The village of Zaballos is located on the northwest corner of Vancouver Island. During the spring, summer, and early fall there are about 1500 residents, but that number drops to about 200 hardy souls who stay there during winter months. Zaballos is known as British Columbia’s smallest village. Sport fishing, kayaking, wildlife photography and hiking attract the most visitors to the area.
Bruce Lee from Ontario, Canada with an excellent, hard-fighting king salmon.
Yes! All four of us were obsessed with saltwater fishing. We were the only anglers waiting on the dock as our guide hurried down the gangplank at 5:40 in the morning. My son-in-law, Marc Chalut from Predator Ridge B.C.; his brother Paul Chalut from Lake Country B.C.; Marc’s brother-in-law Bruce Lee from Toronto, Ontario and myself, Dave Kimble, now from Vernon, B.C. stayed out of our guide’s way as he got the twin 225 hp Mercs on his 27-foot cruiser warmed up and ready to go. After a brief prepared speech about safety gear and protocol he pushed off to lead the seven other boats from the “Reel Obsession” resort in Zaballos, B.C. down the two miles of Zaballos Inlet and turned west to run through the 12-miles of Esperanza Inlet.
He pulled in just west of “Table Rock” and I couldn’t help but notice the change of watercolor to a strange milky-green that I had not seen in my 70 years of salmon fishing from Oregon to Alaska. The guide explained that the water was six degrees warmer than it was the previous summer, “but” he said, “the salmon fishing for both kings and silvers is better than it’s been in twenty years. The only bad part of this is that all the fish, from herring bait to big kings, is that the average size is a little smaller.” His thought process was that if the herring were smaller throughout the system, it was only natural that the salmon would also end up smaller.
He very quickly started the 18hp kicker and aimed the boat into the northwest. He had separate controls for the boat back on the rear deck so that he never had to leave or get a client to steer the boat. He tied on a flasher and spoon combo and dropped it with the downrigger to 161-feet. As he started to rig the second outfit I noticed a slight bobbing on the first outfit and asked him if that was the bottom or a fish. He very quickly jumped across and, with lightning precision, popped the line out of the downrigger clip and set the hook onto our first king and handed the rod to Paul who carefully fought it until he could lead it headfirst into the guide’s waiting net.
While Paul was fighting that first king our guide had lowered the second rig down to 151-feet rigged with a flasher and a green and white hoochy. While he was netting Paul’s king, Marc noticed the second rod tip bobbing and popped the line and set the hook for his brother-in-law, Bruce. This was just Bruce’s third trip to saltwater, but he fought his king like he’d been doing this his whole life. The next two hours were totally hectic. Five adults, constantly on the move on the rear deck, either reeling in a salmon or ducking out of the way of the net handle, shouting that there was a hit on the other line, trying to keep salmon from tangling during the several double-headers and ducking the spray as our guide tried to keep the slime from sending one of us overboard.
Our guide with Paul Chalut from Lake Country, B.C. with the largest king of this trip.
Finally, the guide said “We’d better stop and head out for halibut. We already have our daily limit of eight kings as well as four nice silvers and, it’s not even nine o-clock yet.” He didn’t even mention the six other salmon that we had released considering that they were just too small. We sat back with a coffee while he changed out the two salmon rigs for four halibut rigs. After running six-to-eight miles offshore he slowed the boat down and ran in slow circles until he was precisely on the mark he had entered on his GPS unit. He then went to the bow and dropped the anchor about 200-feet to the bottom. He then attached a large orange buoy to the anchor line and backed the boat downtide about 50-feet to make sure that our fishing lines didn’t get tangled with the anchor line if we had to fight a very large halibut. We all dropped our baited lures down to the bottom and reeled in just enough line to allow our one-pound balls of lead to just bounce off the bottom occasionally. Our guide laughed and told us we might as well put the rods in the rod holders and sit back and relax. It often takes over an hour before getting that first bite.
We had all just sat down when Marc jumped over to his bouncing rod tip, reeled down and set the hook into a good-sized fish. When he had reeled it about halfway in the guide told him that it looked like a lingcod, the hali-headshake is considerably more distinct. And, sure enough, a lingcod of about 20 pounds was soon flopping around in the back of the boat. It was an excellent bonus fish and superb on the dinner table. Then we sat back and not-so-patiently waited close to an hour before Bruce got a bite and started reeling in our first halibut, a small but very tasty 15-pounder. Marc tapped my shoulder and pointed to my rod tip. It was bent nearly to the surface, and I quickly set the hook into the heavy fish. I remember thinking that it was large but not huge. That’s important because the maximum size for halibut had just been lowered to 49.6—inches, about 57—pounds. The larger halibut are all females and must be released without injury. Mine was just over 40—pounds and after a good battle was quickly dispatched and slid into the fish—hold. Another hour went by before both Paul and Marc brought in an-other pair of very nice Lingcod and Bruce caught another small halibut. It was time to stow the gear and run back to Zaballos.
Once we arrived back to the resort the dock hands helped to line all our first-day’s fish up in front of the resort sign for a photo. It seemed like a huge number of great fish and for all four of us, the best first day ever on a four-man trip. We went back to our rooms to clean up and rest for a bit while our guide filleted all our fish and turned them over to the processing crew. By the time we had consumed a large and fantastic mouth-watering dinner prepared by chef Chris Derziche, our fish fillets were neatly packaged, air-sealed and flash frozen.
After being served an excellent appetizer and to be followed by a great desert, Reel Obsession’s head chef Chris Derziche served this fantastic, stacked striploin, covered with local spot prawns in his own secret sauce, served with an “eastern style” Caesar salad. Magnificent!
Our second day started out with a beautiful sunrise and calm waters. However, our guide was anxious to fill our possession limits because a storm front was due to hit the area on our third and final day. Salmon fishing on this day turned out to be slow and steady. It was noon before we finished catching our possession limits of eight more kings, all between 15 and 24 pounds, as well as several more silvers, 8 to 10 pounds. We ran out to the guide’s special halibut anchoring position where we finished catching our halibut possession with one 24-pounder and two more small halibut—and another bonus of two more large lingcod. Once again chef Derziche finished this fantastic day with a special dinner of stacked striploin steak topped with huge spot prawns in his secret cheese sauce and served with an eastern-style Caesar salad.
When we met at the boat on our third and final morning it was overcast and we could feel a brisk wind from the southwest. Our guide told us that the good news was that we only needed three more silvers and six more ling cod to fill our possession limits. The bad news was that the wind would make bottom fishing for the lings very difficult. In the first hour we caught and released three nice kings during the first hour of trolling. Our guide had to use the big motors to power the boat back to the south because we could only troll in the same direction as the rather large whitecaps were taking us. When he started the trolling motor and aimed the boat back toward table rock, he switched the trolling spoons to Gibb’s “skinny G’s” and only dropped the downrigger weights to 37 and 39 feet. We caught our three silvers within about 20-minutes. During the next three hours we trolled or jigged in about 60-feet of water close to some giant rocks. We boated three more nice lings, a half-dozen larger rockfish and, to our surprise, we caught three Cabazon, very ugly fish that taste like excellent shellfish such as “scallops.”
As soon as we returned to the Reel Obsession Resort docks our day’s catch was filleted and bag sealed while we cleared everything out of our room and ate a quick late lunch. Just before we departed the resort the crew packed the coolers we had brought, carefully layering our morning’s catch in between the frozen bags of the previous two days’ fish. It took us two days to get home and, when we emptied our coolers into our home freezers, the fillets previously frozen were still frozen and the last day’s fillets were ice cold and perfectly preserved.
The village of Zaballos is located on the northwest corner of Vancouver Island. During the spring, summer, and early fall there are about 1500 residents, but that number drops to about 200 hardy souls who stay there during winter months. Zaballos is known as British Columbia’s smallest village. Sport fishing, kayaking, wildlife photography and hiking attract the most visitors to the area.
Visiting anglers should book ahead to take a ferry to Vancouver Island and then drive north to Campbell River, B.C. After that they’ll still need roughly two and a half hours to travel 80-miles (128 – kilometers) north on pavement to the Zaballos turnoff just north of Woss, B.C. where they need to turn left (west) and travel another 24.8 miles (40 kilometres) on a gravel logging road.
We were staying at the Reel Obsession Fishing Lodge owned by master guide Adrian O’Conner. Look it up at www. reelobsession.ca. Contact Adrian by phone: 1-888-855-7335 or leave him an email: adri-an@reelobsession.ca. This fishing resort had superb accommodations, large, safe boats, excellent food, and the best staff of knowledgeable guides that I’ve ever fished with. My group is already booked with
‘Reel Obsession’ for next summer. I highly recommend it.
Our group, with the author in red, pose with their first day’s catch: 8 kings; 4 silvers; 4 halibut; and 3 very nice lingcod.
I didn’t mention my guide’s name for two reasons. The first is that all of Adrian O’Connors’ “Reel Obsession” guides are hand-picked and are carefully trained to do things “his” way. I’m certain that each one of them would do an excellent job. My second reason is my own selfishness. When I’ve mentioned a great guide by name in the past, I’ve often never been able to book him again because he has become too busy.
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