Sportfishing Along The British Columbia Coast

Brundige Inlet on the north shore of Canada's remote Dundas Island, British Columbia, points northeast toward the unseen border with the United States. Across the passage, low clouds on the horizon should be hanging on the headlands of Alaska's Misty Fjords National Monument. As the 72-foot converted commercial-fishing vessel Ocean Star reaches open water, the captain nudges the throttle up a few hundred revolutions.

"You know, skipper, this operation wouldn't make a very good reality show," I say as he sets our course to round the island's Whitly Point.

The captain smiles and replies, "Oh, you mean not enough arguing and conflict? Well, you haven't seen us between trips, then."

We're on the third day of a four-day, three-night trip in these wilderness waters aboard an eminently seaworthy and very mobile fishing headquarters. At the helm is her converted commercial fisherman owner, Willis Crosby. In 38 years of fishing for market — salmon, herring, halibut, rockfish (you name it, he's caught it, dressed it, iced it, packed it) — Crosby has been up and down all the British Columbia coast. But that's changed; he's turned his restored, even gentrified, wooden working boat to a new line of work. Now Willis Crosby and his family are catering to the sportfishing trade and he's on the last trip of his sixth season operating as Ocean Star Charters.

In the galley below, his wife Gayle is preparing lunch and probably battening down. It could kick up once we round Holiday Island and enter the broad Main Passage at the top of Chatham Sound, where the forecast calls for southeast winds to 20 knots. On the afterdeck, their son Shawn, the chief fishing guide, and mate, Josh Pallister, are breaking out the halibut gear. Shawn's got 15 years of commercial fishing behind him and Josh also grew up in a fishing family. We're "switching over," and that means shifting location after two solid days of the crew keeping the seven guests squarely on coho salmon — and out of the way of humpback whales — in the waters off Dundas. That's the beauty of what I've come to call "mothership fishing" because Ocean Star and her fleet of four aluminum outboard skiffs is a floating lodge that takes you where the fish are. And now that we've all limited on coho salmon, we're off to where the halibut hang out.

So far, Ocean Star Charters is living up to its slogan: Cheena kwan, "lots of fish" in the language of the Haida, the native tribe in this part of British Columbia, and Willis Crosby's heritage. Come to think of it, even without family squabbles and no dialog to bleep out, this kind of fishing could still make great TV. The reality is, this is a smooth-running family operation that falls somewhere between "Deadliest Catch" and National Geographic.

Day One: The Old Man's Hole

We'd left the Prince Rupert Yacht Club dock an hour before noon two days earlier under a soggy sky. Wending a zigzag course through tricky Venn Passage, Ocean Star passed the Tsimshian native village of Metlakatla where our mate Josh had learned to fish when not much taller than the sea boots of his grandfather. By the time we entered Chatham Sound, and set a course toward Dundas Island, we fishing guests were old friends: the father and son team of Ted and Randy Isaacson, with Rick Forster, all from Tennessee; Californian Bob Martin, a longtime friend of Ted; Mike Sommerville with his son Kyle, from Calgary, Alberta; and me.

Steaming north in light rain for four hours brought us to the north side of Dundas, just a few miles from the international border. Once Crosby had tucked Ocean Star well inside long, narrow Brundige Inlet, our leisurely cruising mind-set gave way to serious angler attitude. As the crew loaded the skiffs rafted up at the stern boarding platform and rigged them for coho trolling, guests suited up in the commercial-grade "foulies" and knee boots provided.

Once out among the rock ledges and islets, skirting thick kelp beds off the island's tip, Willis clipped the lines to the downriggers, and we were trolling over "Old Man's Hole." The other boats spread out to work sections off the shoreline at different depths, following the rip lines across the mouth of Goose Bay. VHF chatter showed little excitement until — bingo! — several hook-ups in rapid succession: two fish landed, one shook loose, then nothing. Ten minutes later the starboard rod on our boat, bent nearly double under the straight-down strain of the trolling gear, let go from the cannonball clip. Fish on! I set the hook and after five minutes of fight, reeled in a bright, silver, 14-pound coho salmon.

Back on Ocean Star, Shawn and Josh dressed the fish and marked them with wire ties in a different color for each angler. It seems I'd "limited." Six coho sporting my red tag, all 12 to 15 pounds, their bright bodies accented by the distinctive, metallic-blue dorsal surface that gives them the name "blueback." Afterward we settled in to Gayle's signature first-night "surf-and-turf" dinner — grilled strip steak and fresh Dungeness crab.

Day Two: Eau De Humpback

0500 — Willis fired up Ocean Star's engine and Randy, Rick, and I, sharing the aft fish hold, now a four-berth cabin, woke instantly. In rapid sequence everyone was up, dressed, suited-up, in the galley for breakfast on the fly, aboard the boats, headed out the inlet at high speed, and fishing by 0600. Off the point, in driving rain, I was in a boat with Shawn and Bob.

The VHF reported somewhat slow action, with the odd coho coming aboard one boat or another. Josh, Randy, and Rick were working along a kelp bed 50 yards inshore of us near the mouth of Goose Bay when a feeding humpback whale lazily surfaced to spout just ahead — and upwind — of their boat. Phew! Whale breath wafted over the skiff in an invisible, gagging cloud that took everyone but Josh by surprise.

"That was about the most overpowering stench I've ever smelled," Randy said later. "Don't talk to me about halitosis till you've smelled a humpback whale's breath. Whew!"

After lunch aboard Ocean Star and a soggy but successful afternoon fishing, we regrouped with our skipper and decided to move on to halibut the following afternoon.

Day Three: Back To His Roots

Once again, the big diesel alarm clock went off at 0500 and we put in a busy coho morning, again in rain (they don't call it "the Rainforest Coast" for nothing) and after lunch, weighed anchor. Two hours later, as the weather began to clear in defiance of the forecast, we headed to a deep-water shelf for halibut. Once anchored in Hudson Bay Passage, we dropped two-pound "cannonball" weights overboard from stiff, six-foot rods, and hung chunk-cut herring just off the bottom. No luck. The tide was wrong, but the faulty forecast put us here, not Willis's instinct.

After dinner that evening, the Crosby family gathered in the "tackle room" on the afterdeck where a seine-net drum once stood. I'd heard the Ocean Star story when I met Willis and Sea-boots are lined up and ready to go fishing. Gayle in the Crest Hotel lounge the day of my arrival in Prince Rupert. Willis learned the trade from his grandfather, a native Haida who fished around their ancestral homeland, the legendary Queen Charlotte Islands. As a young man, Willis went on to buy his own boat, forging a successful career fishing salmon, herring, halibut, and rock cod around the islands, and eventually all up and down the coast. Shawn fished with his father and eventually got his own boat.

"In 2000, a friend of ours, a well-known artist from Vancouver, asked us to take him to the Queen Charlotte Islands to paint," Crosby explained. "We had a different boat then and it was strictly a commercial fish boat, but this fellow wanted to bring eight other artists along so we quickly scraped up 2x4s and mattresses and built extra bunk beds in the hold. Then Gayle, Shawn, and I took them on a 17-day cruise to the Queen Charlottes."

Both of Willis Crosby's parents were from the islands and he'd spent so much time there growing up and later learned those waters so intimately that he was able to guide the group to Haida village sites, remote hot springs, and ancient settlements that the average tourist might never visit. The group didn't fish, though, and that planted the germ of an idea in Shawn's mind.

"They couldn't get enough of it," he said, "and afterward I said, 'Dad, we should just do this — touring, kayaking, whale watching, whatever. Let's get into leading tours out here,' and the next year we bought Ocean Star." The artists' group came back every summer, but the Crosbys continued to fish commercially while converting the boat to its new but not yet defined career.

"After awhile," Gayle recalled, "it became pretty obvious that even though we could certainly accommodate sightseeing cruises, our real market was going to be sportfishing."

"And then we had to learn how," Shawn jumped in. "We'd commercial fished all our lives but sportfishing was new to us." It took three years to get Ocean Star and her skipper approved to carry passengers, and today the season spans about 20 trips. Not all are exclusively sportfishing, and the Crosbys will tailor extended cruises to the Queen Charlottes and book shorter trips to attractions such as the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary, only accessible by air or by boat.

Day Four: Closing The Circle

Fishing remains at the core of the Crosbys' lives, and the next morning, on the way back to port, with the promised gale-force winds gone elsewhere, the sun began to break through on flat-calm water. On a promising bank in Chatham Sound, Ocean Star dropped the hook a final time and I dropped mine. After half an hour, I felt the tap-tap of the rod tip and watched as my line swam slowly toward the open ocean. I started reeling to let the circle hook do its subtle work and soon had a 13-pound halibut sitting in ice on top of my coho cache. All but one brought home a halibut and Mike Sommerville took a lovely lingcod as a bonus.

By afternoon, we put into Port Edward, a few miles south of Prince Rupert, where Ocean Star would lay up for winter. The Crosbys invited us to toast a successful season with them as a pickup truck rolled out on the wharf to take me and my prizes back to Rupert. And look who's driving, Shawn's wife Dallas and — what's this? — two grandchildren; they climbed all over Willis and Gayle. The circle seemed complete.