Smokey Ball is a former mayor of Deer Lake
a small community by the side of the Humber River in Newfoundland.
Parked on just about every filling station
and fishing shop counter in this part of the world is a
large jar full of Smokey’s “bombers” –
torpedo shaped fishing flies made from deer hair and a slightly
faded orange hackle feather, tipped at the ends with caribou
fur.
Other people make bombers too but most
of the local fishermen say Smokey’s are the best.
Some people fish with different flies now and then. But
up and down the river, dawn ‘til dusk, if you check
out the tackle you can be sure that a big majority of the
anglers will be fishing a bomber.
They fish it upstream, mending the line
so that the fly floats undisturbed in the same way they
do on the Hampshire chalk streams. But this is dry fly fishing
for salmon.
I know that salmon will take a dry fly
and I know they take flies off the surface. There are many
rivers in Scotland, Iceland and Norway where streamer-like
flies such as the Collie Dog and the Sunray Shadow are fished,
sometimes with a hitch in the line to create a riffle. The
salmon are attracted to the disturbance.
But the bomber doesn’t seem to work
so well when pulled across the water. “We always fish
it upriver. It seems to annoy the fish and sooner or later
one will go for it,” says fishing guide John Park.
It did too. I must have covered some fish
I could see lying in the stream as much as hundred times
when suddenly a head reared up for the fly. Nothing. Two
casts later, the same happened. Again, not a twitch on the
line. “You’re supposed to strike as soon as
you see it,” said John.
“Oh,” I said. Not for the first
time that week I was missing some crucial piece of information.
In the same way I had been frustrated when opening my fly
box, armed with double and treble hooks only to be told
that the fishing rules stated single hooks, unbarbed, with
no weight added to the fly.
I felt slightly guilty, ashamed and somewhat
unsporting in the same way that I might if I had gone to
a pheasant shoot with a Bofors anti-aircraft gun. What Newfoundland
anglers call their “play fair” rules were introduced
a few years ago out of desperation in an effort to restore
dwindling salmon stocks.
Not more than 14 years ago, the Humber
River was almost clear of salmon, before the loggers stopped
floating their timber down the river. Bacterial action on
the wood had starved the water of oxygen, spoiling habitat
for migrating salmon.
Today stocks are recovering, but the great
days are probably gone forever. When Lee Wulff, one of the
pioneers of modern salmon fishing techniques, first came
to Newfoundland in 1937 he spent days making his way by
boat up the Humber River.
At Big Falls, a natural 12ft high barrier,
salmon were gathered in their thousands, leaping a dozen
at a time to get over the obstacle. Wulff assembled his
fly rod and started fishing below the falls. By the evening
when he called a halt he had landed 75 salmon, releasing
all but his first fish.
Today catch and release is enforced by
strict quotas of no more than six fish per season, but all
the anglers I saw catch fish were fishing for their quota.
Some, however, will deliberately release a hooked fish before
they are played out. For someone who has been accustomed
to viewing a fish on the bank as a caught fish, the practice
seems odd.
My fishing had been arranged by The Humber
Valley resort, an ambitious development of timber chalets
in woodland settings. The resort has access to skiing in
winter, golf and fishing in summer.
Not everyone used to fishing a beat system
will enjoy the first-come-first-served routines of the local
anglers on some of the most popular stretches of the Humber.
Static fishing is not for me.
Guiding services, however, like that offered
by Joe Dicks at Explore Newfoundland can get you out to
the wilder places. Sadly I missed out on a day fishing the
Main River where Dicks and his party managed to find some
water well enough oxygenated in the unseasonably warm conditions
to hold taking fish.
The number of variations, from country
to country, even river to river, used to fish for a single
species continues to surprise me. Will the bomber work in
Scotland? I can think of a few places on the Dee where I
might try it later this month. For the next two weeks, however,
I have a round Britain and Ireland sailing race to complete.
Weight controls are quite strict but I have sneaked in some
line and a few lures in case the opportunity arises. You
have to fish where you can.
