pink salmon

You have to understand that this blog is a bit of a cheat. It is really the work of John and his wife known as Mighty Lois. John would not even have begun if Lois had not shown him how to start and then written down easy steps on how to find it again. So it goes when you are born incapacitated and make no effort to lift your rod. So if you are expecting me to slide off into digressions  about how to tie non-slip-knots and piscatorial lore like that - Forget It. That's Lois's business and will always be so. E.G! She worked out how to put single hooks on the deadly Tasmanian Devil lures that wiggle more enticingly than a belly dancer and lure in mesmerized Pink Salmon. But that is another story which we will return to later.

You have to know a bit about Pink Salmon first and the Fraser River second. Pinks are different from other salmon. They don't hang around.Once they leave the eggs that the female salmon has laid in gravel redds (spawning beds) they don't linger. Smolts (young salmon) disapear and head for the vast Pacific. No one seems to know where they go and what they do out there. But it is definitely known that they come back to the Fraser every second year. Then a sort of hysteria grips the fishing community round the Fraser and Vancouver. The Pinks come in massive streams of silver and are easy to catch. Once in the Fraser they split up- searching for their natal waters to spawn. It is now that they return to rivers like the Vedder to complete their life cycle. The males undergo a grotesque metamorphosis. As the pilgrims meet the fresh water their bodies change. The females become gravid with eggs and the males start tp develop grotesque humps on their backs. Quasimodo's meet quivering queens.  Milt unites with egg and the race is reborn.  A sacred rititual which carelessness and greed must never desecrate.



!t was a let down coming back to Canada from Australia last month. All seemed doom and gloom. Newspapers were full of the failure of the Sockeye Salmon run. Was I about to witness the death of one of the world's most wonderful spectacles - salmon pouring up the Fraser River? What would happen to the arrival of the mysterious 'Pinks' - they only came back to the Fraser every second year and