I have been blessed to have fished wonderful fresh waters in North America, South America, and Africa. Still when I close my eyes and remember my best experiences, I drift back to June days shortly after the ice has gone out of Coronation Gulf. This Arctic Ocean embayment is at the mouth of the Coppermine River, next to the Inuit community of Kugluktuk in the Kitikmeot region of Nunavut.
Summer comes to the Arctic coast as soon as the ice is pushed out of Coronation Gulf. It is almost an overnight transition. When the weather breaks and summer comes to the mouth of the Coppermine,
it can be quite balmy in late June and early July, around the time of the summer solstice. Twenty-four hours of daylight lets one fish into the night when the wind subsides and the ocean tends to be calmer.
There is an ongoing debate on the speciation of the western versus eastern Arctic charr. (Charr is the traditional English spelling, which I prefer as it has become the standard in fishing literature.) The dividing line between these very closely related fish is somewhere around the Tree River east of Kugluktuk. To the angler, the western fish have larger spots with an appearance not unlike the Dolly Varden found further west in the NWT, coastal Yukon, and Alaska. The Tree River eastern fish have small reddish spots with blue halos around them and are a little flatter in profile. The Coppermine River and Coronation Gulf fish are the western variant.
Coronation Gulf offers one of the earliest chances each year to pursue western Arctic charr. The fish in the spring are a mix of anadromous fish, which ascended the Coppermine during the previous fall to spawn and then wintered in the fresh water, and younger fish that have spent their first five or six years in the fresh water and are now coming down to the ocean for the first time.
As the brief summer arrives, these fish are often elusive as they cruise the coastal waters of the ocean to follow the schools of herring and capelin. Along the coast, charr can often be found with binoculars by searching for sea birds feeding on panicking bait fish, which churn the surface of the ocean as they are chased by seals and charr.
But it’s a big ocean, and the question is always how to predictably find charr. One delightful solution involves fishing the feeding waters around the islands in Coronation Gulf off the mouth of the Coppermine. Some of these fish will run back up the river to the interior lakes later in August and September and can be pursued in the river. Collectively, they feed around the islands a few kilometres from the community. In late June and early July, the channels around the island are full of feeding charr.
In the years I was working in the Kitikmeot region, I was introduced to this delightful fishery by my old friend Gerry Atatahak and his late wife, Susan. We slow trolled the channels, Gerry using shiny spinners and wobbling spoons, while I used a sinking fly line with big weighted bright steelhead patterns, sculpins and white polar bear hair type streamers imitating the bait fish. I generally got out fished by the hardware, but we never went hungry. Gerry has a small cabin on one of the islands, which served as a base for shore lunches of charr, fried potatoes, and onions after fishing.
Sitting on a rock by a driftwood fire after a fine meal watching the sun traverse the southern horizon, there could be no better beginning for summer or the end of a great evening.
