I’ll Try Anything!

Quest Giver: Christopher Sloan — Fort Wildervar, Howling Fjord [60, 19]

Objective: Collect 5 Northern Barbfish from Water Plants in Caldemere Lake.

Quick Facts

• Location: Caldemere Lake, directly south of Fort Wildervar [60, 18]
• Chain Position: 1 of 2 (leads into The One That Got Away)
• Pairs With: Down to the Wire (feather collection along the lake’s northern shore)

Walkthrough

Dive Into Caldemere Lake

• Jump off the dock near Christopher Sloan and swim into the lake. Look for Water Plants on the lake floor. They sparkle like chest nodes, so they’re easy to spot underwater.

Interact With Water Plants

• Right-click a Water Plant to trigger a spawn. One of three creatures will appear:
  • Northern Barbfish — Kill and loot for quest credit.
  • Caldemere Snapper — Hostile crab. Kill or avoid.
  • Forsaken Spy — Hostile humanoid. Kill or avoid.
• Only the Northern Barbfish counts toward quest completion. The other two are junk spawns.

Efficiency Tips

• Work the shoreline plants first. Plants closer to Christopher Sloan and the dock let you surface quickly for air and kite unwanted spawns to Fort Wildervar guards.
• Don’t fight every spawn. If a crab or spy appears and you’re healthy enough, swim to the next plant and let them leash. Melee classes can swim backward toward the next plant while killing the current mob.
• Stealth classes (Rogues/Druids): Stealth immediately after interacting with a plant. If a Barbfish doesn’t spawn, move on without combat.
• Hunters: Drop a Freezing Trap before clicking a plant. If a junk spawn appears, leave it trapped and move on. Feign Death resets aggro cleanly if needed.
• Mages: Blink away from junk spawns immediately after the plant interaction to avoid combat entirely.
• Druids: Aquatic Form is a massive advantage here for swim speed and underwater breathing.
• Remember to breathe. Surface periodically unless you have underwater breathing from a class ability, potion, or racial trait (Undead’s Underwater Breathing).
• Pair with Down to the Wire. The feathers for that quest drop along the northern lakeshore. Grab both quests from Fort Wildervar before heading out.

If You’re Speed-Leveling This quest has a reputation for bad RNG, but Blizzard improved the Barbfish spawn rate and reduced the requirement from 7 to 5 in a later WotLK patch.

Most players now complete it in 8-15 plants. The two-quest chain (this plus The One That Got Away) gives solid combined XP, so it’s generally worth doing unless the lake is heavily contested by other players.

Lore Context

• Christopher Sloan mentions buying bait from Nat Pagle, WoW’s legendary fisherman. Pagle has been a recurring NPC since Classic, originally found at his dock in Dustwallow Marsh. His bait being referenced this far north in Northrend reinforces his status as Azeroth’s most famous angler.
• The Forsaken Spy spawning from underwater plants is a fun bit of environmental storytelling. Fort Wildervar is Alliance territory, and the Forsaken at Vengeance Landing to the south have been running intelligence operations throughout the Fjord.

Oddities

All three spawned creatures can actually drown if rooted, trapped, or CC’d underwater and left alone (takes about a minute). Their corpses remain lootable, so if a Barbfish spawns, you can root it, move on, and come back to loot once it drowns. A grim but functional strategy.