10 painful lessons I learned on my first B.C. steelhead trip

#7 Anadromous Fish Are Maddeningly Complicated

I spent a lot of time talking fishing with Randy, as well as lodge manger Kent O’Neill, who’s also a dedicated angler. And I started to feel that if I moved out west to fish on my own, it might be a very long time before I caught anything. On Vancouver Island, fishing changes monthly—if not weekly. Each river has its own intricate character and patterns. And movements of steelhead and salmon can be triggered by complex combinations of tides, rainfall, temperature and—the guys might have been kidding, but I’m not sure—a butterfly flapping its wings on the Lower Mainland. The upside of this complexity is that no matter the season, there are almost always trout or salmon somewhere. You just have to understand the fishery (or follow Randy’s truck) to find them.