Landing a big salmon makes an angler, at least temporarily, immune to the petty slings and arrows of life. What is a traffic ticket to someone who has just landed a forty-pound salmon? Nothing. Long wait for your table? Meaningless. You’ve exited the dull antechamber of regular life and have entered a fantastic formal ballroom. And no one can take that away from you.
This universal fact places an understandable premium on the few big-fish rivers that remain. It is hard to catch a large salmon where none exist. Yet your invitations to fish Norway’s Steinfossen Pool, or spend a week in Lorne Cottage along the Cascapedia, have not likely been lost in the mail. And your wealthier, better-connected friends, casting farther and more tastefully, are too busy to save you. What to do?
Enter Canada’s York River—everyman’s chance to catch a big fish, and you don’t even need to fish from a boat.
You won’t be alone. There was a time when only Americans fished much before summer solstice. Among the more tragic fishing consequences of the pandemic has been Canadian anglers’ discovery of their own country’s salmon rivers. In our absence, Quebecers realized it is actually pretty cool to swing a fly to grabby, dime-bright, early-season salmon.
But fear not. The below primer will orient even the most well-mannered and mentally balanced angler to salmon fishing on Quebec’s great Gaspé Peninsula.
GETTING THERE
The humane commute is to land your private jet at the Gaspé airport and transfer via limo to your luxe lodging. But since you won’t be doing that, you will instead be driving many hours. Those with reason will execute this drive overnight, as
