For quite some time now, I have been planning a trip to Vancouver Island to fish the Stamp for winter steelhead. Now that the Central Okanagan school district I work for has a two-week Spring Break, I seized the opportunity, loaded up the family and made the drive to Qualicum Beach, where my wife and kids would be entertained and I could slip out for a couple of days to fish guilt free!
I decided to bite the bullet and hire a guide for my first trip to the Stamp for winter steelhead and I am sure glad I did. It was money well spent. My cousin Marla married Chris, a steelhead junkie from Northern California, and they moved to Nanaimo a few years back. I invited him to come along. Between him and the guide, Bladen (one of Nick Hennyj’s boys), I received a first rate education in steelheading. I was actually overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge these two guys have and as I sit here back home and reflect on the entire experience, it is difficult to remember it all but I’ll give it a go.
We arrived in Qualicum on Saturday and since I had to wait until the following Thursday for the big guided trip, I decided to make the drive over the hump to Port Alberni on Sunday afternoon to explore the river on foot and do some float fishing from the bank. I parked the truck at a nice camping spot right on the river in the Stamp River Falls Provincial Park and hiked down to the pool below the falls.
I fished for a couple of hours there with no success. The fellow next to me bonked a beautiful 15-pound hatchery buck for his barbeque dinner that night. The pool there is very deep so I tried drift fishing it without a float and just before 4:00 pm, I had a fish on for a brief moment but lost it. I walked back to the campground and fished a couple more hours with nothing too exciting happening so I decided to head back to Qualicum. I called my cousin Chris that night and we finalized our plans for the guided trip on Thursday.
On Thursday, Chris picked me up and we drove to Port Alberni. Our guide Bladen met us at the marina for the drive up river. On the drive up, we listened to Lemmy from Motorhead sing the lyrics “The Chase is Better Than the Catch.” I don’t know about you folks, but this song set the stage perfectly for a day of slaying steel. We arrived at our put-in at the Robertson Creek Hatchery on the upper river. What a great facility! Kudos to the staff there and the people who have contributed to the hatchery’s success. Without it, the sportfishing community would definitely be hurting.
We put the Willie drift boat in just below the hatchery and drifted down to the confluence of the Ash and Stamp Rivers. We saw quite a few fish as we drifted downstream which was obviously a good sign. At the first run below the Ash, Bladen suggested we back troll some plugs. I tied on a green metallic Hot Shot 30 (aka The Green Manaleeshi with the One Pronged Crown) and Chris went with the same in metallic blue. For the plug fishing, I was using a standard Calcutta bait caster reel and 11-foot rod but Chris, always looking for ways to make things more interesting, was using a small bait caster reel attached to a six-foot trout rod rated for 4 to 6 pound test. It didn’t take long for my first fish of the trip to slam the plug, and slam it hard he did. After a short, aggressive battle, I quickly lifted the fish out of the water for a photo and gently released it. In the next run, Bladen pointed to a fish hugging the bank and suggested throwing a pink Marabou jig at it. For this I switched to my Abu Garcia Cardinal spinning reel attached to a 10-foot rod rated for 4 to 12 pounds. The reel is spooled up with 12-pound Maxima Perfexion line. If you have not yet had a chance to cast and then land an aggressive fish on this brand of line with light tackle, you are missing out! I cast the jig slightly upstream and as it floated past the fish’s snout, BANG! FISH ON! 12-pound wild buck gently released. Moving to our next run, Bladen suggested we up the ante. He handed Chris a mooching reel attached to a noodle rod. What???? He said, “try this for a little fun.” Now, Chris is used to his single action center-pin with a left hand retrieve but Bladen thought it would be fun to see Chris land a fish with this outfit and a right hand retrieve. Chris, always up to a challenge, agreed and as he was drifting a Gooey-bob with some wool, a large fish was hooked in the tail-out of the run. After a really, unusually short battle, our largest fish of the day was brought to the boat. As Bladen went to remove the hook, this is where the fun began. The fish went ballistic! He peeled off line, went under the boat, jumped several times and tried his hardest to spit that hook. After 10 minutes, Chris had the fish spent and we were able to remove the hook. Afterwards we couldn’t help think that Bladen did something to that fish to make it so angry when it came to the boat for the first time. Hmmmm.
At Money’s Pool, we again tried jigs, Gooey-bobs with wool and even Jensen Eggs and puffballs/fish pills tied up in a spawn sac. After I “farmed” a couple of fish (losing them for whatever reason), we went back to the plugs and again Chris and I pounded out a couple more beautiful fish. By this time, we had been fishing for quite some time. I was surprised how much “fishy looking” water there is on this section of the river. From the Ash River confluence to the takeout at the campground, is approximately 8 kilometers and if you were floating without stopping to fish it would not take very long. However, we stopped at as many runs and holes as we could, being mindful of our time. In some places that looked unbelievable, Bladen would say, “Nope. There’s only a 50% chance of getting one here and we need to hit the ones with a higher percentage because we have limited time.” In fact, after fishing a couple of runs below Moneys, we found ourselves running out of daylight and we had to skip several runs in order to fish the runs that Bladen knew were holding fish. As we approached the second to last run, Bladen said, “I’m calling a fish here for sure. But first, let me tell you a story.” This is how it went for the entire day. When I was not picking their brains for steelhead knowledge, or playing a fish, I was laughing my ass off at Chris and Bladen’s stories. Nearing the end of his story, I caught another beauty on the pink jig.
After an hour and a bit without any action, we drifted into the campground, our last run. I was not optimistic, as I had fished here earlier in the week without any luck. The sun was setting, the rain started pounding and the water colored up. It almost looked like a clay bank had collapsed upstream as the visibility was about one foot. Bladen got that look in his eye – PLUG water! Out went the Green Manaleeshi and Chris released the power and the glory of his almighty “Bloody Mary” Tadpolly plug. Bladen jokingly said that “Bloody Mary” was not going to catch anything. Chris just smiled and said that “Bloody Mary” was legendary in Northern California and it was about to lose its virginity in the Stamp. However, it was the Green Manaleesh that got slammed first. BANG! The fish set his own hook (nice thing about trolling plugs) and rocketed out of the water and walked on it’s tail about 50 feet downriver. I jumped up and both Bladen and I started hootin’ and hollering! Fish On! Yaaahooo! Another 10 pound hatchery to the boat and released. 10 minutes later, Chris’ rod tip bent over and he too had fun bringing in another fish! At the end of the day, we had played 12 fish and had 9 to the boat!
The next day, Chris and I decided to hike into some holes on foot. Obviously we could not cover as much water but we had another double-digit day! The trip exceeded my expectations and the memories will no doubt keep me going until I have the privilege off going there again next year. Here's some photos of the trip.
