to the inquisitive seal that comes to see what you are up to and takes a bite out of the floats.

To finish off, get the pot trapped under a rock and break the rope in a fit of exasperation while trying to haul it up. So I had to leave it down 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 keep a profit and loss account on their enterprises, so here's mine!