Fly Fishing British Columbia

Karl Bruhn has stood on the polar ice cap at the North Pole; dogsledded in Greenland; travelled winter ice roads with a fur buyer; lived on a trapline; was awarded two Certificates of Military Achievements without having served; danced the Tea Dance of the northern Cree as an honored guest; worked as a stevedore, as a private chauffeur, in a copper mine, for a railway, in eastern factories, as a newspaper reporter and editor; edited Canada’s oldest outdoor magazine, wrote a bestselling book on lake fishing in British Columbia; and has canoed hundreds of river miles in B.C., Alberta and the Northwest Territories. He is a cum laude graduate of McGill University, an honorary lifetime member of Powell River Salmon Enhancement Society and a lover of wilderness and the art of fly fishing. He has lived in igloos, in a teepee, under lean-tos and has restored the turn-of-the-century coastal homestead he now calls home.

Brian Chan is a professional fisheries biologist who has worked on trout management in the Kamloops region for the past 25 years, making him one of the fortunate few with a work career that focuses on his passion. An ardent fly fisher for the past 30 years, he has been active in conservation efforts and is a regular contributor of fly fishing articles to various outdoor publications. He is the author of Flyfishing Strategies for Stillwaters and was one of the several authors who contributed to The Gilly. His fly tying abilities were featured in 1994 book, The World’s Best Trout Flies. He has also produced two volumes of an instructional video series on lake fly fishing.

Ian Forbes has cast a fly on every major trout stream in British Columbia and is diligently working his way through the minor flows. Combining his 35- year B.C. Forest Service career with as much stream prospecting as possible has provided him a unique opportunity to explore B.C. He has written and illustrated outdoor magazine articles for more than 40 years, and many of his paintings hang in private galleries. Besides extensive annual forays within B.C., never more than a year goes by without a trip to at least one of several favorite fishing haunts, including Alberta, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Australia and New Zealand. A fly tier for 50 years, many of his innovative original patterns are known to B.C. fly fishers. He has contributed more than 80 of his fly pattern pencil sketches to this book.

Don Holmes is a professional biologist who has made Paul Lake in the southern Interior his home. He has been an avid lake fisher since being taken in hand by the close-knit group of Kamloops ‘oldtimers’ as a youngster. With a Masters degree in Fishery and Environmental Science, he has been with the Ministry of Environment for 26 years, concentrating on water quality and aquatic biology. Introduced to fly fishing in the 1970s under the tutelage of master lake fishers aquatic intertebrates among his personal passions. He admits to having learned more about stillwater intertebrates from Jack Shaw than from all his university years.

Adam Lewis has worked as a fisheries biologist for more than a decade, studying the ecology of fish and the effects of industrial development. A Registered Professional Biologist since 1990, he acts as a consultant to government, industry and environmental organizations, monitoring environmental effects, analyzing impacts and prescribing mitigative solutions. Vice-president of operations for Triton Environmental Consultants Ltd., he is also the author of Salmon of the Pacific, Sockeye: the Adams River Run and Saving Skeena Steelhead, a publication of the Steelhead Society of B.C. He is a member of the American Fisheries Society, sits on the Advisory Board of the Sustainable Fisheries Foundation and has served as a director of the Steelhead Society for four years.

Art Lingren is a member and past president of the Totem Flyfishers, British Columbia’s oldest fly fishing club; a member of the Harry Hawthorn Foundation; an honorary member of the Loons Fly Fishing club; and a long-time member, official historian and vice-char of the B.C. Federation of Fly Fishers. In 1995 he received the Federation’s Angul Award for appreciation of the fly fishing heritage in art and science. He has served for many years as a director of the Steelhead Society of B.C. and is prolific fly fishing writer with regular magazine contributions and four book titles to his credit, all on B.C. fly fishing and tying. Fittingly, he wrote the foreword to the 1997 reprint of Dr. T.W. Lambert’s 1907 classic, Fishing in British Columbia. For the last 30 years he has balanced work and family with a passion for B.C. steelhead trout, char and salmon waters.

Kevin Longard has been fly fishing Vancouver-area lakes and streams for 20 years, is featured in a number of videos, including two instructional tying films and the well-known How to Fly Fish Lakes, a guide to coastal lake strategies. A Federation of Fly Fishers certified casting instructor, he gives courses on tying and fishing, guides heli trips and is a seminar speaker at Vancouver-area outdoor shows. He is the owner of Skagit River Flies, a supplier of tying materials, flies and equipment, and is a regular contributor to a number of B.C. fishing publications.

Bob Melrose started fly fishing at age 12 and never looked back. Aside from 39 years in the sporting goods industry, with as many years fishing and hunting through-out B.C. and Alberta, he is a Fly Fishing Federation certified casting instructor, has taught the craft for 20 years, and has balanced it all with 30 years as a ski instructor. The owner of Bobs Sports in Prince George from 1974 to 1990, he opened a new 3,000-square foot Bob’s Sports in Prince George in 1999. He continues to teach fly fishing, dividing his non-business time between fishing, upland gamebird hunting with Sage, a German long-haired pointer, and skiing the slopes in winter.

Peter Morrison is a casting advisor to the Federation of Fly Fishers, a certified master casting instructor well known for his many fly fishing and casting seminars, a factory representative for Sage Rods and Scientific Angler Fly Lines, a former professional angling guide and a pioneering saltwater angler, most notably in the quest for Pacific salmon. A fly fisher for more than 25 years, he has angled for almost every Canadian gamefish as well as such exotic species as tarpon and bonefish. He has worked in the fly fishing tackle industry for 10 years and in 1999 was selected to join the Canadian team at the 2^nd Annual New Zealand Saltfly Tournament.

Ron Nelson is longtime, national award-winning writer whose work has appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal, BC Outdoors, Flyfisherman, Reader’s Digest and a wide range of other magazines and newspapers. He is also a freelance book editor, contributor and author of one book (a second book, And When You Go Fishing, Again, is currently in the works) After a decade in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley and two decades on the Queen Charlotte Island, he now lives with his wife and 14-year-old son in Cranbrook.

Doug Porter caught his first fish on a fly in 1958, using a fly his brother taught him to tie. He went on to become a charter member of the Kamloops Fly Fishers and, in 1980, founder of the Grizzly Anglers, the Clearwater-based group known for its trend-setting conservation work, including the prototype Dutch Lake spawning channel – the first of its kind in Canada. Having joined the Forest Service in 1975, he is currently recreation officer for the Chilcotin forest region and a member of the Chilcotin Rod and Gun Club, serving on the executive since 1991, with two years as president. A contributor to The Gilly, he has taught fly tying and casting since the early 1980s, always with a strong conservation message, and started teaching rod building in 1998.

Ian Roberts has a degree in still photography from Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, spent a year of post-graduate study and work in Italy, owns a Victoria-based photography business and has been fly fishing since he was 10. He merges his love of photography with his passion for fly fishing in images which have appeared in various publications, including the color fly photography that appears in this book. He specializes in estuary fishing for sea-run cutthroat and salmon, but rarely misses an opportunity to bonefish and other warm-water species. His various written contributions to this book mark his first foray into the field of angling writing.

Phil Rowley started fly fishing as a youth at Cameron Lake on Vancouver Island and has been self-confessed fanatic ever since. He regularly gives seminars, including presentations at outdoor shows in Canada and the U.S., teaches fly fishing and tying, is a commercial tier whose flies were among those used by Canada’s 1994 world fly fishing team, and counts both Brian Chan and Gordon Honey among his clients. He is also a contract tier with Umpqua Feather Merchants and a member of the Lamiglas field staff. He writes extensively and contributes photographs to a variety of fly fishing publications, is a past president of the Osprey Fly Fishers and a former director of the B.C. Federation of Fly Fishers.

Dave Stewart has blazed so many angling trails in so many corners of B.C. it is unlikely the rest of us will ever catch him up. Born near Revelstoke in 1919 on the family homestead, now designated a historical site (Craigellachie Historic Site), he is himself a part of B.C. angling history. Aside from brief ventures to other provinces, the Arctic and U.S., he stuck to B.C., driving truck, playing jazz guitar, working as a railway telegrapher and train dispatches, captaining his own commercial salmon troller and fly fishing for much of his angling life. He started writing in the early 1950s, selling a wide range of material, including fiction and ‘fact fiction’ in U.S. magazines, travel articles for many major dailies and a wealth of outdoor stories. As a western stringer for Maclean-Hunter, he travelled across B.C., Alberta and the Yukon, always carrying fishing tackle and always learning. After 25 years as a freelancer to BC Outdoors, he became Guides Editor until his retirement in 1984. His book The Last Cast is a collection of 24 of his acclaimed and popular Last Cast columns, which he continues to write.

Barry Thornton is a popular and prolific British Columbia outdoor writer. He has published over 1,000 articles and an equal number of photographs, with writing awards from the Outdoor Writers of Canada and the Northwest Outdoor Writer’s Association. The American Fisheries Society’s northwest chapter presented him with their Roderick Haig-Brown Memorial Award. He has served as a director of the B.C. Wildlife Federation, a member of the Salmonid Enhancement Task Group, and was the founding chairman and a three-time president of the Steelhead Society of B.C. Recently retired after 35 years as a school principal, he now writes full time, contributing to regional, national and international publications.