A magic knot or enchanted fly?
I’m coming home to Newfoundland and Labrador tomorrow, just in time for opening day of the 2017 salmon season. I have a few domestic chores to attend to, but I’ll soon be swinging my 10-ft, 7-wt and swimming my Blue Charm tubes for Atlantic salmon.
The highlight of my year is our two-week tenting adventure in the “Big Land.”i wouldn’t give that up for a stint on the French Riviera, in the most luxurious beach hotel. You will hear more on this later in the summer. We do our own blackened salmon.
I think we salmon anglers don’t quite appreciate how lucky we are to live in Newfoundland and Labrador. By being residents of this fair land we have the right to fish without charge in more than 200 waterways that are home to the absolute king of freshwater game fish. When I say without charge I mean that there is no daily fee for rod time on the river. We do have to buy a yearly licence, but that’s got to be planet Earth’s best angling deal. There are not many countries that allow free access to Atlantic salmon fishing for even their own citizens.
In Newfoundland and Labrador we force visitors to hire a guide so it’s not free for those angling tourists. And they have to pay more than us for the yearly licence. As I said a few weeks ago, finding guides can be a problem for tourists wandering around our province. I’ve heard from quite a few anglers who have cancelled trips to N.L. because of the guide requirement. They have e-mailed me. I think we are losing out here, and should take action to fix this. I think we should drop the mandatory guide business and charge tourists for the time they spend fishing. That’s what they do in nearly all the Atlantic salmon angling jurisdictions. And if folks figure they need a guide they will hire one, maybe leading to more employment and expanded adventure tourism in the long run.
Some will say that too many angling travellers will ruin the fishing for us locals. Actually, people have said this to me in response to me advocating for more flexible rules for non-residents. If crowding is a problem, it’s a simple matter of restricting the number of nonresidents on a river per day. I fished in Norway last summer and that’s how they do it. On the Kongsfjord River in the Finnmark region they allow 20 anglers per day on a section of river about five miles long. That’s pretty comfortable, not crowded fishing. Actually, you can book a package deal, a small cabin that sleeps four and five days on the river for a flat rate. They are booked up. We are looking for an opening for 2018.
I’ll leave river management alone for now and tell you a salmon yarn. I recalled this one this very morning when I was showing my Florida fishing buddy Barry, a few salmon fishing knots. Barry is an old salt and he’s going to Alaska later this summer to fish the fresh rivers for a few weeks. So I’m demonstrating how to attach a salmon fly and this long-ago episode on the Gander River popped clearly into my brain. It was July 1982 and a week before Goldie and I got married.
My longtime friend Paul Drover, my cousin Boyd Winsor and I drove to Glenwood on the shore of Gander Lake, right where the Gander River feeds from the big lake. Boyd had his van rigged for camping and we bunked down for the night with a few drinks of rum to lull us to sleep. The next morning we awoke early, ate breakfast outside, and prepared our bags, rods, and gear for a few days on the river. My father’s friend from Glenwood had arranged it all for us, essentially, a guy with a river boat and a cabin who was off work for a few weeks and agreed to take a few hombres from the Avalon Peninsula fishing on one of Central Newfoundland’s finest rivers.
Back to knots, and how I learned the timeless Turle Knot, or as some folks say, Turtle Knot. Our Gander River expert guide ferried us to his cabin and unloaded all our stuff. We had a quick lunch and started fishing. I went out with the guide to fish from the boat. I wish I could remember his name. He anchored the Gander River Boat above a nice ripple and I started swinging my fur-and-feather offering just like I’d been doing since I was a wee boy of just seven tender years. I kept seeing salmon but none broke the surface to bite my fly.
From his seat in the stern our guide shouted out, “You have your fly tied on wrong.” “OK”, says I. I flicked my line to him and he tied on a Gander River style Butterfly using what he figured the right knot for the circumstances. I made a few casts and caught a salmon. Later I snagged another. I was sold on his knot fly combo. I went home happy as a lark and got married.
Thinking back on that day so long ago, I’m not really sure what provoked the salmon to strike. Was it a magic knot or enchanted fly? The guide didn’t know the name of the knot but he later showed me how to tie it and I never forget a knot. Later I learned it was a Turle knot, very popular in the fly fishing world. I won’t give you specific instructions here because it is easier for you just to watch a video on the Internet. It may have been the fly, the knot or a pure coincidence, but for certain a fly swims different on a Turle. To this day I still use it quite often, but not exclusively. Nothing works all the time and everything works sometimes. That’s why fishing is so interesting and fun.
Try the magic knot and tell me about what happens.