Nobody warns you that the best salmon fishing in the country happens within sight of a Wal-Mart. Lake Ontario in late August is a freshwater ocean with the manners of one, and the Niagara Bar is where the river dumps out into it in a long shallow shelf that drops off hard on the outside edge. Cold water piles up along that break, baitfish pile up in the cold water, and Chinook the size of a bag of dog food pile up under the bait, waiting on the fall rain that will send them up the river to die. For about three weeks they are the most catchable they will ever be, and everybody with a boat and a downrigger in western New York knows it.
Trolling for kings is a fussy, technical, deeply unromantic way to fish right up until the moment it is not. You run a spread that looks like the rigging of a small schooner: downriggers dropped a hundred and ten feet, dipsy divers out to the sides on wire, a copper line back three hundred feet doing something nobody on board can fully explain. You watch a temperature probe. You argue about whether the thermocline moved. You change a flasher four times because a man on the radio said green was working and then would not say where.
And then a rod loads up. Not a tap, not a nibble. A downrigger rod bent double in the holder snaps straight when the release pops, and for one entire second nothing happens at all, and everybody looks at it. Then the reel starts screaming and does not stop for a while. A twenty-five pound king running downhill in fifty-eight degree water does not care about your drag setting or your plans. It goes under the boat. It goes around the other lines. Somebody yells something about the kicker motor. The net comes out too early, every single time.
We fished out of Wilson with a retired schoolteacher who has run the same eighteen-foot aluminum boat off that bar since the Carter administration and keeps his notes in a spiral binder with the pages gone soft. He does not use the electronics much. He runs to a spot he calls the elbow, looks at the color of the water for a while, and sets lines. His theory of salmon fishing is that the fish are always somewhere and your job is to stop having opinions about where. That morning it took forty minutes to prove him right and about eleven seconds to lose the first one.
We ended the day three for six with a twenty-two pounder that came aboard looking like a piece of chrome plumbing and a fillet job on the dock that drew a small crowd. The teacher wrote the numbers in the binder, closed it, and said the fish had been a little sluggish. Somewhere in that man is a morning that would satisfy him, and none of us has been present for it.
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