Minimum sentences in Canada (updated)

July 25, 2011

Check the update at the end of this article.

John Snobelen, currently a Toronto Sun columnist, had an earlier run as a provincial politician, serving Mike Harris as his minister of education and minister of natural resources.  Always a colourful figure, Snobelen is best remembered for a speech to directors of education in which he stated, “You can’t manage change.  We’re going to bankrupt the system.  We’re going to create a crisis.”  He certainly did that, entering our memory as the worst minister of education in Ontario history.  As minister of natural resources he annoyed Harris supporters by suddenly cancelling the spring bear hunt, a major source of revenue to tourist operators in Northern Ontario.  Dropped from cabinet by Ernie Eves in 2002, he disappeared to a ranch in Oklahoma until his eventual resignation from the Ontario Legislature in 2003.

Our tale begins in January of 2007 when the Toronto Star broke the story that John Snobelen had been arrested and charged after police executed a search warrant and seized an illegal .22 Colt semi-automatic pistol  from its place of concealment in an air duct in the bathroom of Snobelen’s farm house near Milton.

It seems the gun and ammunition had been hidden there by Snobelen’s estranged wife for reasons unclear in the agreed-upon statement of facts in court testimony.  I’ll leave it to the reader to fill in the gaps as to why a wife would first place a gun out of the reach of her husband and later direct police to the contraband weapon.

The handgun had been transported into the country with Snobelen’s personal effects when he moved back to the Milton area from Oklahoma.  He admitted in his plea that he had unpacked the gun and failed to register or dispose of it.

This seemed to lay this public figure wide open to the minimum sentences applicable to gun crimes once the Colt was discovered by police, for on CTV on January 6th, 2006 Stephen Harper said he would introduce a minimum sentence of five years for possession of a loaded restricted or prohibited weapon.  “Not only will sentences be tougher, we will make sure the criminals serve those sentences,” said Harper.

Perhaps the Harper Government hadn’t yet had time to implement its pet minimum sentencing rule, for a year later John Snobelen faced the justice system in a sentencing hearing.  The outcome had taken seventeen months, but in May of 2007, notwithstanding the defendant’s guilty plea, Justice Stephen Brown noted that Snobelen had never used the weapon and that it had been discovered during ongoing marital problems.  Brown described Snobelen’s failure to dispose of the firearm as a foolish mistake and a serious error in judgement, but sent him on his way with an absolute discharge.

This seems a not-unreasonable outcome to the story.

But then last week Gary Bellett of the Vancouver Sun reported that Texan Danny Cross (64), Californian Hugh Barr (70) and their wives were on their way to Alaska to celebrate Cross’s wedding anniversary when they were stopped at a border crossing near Vancouver on July 11.

They declared they had no firearms aboard their Winnebego, but Border Services personnel located a total of five loaded pistols and promptly arrested the two husbands.  The retired brothers-in-law then spent five days with the general population in jail while their wives struggled to raise the $50,000 bail for each prisoner.

These retirees, like Snobelen, had no previous criminal record.  They come from a gun-toting culture where a man literally feels naked without his guns.  But as soon as they crossed the border and declared that they had no firearms with them, they became targets for Stephen Harper’s minimum sentence program, and they lack Snobelen’s contacts and resources as a wealthy man and former cabinet minister.  According to Canadian law today, these men must be incarcerated for a minimum of three years.

I’ve been a long gun owner all my life but have no use for handguns.  Still I feel there’s something fundamentally stupid about treating these men as hardened criminals.  Why not confiscate the guns and possibly the motor home, give the owners a stiff fine and send them home?

Let’s try another example of a minimum sentence.  Say your kid has six marijuana plants growing somewhere and is arrested and charged.  The minimum sentencing provision kicks in and he or she faces three years of prison.  Last spring I challenged M.P. Gord Brown on this and he responded, “Six plants is a lot of marijuana.”

My old economics professor always insisted that when you draw a line across the graph, strange distortions occur in a free market.  The minimum sentence rule no doubt sounds great to Conservative supporters in a headline, whether Harper says three years or five as the minimum punishment for a particular crime.  But it makes for lousy justice and I fear we will feel its effects over the next few years.

Update: The Ottawa Citizen, Dec. 8, 2011

U.S. seniors fined for sneaking guns across border

Men were carrying small arsenal for protection, lawyer says

By Gerry Bellett, Postmedia News December 8, 2011

Two pistolpacking American seniors were fined $10,000 each on Wednesday after being found with a small arsenal of undeclared firearms by Canada Border Services Agency officers who searched their motor home July 11.

The men Danny Cross, 64, of Texas and his brother-in-law Hugh Barr, 70, had told guards at the Aldergrove, B.C., border crossing that they had no weapons in their motor home but a search turned up a shotgun, a derringer-type pistol, a cowboy-style six gun, and three semi-automatic pistols – all except the shotgun were loaded.

At the time Cross and Barr – accompanied by their wives – were on their way to Alaska to celebrate Cross’s wedding anniversary but instead ended up in jail for five days until a $50,000 bail for each was raised.

Both pleaded guilty in Surrey, B.C., provincial court to possession of loaded, prohibited weapons.

Crown counsel Leanne Jomori told Judge James Bahen their actions warranted between 60 to 90 days in jail as they had deliberately lied to border guards.

She said the pair were cavalier in their attitude to Canada’s restrictive gun laws and didn’t take them seriously.

Their lawyer Joel Whysall said a jail sentence was inappropriate given they had spent five days in jail and asked for a fine to be imposed as neither had a criminal record and were exemplary citizens in their own country.

He said the men were carrying the guns for protection.

When asked by the judge if they had anything to say, Barr, who spoke for them both, said they wanted to “apologize to the people of Canada for what we have done.”

“We are embarrassed and humiliated that we ignored the handgun laws of Canada. We had no intention of doing harm,” said Barr.

Outside the courtroom, when asked why they were carrying so many guns, Barr said he’d heard that northern Canada was wild and dangerous – “a bit like it was in the old covered wagon days.”

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/seniors+fined+sneaking+guns+across+border/5827712/story.html#ixzz1fx50hmSu

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How I mistook a humpback whale for a loon

July 17, 2011

From the time I first arrived in British Columbia until my return home from the trip, my sense of proportion was out of whack.  Trees in B.C. are huge.  Everyone knows that.  The fish are huge.  That’s good.  But blackberry stems are as wide across as my thumb, and the thorns would tear you apart if you tried to push through them.

The Fraser River is an immense, roaring engine tearing its way through the heart of the province.

Even small local mountains have snow on them in late June.  As far north as the Haida Gwaii it didn’t get dark until 11:00, and it was bright enough to read by 4:00 a.m.

The mouth of Naden Harbour lay just to the north of the Queen Charlotte Lodge – a run of a bit over five miles.  The fishing spots were five to seven miles further along the coast.  That amounted to at least twenty-five miles of ocean swells to leap over just to go fishing and get back to base afterward.  No wonder a fishing trip usually took 11 hours.

As a lifelong boater I have an interest in all floating vessels.  I asked our guide how long the tugboat where we had lunch was, 65 feet?  “Uh, the Driftwood is 135 feet.”  Ulp.  Are my perceptions that far off that I underestimated the size of a large boat by half?

Then came the group of humpback whales a mile or two out to sea from our fishing position.  I was delighted to see them, more than anything so that I could cross another line off my bucket list.

But then I lay myself open to no end of ridicule from my boat-mates when I looked over the stern and yelped, “Hey, there’s a loon!”

Brian immediately turned to look, as loons are unheard of in the North Pacific.  He let out a hoot.  Apparently my “loon” was some part of a humpback whale, seen from over a mile away.

Well somehow the thing configured its tail or its flukes to imitate the v-form of a loon’s wings when it raises them from the water to warn off a fisherman or another bird.  It’s a familiar, characteristic loon move, and I thought I saw it in that glimpse of the water at the stern of our boat.

Brian was a bit relentless in his teasing about my loon, and I mentioned this embarrassing incident to Roz. She thought about it for a bit and then sent me a copy of an Edgar Allan Poe story she remembered reading as a kid: “The Sphinx.”  In it the narrator, a nervous, superstitious fellow, becomes convinced he is seeing a monster running up and down the mountain as he gazes through the window of the house where he is a guest.  He sees it as an omen of his impending death.

Eventually his host gets wind of this apparition, asks probing questions, then locates a description of the monster in a book.  He explains gently to his guest that he has been observing, not a 75-foot monster dwarfing the trees on the neighbouring mountain, but a tiny spider spinning a web on the window pane at the tip of his nose.

Perspective is everything, and mine didn’t recover from the shock of British Columbia until I had caught and released several dozen largemouth bass on Newboro Lake.

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While the wolves are away, the deer will play.

July 5, 2011

This year I haven’t kept up my end of the bargain with the wolves over fish heads, so last night when I finally took some out to the row of blight-resistant butternut seedlings next to the walnut orchard, two deer were standing there, placidly chewing on my prized butternuts.  They moved over into the walnuts while I distributed the gory wolf-bait, but one came to the apple trees below the house this morning to entertain us over breakfast.  Yearlings or young does, I think.  Much larger and sleeker than the runts on the lawn at the Queen Charlotte Lodge.  Night before last one explored both gardens, nipping leaves off a corn plant, but that’s about it.

They’re pretty things.

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Rod and Tony take on the Pacific

July 3, 2011

Coming at the end of our most successful fishing day in memory, the run out of Naden Harbour into the Pacific was less scary than it would otherwise be.  We knew the boat, having fished about forty hours in it over the last four days with our ace guide, Brian.  But now we were in command.

Brian had moved the sturdy 22′ centre-console workboat around to the outside of the boathouse at the Queen Charlotte Lodge on the pretext of adding fuel.  I think he wanted to avoid complicated maneuvers among the other boats.  There’s no sense in embarrassing guests.

Tony backed it out smoothly, then jounced me around the swells until I came back to stand beside the console and hang on.  Railings on the boat are well-designed for this purpose, but if you think gloves for fishing in June is a dumb idea, take note:  the gloves are for hanging onto metal railings on the boats as they leap over swells.  The water’s 48 degrees and the wind chill is pretty cool, as you are moving about 25 mph, and it’s often 12 miles to a fishing spot.  That’s the role of the gloves.

We had our usual arguments about where to fish – a process which amazes observers in that the only place we can agree upon at that time often produces good results.

We worked our way along the coast to the west of Naden Harbour, until the spot known as Bird Rock II looked about right.  An afternoon swell had come up, so the boat took some controlling.  Tony set the downriggers.  He must have watched Brian more carefully than I had, as he operated them smoothly at first try, remembering that the left one had to be handled differently than the right, something about the automatic switch.

He also cut the herring bait with confidence, even mimicking Brian’s characteristic flick of the egg sac behind the boat with the tip of the knife.  The 10’ mooching rods with their long leaders were a real handful for an inexperienced crew.  Nevertheless, Tony got the baited line onto the clip next to the cannon ball and let the port line down, then started in on the identical process with the starboard rod while I tended the helm.

Fortunately we have combined many hours of practice with downriggers, so nothing tangled, broke, or fell overboard.  Then we found ourselves trolling into the breeze, with no idea if this would work.  Was the bait cut correctly?  How quickly must I troll?

As we watched, our travelling companions, professional river guides Dean and Chris, hit onto a massive Chinook.  For the next while it was chaos on their boat, but Dean managed at length to boat, photograph and release the fish while Chris kept the vessel out of trouble in the rip tide.  They had their four Chinook each already.

No strikes so far.  Salmon don’t seem to volunteer.  I failed to avoid tangling with a chunk of kelp, so up came one line.  Tony handled it like an out-of-practice veteran, not a newbie.  Several more repetitions of the kelp removal process and we decided to fish a little further from the weeds.

Then Tony suddenly whipped the starboard rod off the holder and set the hook on a decent Chinook.  The thing took off like a tugboat, leaving Tony a bit shaken by its power.  It turned downwind of the boat.  I got the downriggers up and the other line in.  There would be no trying for a double on this initial fight.  The fish sounded, then tried to pass under the boat.  This made Tony a little frantic.  To say the shift lever on the 115 Mercury outboard was a little balky would be an understatement.  The boat’s lurches while moving out of the fish’s way did nothing for Tony’s aplomb.  Eventually I figured out that if the boat were sitting downwind of the fish it would drift away from trouble and Tony could then play it at his leisure, rather than engaging in a pitched battle on the last thirty feet of line over access to the boat prop.

The fish was still pulling like a freighter.  I glanced down through the clear water and found the reason:  it was lightly hooked on a belly fin.  Imagine if you were going to mount a trailer hitch on a salmon to give it the ability to exert maximum pull.  That’s where Tony had set the hook.   There would be no leading this fish to the boat:  it would have to dragged in by main force.

By this point Tony was whining about sore arms and he was staggering around the boat a bit, but he persevered.

The fish wasn’t enjoying the battle either, so it came to me to boat the thing with this ten-foot landing net which had been lying around underfoot.  As usual I had been preoccupied with reeling when Brian landed my fish and running a camera when Tony had the occasional salmon on.  So I didn’t know how to use the big net.  Fortunately Tony was forthcoming with instructions:  “Don’t stab it!  Get the net into the water.  Now reverse it:  the net has turned inside out.  Hold the end out of the water.  Don’t stab it!  Now put it in front of his head and I’ll pull it in.”  The fish had other ideas, but the line held.  Next time the chinook had run out of luck and I captured it in the net, then we lifted it into the boat.  Tony took a little break to get his breath back and I dug out the camera.

The fish went back into the Pacific in fine condition.  I must say that this was the prettiest salmon we landed on this trip, and certainly the most memorable.  We were happy enough to head back to dinner at the lodge after this single fish.  We had proven our point.

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The final adventure with the red 4X6 trailer

June 29, 2011

See UPDATE at the end of the article.

Rod

The new tandem trailer was still loaded with plywood from the previous day’s shopping expedition when I realized that we would need shingles for Garage #2 before the weekend was out.  Off I went to Smiths Falls with a list and the old 4X6 trailer.  It was rusty, but the tires held air and the lights worked.

My estimate of 26 bundles of shingles was pushing its weight capacity.  The guy at the counter at Rideau Lumber explained that I would run short unless I added enough for cutting, so the order went up to 30 bundles of the textured, architectural shingles.  “But you won’t use architecturals across the top of the roof to form a cap.  You’ll need at least two bundles of regular three-tab shingles to cut up for the top.”  Turns out we used 25 bundles of architectural shingles, and one bundle for across the top.  Had I stuck to my own estimate, this sorry tale might not have occurred.

But I listened to expert advice and the load on the pallet grew pretty tall before they set it onto the trailer.  The tires took the load well, to the surprise of the lift truck operator.

Away I went through the maze of streets in downtown Smiths Falls in search of Hwy 15.  Everything worked fine until I turned off the bridge at the Combined Lock.  Then suddenly I heard the sound I like the least when towing, a high-pitched screeching, accompanied by billowing clouds of white smoke:  the death throes of a tire.  I ducked out of the traffic and had a look.  The right wheel was tilted so that it was rubbing on the box of the trailer, producing considerable friction.

Still less than a mile from Rideau Lumber, I thought I might be able to limp back across the river and through the park to the yard and have them transfer the shingles to a truck for normal delivery.  Off I went, trailing a major cloud of strangely white smoke.   Cars went to some lengths to avoid the cloud in the heavy traffic, but I persevered.

The load was within two blocks of the Rideau Lumber yard when the tire finally let go with a muffled bang.  Rolling became very difficult after that, as the flat tire soon shredded off and despite my slow, deliberate pace, the wheel started to dig a furrow through the pristine asphalt of the quiet residential street.  This was unlikely to go over well with the residents of the neighbourhood, and I was stopped right outside Walter Cecchini’s house.  Years ago Wally was a colleague at Smiths Falls Collegiate, and his favourite wisecrack about me was, “I never liked him!”  Now unless I was careful he’d have some justification for that prophetic comment.

So I phoned Rideau Lumber to ask if they would send their lift truck to undo the burden which had broken my trailer’s back.  A look underneath revealed that, weakened by rust, the axle had snapped off when negotiating the corner.  Mike told me that they couldn’t take the lift truck off the lot because of insurance requirements, but he would see if they could send the boom truck.

Before long a new SUV stopped.  Arnold Mosher got out to look.  Arnold operates the pride of the Rideau Lumber fleet, the boom truck.  He eventually decided the job was feasible, so he came back with the huge rig while I directed traffic.

I love to watch Arnold operate his boom.  He has this wireless, waist-mounted console on a belt with which he controls the thing, so Arnold and the truck perform this ballet during which they move heavy objects and avoid each other and trees, wires, and vehicles.  If you enjoyed the Transformers movies, you’ll get a big kick out of having Arnold deliver a pallet of shingles or a lift of 2X4’s to your project site.

Scott Fleming, my former student and the owner of Rideau Lumber, drifted quietly by in his pickup truck, keeping an eye on things.

The shingles were no problem.  Arnold lifted the pallet off my severely tilted trailer and placed it fairly far back on the bed.  “Think there’d be room for the trailer up there, as well?”

Arnold nodded to the space at the front.  “I can strap it on there if you like.”

So that’s how the red 4X6 trailer made the final trip back to the farm with its load.

UPDATE:

The concluding sentence above makes a fine, sentimental farewell to a beloved tool, but the truth is somewhat in abeyance with this story.

In fact, the wrecked trailer lay in the yard for a month or so until Princess Auto had a sale on axles and wheels. Then for about $300 and a couple of hours of work I had the trailer back on the road, somewhat battered, but seemingly capable of carrying 1 cubic yard of gravel home from the quarry yet again.

It was just too good a trailer to lose and I couldn’t find a suitable replacement, regardless of price, on the new or used market. So far it has hauled two heaping loads of gravel from the quarry for various jobs around the property and is fixing to do more. In between it carried a set of 10′ garage door hardware from Kingston and a load of lumber from Smiths Falls lashed to the top of the box while the tandem trailer sat under a ton and a half of drywall.

So I guess it’s made a round trip to trailer Heaven.

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Fishing the shear tide with Brian Clive

June 24, 2011

At Naden Harbour the water’s about 48 degrees at this time of year.  Salmon migrate away if it rises above 55 degrees.

Thursday dawned clear and calm, the start of an extraordinary day at the Queen Charlotte Lodge fishing ground.

Guides and guests pay close attention to a running total of the fish brought in for processing, as this fish is flash frozen, packed up and shipped on the plane with us back to Vancouver.  Everybody wants to load as much salmon and halibut as possible into his package.  Four Chinook, four coho, two halibut are the mainstays.  The various less desirable groundfish include rock cod and lingcod.

Chinook are both the most desirable and the most abundant species available at this time.  Cohos are smaller, more delicate, and much harder to find.  By the last day Tony had two coho on his list, but I had caught only Chinooks.  It had made me feel a little strange over our first three days of fishing to watch Brian release 17 and 18 pound salmon as casually as I would slip a 14” bass back into the water.

Then I hooked a 26 pounder.  There seems to be a tipping point with salmon where the energy of the fish suddenly doubles.  The 22 pounder the day before was a magnificent fish, but the 26 pounder wore me right out.  It ran, sounded, shook the line until my biceps ached, then headed for bottom several more times.  While I haven’t caught one yet, I’m told the sheer power of a fish of tyee size, 30 pounds, reverberates in every muscle and tendon of the angler’s body after the fight is over.

But this day we needed cohos and the sea was calm, so Brian took us out about two miles offshore.  Hauling in large salmon is great sport and excellent tourism, but time spent with a knowledgeable instructor and a square mile of water is to open a world of wonder.

We were running slowly along in the boat when Brian suddenly perked up and pointed down into the water.  It was littered with tiny, iridescent spots.  “Scales.  Birds have been feeding on a baitball here.”

“Plankton is the basis of all of the life in the water.  It’s fragile and the wind  beats up the organisms close to the top of the water column and reduces the food supply.  But when a calm day comes like this, the sun produces an almost instant bloom.  This turns on all of the other life forms to feed on the plankton, so the bait fish, the birds, the salmon, all become active.”

There we were out there with nothing around us but water.  And birds, a lot of birds.  And apparently a river, because on the calm sea a stream came flowing by us like a sharply-defined river in the middle of nowhere.  It carried pieces of kelp broken off from the beds on shore, as well as enough algae on the suface to make it easy to see.

The birds, helldivers and gulls, congregated in great numbers around shoals of needlefish forced to the surface by the helldivers.  Brian called them baitballs.  The gulls could swoop in and grab mouthfuls of the tiny fish, they were that tightly packed at the top of the water.  “Of course a humpback whale will eat the whole ball.”  The feeding frenzy continued for several minutes until the birds gradually filled up, drifted away, and the baitfish were allowed to disperse.

So at 10:00 Thursday morning we set the downriggers for coho after hauling in Chinooks near shore for four hours.  “Coho are hard to find, but we’ll try out here for a while.”  Before long my rod twitched, so I ran through the routine Brian had drilled into me over many lost fish:  “Lift the rod off the holder.  Tip it over so the reel is down.  Reel in to the clip on the downrigger.  Feel the fish?  Jerk it off the clip.  Reel up to the fish until you feel it.  Set the hook! Still there?  Let him run.  Bring back line when you can.  Hold your right hand on the bottom of the reel to control the drag.  When your left hand tells you, let him have line.  When you can get line back, pump with the left, reel with the right.  When the fish comes near the boat, don’t worry about that.  Just play the fish.  The guide will get the lines and the downriggers out of the way and move the boat so that the fish doesn’t foul the motor.”

Brian expertly predicted each fish’s moves.  His coaching and seamanship were vital to our fishing success over the 11-hour days of the trip.  My part?  Once a fish was hooked, I didn’t lose it.  Getting to that stage was hard for me, though.  The unfamiliar mooching rod looks like a fly rod, and that turn-the-reel-over stage kept confusing me at a critical time.  But after enough repetitions muscle memory took over.  By the fourth and final day I found I could whip the rod out of the holder, flip it over, wind-wind-wind, flip the line off the clip, chase the fish down with the reel, then stretch its neck with a strong, smooth hook-set motion.

Brian commented when I set the hook on the first Coho:  “I’m surprised it can still swim.  I thought that hook-set would have fractured its neck.”  The eight-pound coho surged to the surface where it ran and rolled on top.  Brian told Tony and me that Chinooks will use the whole water column it a fight, often diving straight down 100’ or more.  “Cohos take to the surface when hooked, often jumping behind the boat before you can get the line off the downrigger clip.”

But that was our last coho of the day.  We couldn’t keep the blasted Chinooks off the hook.  Today the things were everywhere, and we were treated to the spectacle of fighting 16-26 pound fish in water so clear we could see every iridescent scale when the fish turned thirty feet below the boat.  When we brought them to the boat, Brian would reach down with the gaff and gently slide the unbarbed hook out, and away would go the fish.

But this is the land of the midnight sun.  We brought Brian back in at 4:30 to look after the fish and to give Tony and me a chance to do what we had been itching to try:  catch a salmon on a downrigger on our own.

Stay tuned for the next part of the saga.

 

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The Orca

June 22, 2011

The orca raised a tall black dorsal fin and followed the salmon in towards Bird Rock where about a dozen boats were fishing.  One guy had a salmon on and you could tell the orca could hear it, but he passed in the wrong direction and came towards our boat.  The fisherman hastily hauled his salmon out of the water.

The creature surfaced close to our boat, opening a big hole in the water, then he slid out of sight for a few minutes, to appear a hundred yards away on his side with a slashing motion which left one pectoral fin high in the air.  Brian, our guide, said that that slashing motion with his head is how the orca kills salmon, though he can’t understand how they catch them.

It wasn’t that the orca wasn’t aware of our presence.  He had sought out the concentration of fishing boats and salmon coming in to feed on the tide, and he acted utterly fearless around man.  I realized that for the first time in my experience I wasn’t the top predator in this environment.

I had asked Brian if I could see some whales yesterday.  A half-hour later he pointed out a humpback whale about a mile away.  Another rose.  “I think there are four or five in that group.”  Surely enough, they were soon all around us, though they kept their distance as we jigged for halibut.

Ten minutes before he appeared I’d asked Brian if we would see a killer whale.  Then this one appeared.  But the orca was different than the humpbacks.  He sought us out.  Brian told us he’d done the same thing on Sunday, taking a salmon from a bemused fisherman.  This time he came into 50’ of water, right near shore.  No wonder people worship these creatures.

After the orca left Tony and I hit into our first double, with a pair of chinooks knocking the lines off the downriggers at the same time.  We released the fifteen and seventeen pound fish to keep room on our limit for “better” fish.  I was a bit skeptical about this, but deferred to Brian’s opinion.  He hasn’t been wrong so far.

Then I hit a good one.  I’d landed a 23 pound Chinook the first day, and this fish looked to be the same size, but it had easily twice the strength, energy, and endurance.  Things got quite busy at Bird Rock as Brian and Tony tried to keep lines and cables out of the “wanna-be-tyee’s” way.  I had thought the tyee title for a 30 lb. or heavier fish was just tourism.  Now I wasn’t so sure.  The fight went on and on, but the fish tired first – most likely because of the superb mooching rod on which I was playing him.

This fish wasn’t much heavier than the one on Monday, but it was in another order of magnitude for sport.  I could now see what Brian meant by “waiting for a better fish.”

Then we ran out to 184’ and dropped herring to the bottom to fish for halibut.  Brian clearly dislikes bottom fishing, but allowed Tony and me one each to fill our limits.

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An innocent abroad in British Columbia

June 19, 2011

Mallards are unsentimental creatures.  The flock through which I had to wade to get to the Pacific couldn’t care less about hygiene, so my first mouthful of salt water had a rather feathery backtaste.  Where did this custom come from, anyway?  This proved just the first of several initiation pranks my vacation destination held in store for me.

In planning this west-coast expedition Tony included a day for a tour of Vancouver.  First up was his favourite spot, Deep Harbour.  I had to agree with him on this choice,  for this calm harbour has to be one of the most beautiful places on earth.  The trees, the plantings, the floating marina in mid-bay, all combine to make the place perfect for the photographer.  Tony took me to the memorial bench the family have established to commemorate the fondness his father, mother, and uncle had for this spot.

We also had to try Trolls, his favourite fish-and-chips restaurant in Horseshoe Bay.  The double portions of halibut were delicious.  From the elevated dock across the street I spotted two young men weighing live prawn, so I made a death-defying descent down a long ramp (low tide, eh?) and relieved the fishermen of a kilo of live shrimp.  The guy dumped them into a bag which they promptly made into a net with repeated puncture wounds from legs and spines.

The next lesson the west coast offered: no impulse buy goes unpunished.  Tony reminded me that we had to complete our tour and get the prawn home in the back of a borrowed Cadillac without getting prawn-scent on the upholstery.  Off we went shopping until we had come up with a bag of ice and a Styrofoam cooler.  Turns out the Caddy has a cargo net in the trunk which might have been designed in answer to this question.  It held the cooler in place and no upholstery was injured in the making of this column.

Today I discovered what it’s like to fish on a river which flows at a minimum of twelve miles per hour.  Dean Werk owns Great River Fishing Adventures.  He took Tony’s sister Sharon and niece Amy with us in his Customweld jet-driven riverboat.  Powered by a 6.2 litre supercharged GM engine, the thing felt as if it could out-accelerate a 737 up to fifty miles per hour.

The first time Tony sent me a picture of a sturgeon he had caught with Dean, I accused him of photo-shopping the shot as a prank.  There was no way he could casually hold a 150 pound fish in his arms in the water like that.  He decided that at first opportunity he’d get his own back by watching me deal with a beast which tried to tear my arms out of their sockets on a strong and unpredictable run.

And unpredictable the sturgeon proved to be this day.  While eight of them picked up the baits tethered to the bottom by lead weights behind the boat, none took the hook.  But they weren’t especially shy.  Several did noisy rolls on the surface and one monster blasted out of the water right at the stern of the boat.  I bit my tongue out of tact.  It was Tony who muttered:  “We gotta get a bigger boat” in tribute to the Jaws moment.  Nine hours later when we were too numb from the cold to care, another jumped so close to the bow of the boat that it almost landed in the chain locker.

But the day was in other ways quite a success.  The Fraser River provides the photographer a wonderful look at the mountains which surround it.  These aren’t hills:  they’re the real deal, mountains.  Even though they are covered with inviting green foliage, everyone I asked agreed that you couldn’t climb one.  The vegetation is too dense to move through it for any distance.  It’s a jungle on a 45 degree angle.

I easily confirmed this estimate of one mountain’s slope just by looking out the window.  It was easy to trace the mountain’s line diagonally across a square window panel.

The first thing I had done upon awakening on my first day in this time zone had been to go outside and hug a tree.  This turned into a very interesting session, squishing around in the rain among the towering cedar trees on the property.  Cedars here look very much like eastern white cedars in Leeds County, except that these western variants have had long, wet seasons and no frost to inhibit their growth.

I noticed fewer species here than at home, but they grow in rich profusion.  Wild blackberries, for example, are so successful here that highway departments have hired brush-cutting machines to clear the roadsides of the thorny fruit-bearers.  Too many berry pickers have come to grief by falling from cliff faces onto busy driving lanes, or parking unwisely on tortuous mountain roads.

But the evergreens rule in B.C.  They’re huge, tall and straight.  They dominate the landscape and comfort and enrich its inhabitants.

Tomorrow we’re off to Masset by 737, then over to the Queen Charlotte Lodge by helicopter for five days of salmon fishing.

Posted by rodcros
Filed in British Columbia Adventure, fish stories
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First B.C. tree hug

June 18, 2011

9:30 a.m. EDT, 6:30 PMT

The first impression is of great lushness and a limited variety of species growing in profusion out of a loose, petey soil.  Each massive cedar tree has a dark, sheltered circle under it of about 30’ in diameter where the soil is very soft.  It’s nice in the still darkness, out of the rain.  Outside the cedars’ canopies, ferns grow in great profusion.  My next impression is that a large bear could be very close and one wouldn’t see it.  Scent would probably be the best way to detect it.  I can see why people wear bells on their knapsacks and carry pepper spray.

Faced with the challenge of planning wardrobe for my first walk into the unknown, I gravitated to the extreme end of the clothes I packed, with a large all-weather rain parka and hood.  The hood came off right away:  it blocked vision without keeping the rain off my glasses.  Next came the Souwester.  Glasses went into a pocket.

Regrets that I left my rubber boots at home.  They’d be perfect.  Topsiders don’t provide the grip on the soft soil and slopes.  A slip and I came back in to switch to hiking boots, wet or no wet, and sample the coffee.

Overall, the view from the guest-house in Abbotsford is one of green and gray, and striking beauty.  The Fraser River flows strongly to the left.  It’s about a mile wide, and fifty feet from my feet.  The trees tower over the house.  I don’t know what they are.  They have leaves like the eastern white cedar, but flatter, longer, and huge.  They grow in such profusion that the trunks grow together and apart, shooting off branches everywhere, creating the overall monolithic appearance of the triangular shape you see in pictures.  Only where the branches have been trimmed back do you get the tall, straight, hydro-pole shape.

I like the old-growth profusion much better.  Weeping willows don’t get much of a chance in this cover, and are reduced to shrub status, covered with a strange moss on persistent branches.  A flowering shrub on the driveway is rampant with large red flowers.  Don’t have a clue what it is, but it’s very nice in a rain-forest sort of way.

The guest-house is low and rambling with a lower story I haven’t explored yet.  Large windows don’t open.  Patio doors provide the ventilation.   No flow-through ventilation seems to be needed, and not much effort has gone into to energy efficiency in the design.  It seems to be a gentle, lush climate.  Considerable effort has gone into the design of rain gutters and drainage around the garage, however.  It must rain a lot.

The exterior’s designed with rot resistance in mind.  Concrete and aluminum, cedar siding which has either been replaced recently or weathered very well.

It’s just sprinkling, with virtually no wind, but as I watch everything is soaking wet.

First priority for shopping today will be the purchase of rubber boots.

As I sit here in the dining room overlooking the river, the wool shirt and jeans seem way too hot.  Time to get outside again.

Posted by rodcros
Filed in British Columbia Adventure
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Shirt or sweater? shorts or jeans?

June 12, 2011

As I write this it’s a very cool 18 Celsius in Forfar.  On Graham Island, halfway up the British Columbia coast, it’s 13 and raining.  In Abbotsford on the Fraser River, it’s 21.

My problem seems trivial to everyone I ask, but it’s important to me:  what clothes will I need to be comfortable while out of doors in British Columbia next week?  The trip involves a day of sturgeon fishing on the Fraser River, and the rest of the week will entail a series of day expeditions in a small boat trolling for salmon in the Haida Gwaii, the official name for the Queen Charlotte Islands.

In a conversation this spring, local attorney Allison Crowe explained that when her father went salmon fishing in that area, his Tilley hat was coveted by everyone as protection from the glaring sun.  Based upon my reading of weather reports for the northern coast of B.C., mentioning that glaring sun seems rather like my mentioning to visitors the tornadoes that hit the Little Rideau each year on the first night after our boat cleared the lock at the Narrows, three years in a row.  Those three freak tornadoes in May or June of ’82, ’83 and ’84 do not make Rideau Lakes Township another tornado alley, though it seemed that way at the time.  Similarly, I think it would be unwise to expect a lot of sunlight on the water off Graham Island.

But the guy I asked at Princess Auto told me that when he was up there fishing in early July a couple of years ago, they wore T-shirts.

Mindful of my teenage experience as a box boy at Genge’s Red and White where I actually saw skis and snowshoes in the trunks of New Jersey cars coming for summer vacation, I looked for better evidence.  The Queen Charlotte Lodge, our destination, maintains a dated online gallery.

June 19th photos have the captors of large salmon arrayed in flannel shirts under sweatshirts, tucked into waterproof overalls.  One Japanese man of about my age showed long underwear at the neck, as well. From the photo archive it looks pretty cold there in early summer if you are out on the ocean.

Apart from my utter lack of experience at packing, the catch is the 25 lb. limit on luggage for the helicopter ride to the resort.  Resort management explains in the information package that they provide lockers at the airport for guest’s surplus belongings, but: “We will help you repack your luggage until the weight is down to under 25 lb.”  The document further asks for my sizes for outer garments and boots which they will assign from their stores at the lodge.

My host Tony doesn’t want to be bothered with questions about clothing.  But he’s a Scotsman, one of a line of sturdy men and women famed for their tolerance for lousy weather.  Tony ignores my pleas to buy a winter snowmobile suit and tries to ice fish in light ski attire. Then he complains, “Your Ranger is too damned cold.  It needs a cab and a windshield.”

I’ve explained to him until I’m blue in the face that, unlike his life in various air conditioned rooms and vehicles, Bet and I spend most of our time outside.  The coat rack for our activities covers a ten-foot wall.  Neither Bet nor I would consider facing the day without at least three sets of outdoor footwear with which to match climatic conditions.  There are even four pairs of rubber boots inside the front door for guests.

Do you see my problem?  I need it all, but I can’t take a coat rack on a 737.  Do I pack shorts or jeans? t-shirts or sweaters?  Do I take along the large waterproof parka Bet and Charlie bought me or leave it and pack my laptop?  (No.  I’m taking the laptop.)

In two weeks I will know a lot more about this subject.  More likely by then I also will find it too trivial to mention.  But for the moment it fills my mind.

Posted by rodcros
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