THE BIG LEBOWSKI

Open Water

We had been there about 15 minutes, barely enough time to join the throng and complete a partial circuit at The Head, when Mick Heath looked over at me and started reeling in line. "There's something about the tone of fishing here that doesn't appeal to me...Some days I can take it...for awhile anyway. But this isn't one of those days."

The beauty of Rivers Inlet is, well, the beauty of Rivers Inlet. Where else can one pursue such remarkable fish in such eye-wattering splendor? We motored across Kilbella Bay to a half-moon-shaped cove where monumental walls of granite plunged precipitously into the blue-green brine. Heath commented that even though he had seen few boats in this location everything about the place suggested the possible presence of salmon. The depth was right, between 30 and 150 feet, and the jutting rock that formed the shoreline provided the kind of defined structure salmon are often prone to follow. Then there was instinct, that unconscious predatory faculty which crouches like Gollum Smeagol at the back of one's skull and hisses wheedling counsel: Yesss...yesss. We smells fishes...Must kill big fishesss.

Mooching, of course, is the most practical and efficient method of covering expanses of water in the search for salmon. Not to push the Hollywood references too hard, but when I think of the angling program at Legacy Lodge a classic line from the film The Big Lebowski leaps to mind: "Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax..." Don't ask me to explain exactly what that means. All I know is that mooching goes way back, largely arising in the costal BC back in the late 1800s, persisting during the newfangled fads of the 20th century, and enduring to this day as the gold-standard technique for saltwater salmon.

While mooching basically involves putting the motor in gear and pulling plug-cut herring behind the boat, that's not to imply that there aren't a host of perplexing factors to consider, including speed (usually a snail's pace for chinook), current, tide flux and depth. Since we didn't pick up clear indications of fish on the depth finder, we had to go with by-gosh and by-golly. No problem. Heath not only sensed the presence of salmon, he surmised that as the fish neared the estuary they would probably adhere to go with seven pulls of line on one rod and ten pulls on the other, surprisingly shallow for water over a 100 feet deep.

I won't burden you with an insufferable description of our heroics. Suffice it to say that in the next two hours we each hooked a salmon, managed to halfway gracefully coordinate the ensuing chaos and, after the obligatory struggle and cursing, brought to net said beasts. As it turned out, these salmon proved to be the largest either Heath or I had ever landed. And this all happened in solitude—not another boat in sight&mdashin the midst of an alpine fjord of dizzying grandeur. And then we called it a morning.

Party Animals

The character of a creature is revealed in its visage. Look at a freshly-landed chinook and staring back at you will be its cold, hard eye and a jaw set in iron. These are beasts designed for two things and two things alone; predation and migration. In the most elemental sense, big chinook are fundamentally gleaming slabs of muscle. Sumo salmon. Beautiful. Terrible.

Compared to the bellicose demeanor of chinook salmon, coho seem almost cuddly. Nevertheless, the Rivers Inlet coho are numerous, aggressive and altogether sassy. And their willingness to bite—they often feed with abandon in the Inlet—makes them a rather pleasing and rewarding quarry.