Death To The Angling Doomscroll
Words by Greg Thomas
If you want to render all your time outdoors as seemingly insignificant, just climb aboard that social media doom-scrolling train and study all those giant fish pics.
It doesn’t matter how many great fish you’ve caught in your life, or how many awesome experiences you’ve shared with family and friends, you will end up feeling diminished, as if everyone else is living the dream and, well, you’re not. Sociologists know this phenomenon. Parents should know this. Our sons and daughters certainly know this. All of us know it. But, admittedly, social media is a bullet train that’s hard to jump off.
I was doom-scrolling the other night, starting to feel like I’ve missed out in life. But, for some reason, I glanced at the calendar and thought, Oh, late June. Chinook and early steelhead time on British Columbia’s Dean River. I grabbed one of my hard drives, scrolled through a collection of Dean River images, and suddenly thought better about the world, better about my myself, better about everything.
The author with a meaty Dean River chinook.
A large, wild, and chrome Dean River steelhead.
I’ve visited the Dean several times, seizing opportunities to throw for massive chinook salmon and early run steelhead, prior to and over the Fourth of July weekend, just as the season’s first waves of anadromous fish arrive.
Many seasoned anglers say the Dean offers the world’s ultimate steelhead experience and I might agree: the river carves through British Columbia’s rugged and beautiful coastal mountains; its steelhead are often large; they crush sunken and skated flies; and those fish come in on the tides in late June, chrome bright, carrying sea lice, and often hell bent on getting back to the saltwater when hooked. I’ve always thought, When you hook a steelhead on the Dean, it feels like that fish was already headed downstream, at full speed, when it took the fly. When you receive your BC fishing license and Dean River catch-card, they should come with this warning: knuckles beware.
When I got into the two-handed game in the 1990s, the Dean was at the top of my hitlist. I petitioned several lodges and tourism organizations hoping they would “host” me on a trip to that legendary river. For several years the answer, if I got one, was no. Then one year, while speaking at a sportsman’s show in Sacramento, California, I met Geoff Moore, an avid angler who worked for British Columbia’s Cariboo-Chilcotin Tourism Association. We traded fish stories and enjoyed each other’s company and then, ironically, found ourselves on the same flight from Sac to Seattle. During that flight I posed the question: Ya know, if you ever need someone to cover the Dean . . . . A few weeks later Moore called and said, “I have some good news, and I have some bad news. Which do you want first?”
I said, “Give me the good news.”
Moore said, “Ok, here’s the good news. You’re going to the Dean. The bad news is, after seven days in heaven you’re going home.”
The reason we travel to the Dean River: Wild Steelhead.
By the end the third day on the Dean I had 13 gorgeous wild steelhead to the beach and was starting to look for a cave, somewhere to hide out for the summer and sneak down to the river whenever I could. I’d landed in Shangri-La and seven days felt like a hundred too few. In the end, I flew away from the Promised Land considering how fortunate I’d been while already scheming ways to return.
And I did get back, a couple times, specifically targeting the river’s chinook salmon and its first wave of steelhead. Those early steelhead, by the way, are some of the largest the river offers and over the course of those trips I caught several weighing nearly 20 pounds. I never landed any of the river’s larger chinook, but a 15 to 20-pounder on the Dean is the equivalent of a 30-pounder anywhere else. I caught several in the 15-to 25-pound range, carrying sea lice and bad attitudes, all hooked less than a mile from the salt, all nearly unlandable. Dean River chinook are different, built short and stalky to navigate the Dean’s massive canyon flows. True bullets. Still, each year someone lands a 40-pounder on the fly and you just have to wonder, “How?”
When you find sea-lice on Dean River steelhead count on two things: you are not far from the salt and that fish fought like no other.
On one of those trips I was fishing with the Canadian spey guru and noted author Dana Sturn. He hooked into a chinook and fought it for a half-hour before telling his guide, “I’m not blaming you or me for what’s going to happen.” And it did happen: The hook finally twisted free at the 40-minute mark, Sturn and his guide never having seen the fish. Those are the ones that make you wonder. Fifty pounds? Sixty? They do exist.
While scrolling through that hard drive the other night I looked at photos of grizzly bears wandering the banks of the Dean, blacktail deer slinking through the bush, friends hoisting salmon and steelhead so chrome-bright and perfect they seemed delivered from god. I looked at the smiles on my friends’ faces, the beers and whiskeys in-hand, and remembered the jokes and the laughing, the impromptu fly-tying sessions, and the rides to and from the water in an old Ford pickup truck with a cassette tape stuck in the stereo, playing the same songs over and over and over . . . as it had for several years. Thank god Free Bird wasn’t one of those tracks. I also remember the food and the drink, the Fourth of July bonfires, and the grizzlies charging up the bank towards me, unaware of my presence but, still . . . charging up the bank towards me! I remembered two giant steelhead rising to my skater in a single run one morning, and also the horsefly armadas attacking en masse each time the wind died and the temperature rose. I remembered flying from Bella Coola to the Dean, the pilot landing on a glacier at the halfway mark, allowing us to chip thousand year old ice off that blue behemoth and cool our in-flight cocktails.
Those were good days. Good weeks. Good fish. Great friends. And nothing takes that away. Not even doomscrolling in the wee hours. This is your cue to consider how fortunate you’ve probably been in your angling career. You may see photos of bigger fish, wonder how people have time to throw every darn day, all over the world, and you may become a bit jealous of those fortunate few. But they can’t touch your memories, nor the fish that arrived in your net. We own our memories, our precise times and places on the water, and nothing can diminish those . . . if we take the time, if we slow down, if we pause and revisit our triumphs . . . at least every once in a while.
