u/Jeremybunny99

Along the Lateral Line: Chasing Fraser River Monsters

The biggest white sturgeon ever landed on the Fraser was eleven feet long and weighed half a ton. If you hook one of the monsters, there is no plan. I’d asked Sean, our guide, what you were supposed to ‘do’ if you found yourself connected to one of the Fraser River big boys. A man of few words, he paused, then gave an uncharacteristic bark of laughter.  “Well,” he’d said, then seemed to ponder it some more…“I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.”

It was our second full day on the river, and I was still battling jet lag and a secret fear I’d bitten off more than I could chew. Sean reversed the boat up to the edge of an overhanging bank, wedged the anchor around a tree root and cut the engine. We cast out and stood back to watch the rods.

After a minute, it happened. A gentle flex of the rod tip, one, two paces across the deck, grab the rod with both hands – and strike. An unseen force bent the rod almost flat, then pulled me, stumbling, to the side rail. It felt as if someone had suddenly attached a huge, old-fashioned garden roller to the end of my line and shoved it over the side. I jammed the butt into my thigh and tried to keep the rod a few degrees above horizontal. Dear God - now what? Sean was barking instructions at me, but I couldn’t focus on what he was saying. My mind seemed to have abruptly stepped outside for a long, contemplative stroll. Fortunately he sensed my cluelessness and leaned over to slacken the clutch a couple of notches. Line poured from the reel as the fish tore away, heading for the main flow of the river. I jammed the heel of my hand against the spool to slow him down and the hundred-pound braid promptly sliced into my flesh. The fish slowed, then accelerated around to the left. Then a pause, followed by a different sensation. I could feel a gathering momentum upwards through the water and I realised what was going to happen at the same moment as Sean yelled, “He’s gonna jump!”

Seventy yards away the sturgeon exploded almost vertically from the surface of the river. Bigger than a man, he writhed upwards to an astonishing height. At the top of his leap he hung there, suspended in mid-air, and for a long, tranquil moment I simply stood and looked at him as the rest of the world faded away. Then the spell broke with an enormous crash and a shower of spray as he fell back, sideways, into the river. Behind me, Bryon and Sean let out a huge cheer.

Eventually I worked him in close to the side of the boat. “There goes his bubbles!” said Sean. “That’s a good fish.” A big sturgeon often empties his air bladder as a last-ditch defence – a submarine setting itself to dive.

I gently eased him through the last few feet of water until he lay on the surface, slowly working his enormous tail. He was otherworldly - medieval armour plating and a cold, moonstone eye.

 We slowly puttered along the bank to a nearby shallow, pebbly beach where we could disembark and land the fish. Sean jumped out of the boat, waded out to the sturgeon and carefully removed the barbless hook. I pulled on a pair of waders and joined them.

It was a peculiar thing, to stand next to that fish as the river flowed around us. I mean – yes, I was pleased; elated, even. I was a fresh-water angler and I’d just landed a fish I had been chasing for thirty-odd years. But at the same time… If a stranger had suddenly appeared and demanded to know what the bloody hell I was playing at, I wouldn’t have known what to say. What was I doing, actually?  And more importantly, why?

We held the fish in the current for a while as he recovered, then gently lifted him out of the water. Sean carefully measured him along his lateral line, from the apex of his tail to the tip of his snout. Six and a half feet long – not one of the legendary Fraser River monsters, but a good fish nonetheless. Sean reckoned that he was around thirty years old. Sturgeon can live a long, long time; so there’s every chance he’ll have the last laugh by still being around after I’m gone.

As we held him up for the ritual trophy shot he didn’t struggle, and I could sense his ancient, colossal indifference. The photograph sits in my study. I look at it, sometimes.

It was late in the day by then, and we didn’t get any more bites. As I chatted to Bryon and Sean on the way home I could feel something – a memory, or a connection I couldn’t quite place – nudging the back of my mind.

Sean dropped us off and partly to try and tease a reaction from him I gave him a very large tip. I was rewarded with a slightly raised eyebrow and fractionally more animation in his voice than normal as he said “Thanks man!”

Bryon went up to our room, but I decided to linger outside and smoke a last cigarette. A couple of contemplative drags and suddenly there it was. From the dusty, untidy filing cabinet of my mind a memory had surfaced.

I’m ten or eleven years old. It’s a warm sunny day near the start of the school holidays, and I’m fishing down at the village ponds. Every time I went, I was optimistic that this time I’d get it right. I’d be able to cast my float out, and it would balance itself nicely in the water, and I’d be fishing.  But something always went wrong and in my darker moments I had started to suspect that fishing was just a theoretical concept, a flimsy conceit incapable of surviving contact with my ineptitude and messy, awkward reality.

But on that day, things seemed more promising than usual.  I found a nice clearing between the trees, facing out towards an area of open water and started to set my rod up. Another angler, making his way up the path behind me, stopped to chat for a minute or two. He must have realised I needed all the help I could get, because before he left he gave me a handful of maggots. I clumsily impaled a couple on the hook and for once managed to gently lob my tackle into the water without tangling it around the nearest tree, or the bankside vegetation, or myself.

I sat back and studied my float. It settled down nicely on the water, riding the slight ripple but behaving itself by staying where I wanted it to. I watched it suspiciously for a while but remarkably, nothing seemed to be going wrong. That was it. That was the memory. A picture of a child with the sun on his shoulders, filled with quiet euphoria because for the first time, he was actually fishing.

I could have happily sat there all day, just staring at my float, but after a while something strange happened.  It disappeared. I struck and for the first time felt a shock from the connection to life – pulsing its way into me through the rod. I reeled in a small roach, jiggled the tiny hook out of its mouth and crouched on the bank, looking at it.

I slipped him gently back into the water and he darted away.

Standing outside my hotel decades later, I realised that was the day that sparked my personal version of the obsession that quietly smoulders in the psyche of all fishermen. And everything that had happened since then – the days and nights brooding and waiting beside motionless carp ponds, the travelling off in the early morning half-light, the frozen hands casting a lure for pike on a winter’s afternoon, as well as all the laughter, disaster, companionship and disappointment - had somehow brought me back in a huge, meandering circle to where I’d started. Maybe, when I got home, I wouldn’t need - or want - to go fishing again.

The next day Bryon hooked a big fish near the entrance to the Vedder Canal that he eventually landed after it stripped a hundred yards of line off his spool galloping and leaping up the channel, then on our last day (Friday) Sean took us salmon fishing. Fair enough, neither of us had ever tried it before, but goodness me… we were useless. In fact left unsupervised, I think we were probably capable of cocooning ourselves in line and (helpless against the flow of the river) drowning ourselves.

Inevitably we started to snigger at our own ineptitude and this, combined with the air of “please-God-take-me-away-from-all-of-this” that Sean started to silently exude soon produced a brittle, unspoken hilarity. Eventually Bryon managed a cast that defied the law of physics by actually landing behind him, on a mud bank. I hooted with laughter and we simultaneously glanced guiltily at Sean. The look of wounded, martyred resignation on his face was all we needed to nudge us over the edge and we staggered around for a while, honking with laughter.

   

I still go fishing. Sometimes, it’s a lot of fun. And besides - as I drift further downstream I need that jolt along my lateral line more than ever, to remind me that I’m alive.

Some evenings, before I go to sleep, I think about the sturgeon. After I’m gone he’ll still be out there, nosing his way up the Fraser with that cold, moonstone eye.

 He’s forgotten about me.