No Rod Needed to Enjoy South Sound’s Chum

By Chester Allen, The Olympian, Olympia, Wash.

Nov. 30–All of us go fishing to catch fish, but we still keep fishing when we don’t catch anything.

Why is that?

Maybe it’s because fishing takes us into a world that seems light years away from 24-hour-a-day news, video games, iPods, cranky bosses, leaky roofs, weedy flower beds, traffic jams, $3.50-a-gallon gasoline and all of the other static of our lives.

Maybe it’s because fish are always mysterious and elusive and gorgeous.

All this is true most of the time, but catching is always the goal.

But we all can go fishing this weekend and find joy in not even making a cast.

Thousands of wild chum salmon — fish that have never seen a concrete hatchery pond — are jamming into small South Sound creeks to spawn right now.

Leaving the tackle behind and just watching these fish fight, dig nests in the stream gravel, spawn and then die is a spectacle equal to anything in nature.

And all of this is happening at the Kennedy Creek Salmon Trail and McLane Creek Nature Trail this weekend.

Millions of wild chum salmon are returning to Puget Sound this fall and early winter in a ritual that goes back to the ice ages.

Chum are thriving in Puget Sound, even as steelhead, chinook and coho struggle. Chum are some of the most recently evolved Pacific salmon, and they have one peculiar habit that eases the perils of living in a world that includes humans.

Young chum salmon head for saltwater soon after they hatch out of the egg. Other young salmon — such as coho and chinook — stay in fresh water for a year or more after hatching.

But the young chum swim out of the gravel and head right for saltwater.

Humans are good at wrecking creeks, so getting out of town is a good deal for the little fish.

Getting out of the creeks right away also means chum can spawn in streams that just about dry up in the summer. Chum salmon spawn in almost every inch of the tiny, jump-across streams that lace through South Sound like veins on a maple leaf.

There is evidence that chum are actually expanding their range.

Any tiny stream that eventually finds its way into Puget Sound probably has spawning chum in it right now.

Lots of anglers believe that chum are somehow a lesser salmon. They aren’t as tasty as a coho or chinook — another lucky break for these fish — and they aren’t sleek and bright and silver when they swim into the stream.

Chum turn olive — with purple stripes — before they even reach their spawning streams, and they sprout sharp, canine teeth. Still, chum, in their own way, are beautiful and strong and tireless — kind of like a Chevy or Ford pickup truck.

Chum also snap a lot of rods every fall.

I like to catch and release them when they rip into the estuaries.

But I love them when they’re up in the shallow, gravelly headwaters of a little creek.

They’re big fish, and they look out of place in the skinny water. But they’re too busy fighting and spawning to care.

I watch the big fish thrash toward sex and death, but I think of those same fish squirming out of the gravel three or four years ago and heading for the Puget Sound in massive clouds of tiny fingerlings.

Young chum swim along the shorelines and in the estuaries and eat anything that fits in their tiny mouths. A lot of birds and fish eat them, too.

The survivors grow larger and head out of Puget Sound and swim thousands of miles to the Gulf of Alaska.

They eat plankton and shrimp and squid and smaller fish. Orcas and seals eat them.

They swim in the cold, rich soup of arctic waters for years, and then something triggers them to swim back to the gravel of their birth to spawn and die.

The fish that have finished spawning often lurk in the shallow, gentle currents. Furry fungus mars their battle-scarred bodies, and their fins are tattered and shredded.

I wonder what goes through the pea-size brains of these fish — these fish that swam thousands of miles, grew big and survived the heavy odds and perils of a hard ocean — and anglers — to spawn a new generation.

Maybe they don’t think at all. But I’m sure they feel the cold, clean water flow through their gills and along their sides — just as it has since they popped out of the egg.

They don’t seem to be in pain, and death almost seems like a friend.

Their bodies will nourish the stream, the plants along the stream and their own young.

And it will all happen again and again and again — if we care enough. So, we watch and marvel.

The catching is better than the fishing on the chum salmon spawning streams, but you don’t need a rod or any tackle.

Chester Allen’s fishing column appears Fridays in The Olympian. He can be reached at 360-754-4226 or callen@theolympian.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Olympian, Olympia, Wash.

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