Willie's Adventures Sailing and Fishing

I’ve come back to the Skeena Spey Lodge in Terrace BC and I’m pleased to say that my friend Mike has actually made it this year after having to cancel last year when he broke his wrist just before coming. The Skeena is a huge river and you fish it with a double handed rod in order to cover enough water to find the fish. The target species is Steelhead which is the American equivalent of our sea trout with their native rainbow trout replacing our British brown trout. They grow pretty big and I was lucky enough to catch and release a really good one in 2018.

Look at the width of this fish!

This is the UK equivalent that you tend to fish at night for in Wales.

Steelhead are rare and protected. You need a special licence and it is all catch and release Fishing with a single barbless hook.

We arrived Saturday mid day and were luck enough to get a bonus half day’s fishing to get the cobwebs off our casting and see if we could connect with anything. We both blanked and my casting needs a bit of work and some tweaks to my setup on my reel.

The clip above is me casting on my stronger side. I am useless on the other bank when you need to do everything ‘left handed’Yesterday was our first full day and my shoulders are hurting already. You can see from the clip above how big the river is. The runs of Steelhead and our other target species the Pacific silver salmon or Coho are down this year but we are hoping that the fish will arrive during the time we are here.

We fished hard yesterday but no target species were caught by anyone at the Lodge. I managed to connect with a new species for me which is the Bull Trout.

Jet lag is an issue as we are 8 hours behind the UK. I am writing this in the middle of the night wide awake. I woke up at 1 am on the first night and didn’t really get back to sleep.

That is pretty much it for now. Hopefully connect with something a bit better today. We are travelling quite a few miles down river today to try to intercept a small push of new fish into the system.