British Columbia Fishing Blog

Southern British Columbia’s Chilliwack River is the most heavily used recreational river in this province. Unfortunately, that comes with a price. Each year, garbage from small litters to large abandoned items can be found along trails that lead to the river and its banks. Since 2002, local residents and recreational users have taken part in 28 Chilliwack River cleanups. On April 17th, we joined 150 other volunteers to remove garbage from this river so freshet would not wash them away into the Pacific Ocean later on this month. We hope this video can inspire other communities to get involved and keep their local watersheds clean. Please visit Chilliwack Vedder River Cleanup Coalition’s website for more information.

In this video blog, we followed Curt from the Fraser Valley Trout Hatchery to Deer Lake in Burnaby, where he released 250 rainbow trout at catchable sizes (300g to 500g). Curt explains what anglers can expect this season from the Fishing in the City program.

Yesterday we made our way up to Squamish and took a look at a couple of lakes in the area. We had expected pretty good fishing at Browning Lake, which was stocked with 1,300 rainbow trout by the Freshwater Fisheries Society of BC last week, but it turned out to be rather challenging. We also took a look at Alice Lake where I had success in the past, but they were still too shy. Despite of a lack of catches, the nature surroundings at both lakes made up for the trip. This video is intended for those who are interested in getting into freshwater fishing in British Columbia but still not sure how to do so. Locally stocked lakes are the best places to start!

So what’s with the weather? We celebrated an early arrival of spring back in February and suddenly it is back to December again. Lakes around the Lower Mainland have been stocked since last week (see stocking database) so this morning when we saw sunshine, we decided to drop whatever work we had and headed to Como Lake for some easy fishing.

Easy fishing it was not to be, because as soon as we left Richmond, we found clouds all around us. We forgot that the sun shines in Richmond, it is most likely raining in the rest of BC. We arrived, sat down on the floating dock, and flurries greeted us! The light westerly breeze did not help either.

Once most of the clouds moved on, it was slightly more pleasant to fish. I managed to catch and release one, while Nina missed several good tugs. So much for foolish urban stocked rainbow trout, but that is good because the fishing wouldn’t be as exciting if it is not challenging.

Environment Canada has forecasted a few days of sunshine, so lets see how accurate that is. If the sun indeed shows itself, be sure to take advantage of all the catchable rainbow trout stockings that are happening in the Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley this month.

This video blog was supposed to be published a couple of weeks ago but we ran into some technical problems recently. The computer that has been working so hard to render all the video that you watch finally gave up. The silver lining of this is now we have a better machine that can do the tasks much faster and produce better quality flicks.

Anyway, this video blog features the second trip that we did to Kawkawa Lake. Unlike the second trip, we had a relatively sunny day so most of the fish were feeding on the bottom. We managed to tag a few but missed much more due to the soft bites.

A 12 minute video tutorial on this particular fishery is now available for subscribers.