All About Salmon: Salmon “Redd” Pic, Haines Report and more comments

August 13, 2006 at 5:28 pm

If you have been to Michaels blog “Michael’s Meanderings” you know that he has a way of stumbling across some incredible finds both in the Yukon and the NWT. Whether it is secret caves, bunkers, fossils, wildlife or incredible vistas…Michael finds them. Knowing that I love fish and fishing, he now keeps an eye out for me. Micheal stumbled upon this female salmon making a redd. He comments:

I figured you would enjoy this pic, taken on Friday afternoon at Sydney Creek, just downstream from the bridge on the South Canol. There were two, both involved in the beautiful, yet complex, samonly art of “spawning”.

 

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank and re-circulate a few earlier comments from Bruce and HP. Quite often I feel my posts are boring but it is the comments that are interesting. In response to an earlier post on the Complex Relationship between Alaskan Salmon and Yukon Anglers HP commented:

Arrived home today from trip to the Chilkoot River in Haines.

A few thoughts I’d like to share.

Interceptions are getting really bad, and the fishers on the river know it. Quote repeated by several individuals throughout our stay, I’ve never seen the fishing this bad, and I’ve been coming here 10/15/20 years?. We didn’t see the boats on the weekend, but come Monday, as you noted, they were out in full force with nets that appeared to be as large as 150 feet long by the mouth of the river.

When the fish are depleted from the river, as they clearly were here, people then start taking unneccessary risks, like fishing the northeast side of the river up by the weir. I even noticed some individuals that shall remained unnamed that I know from Whitehorse taking their young children with them. If you’re going to be stupid and just as greedy as the commercial fishery, don’t put your children in harms way when you run a very real possibility of being confronted by a bear on your long trek through their well marked and confirmed territory (and well signaged I might add).

Final count:

Saturday night arrival - 1 Sockeye

Sunday all day - 1 Sockeye, 1 Pink

Monday all day - 0

Tuesday all day - 1 Pink

My father was skunked the whole trip.

I’m not sure where the weir is getting their numbers from, but I can’t help but feel skeptic about the accuracy. I know sockeyes are a tough catch, but give me a break, nobody catches any all day and 3000 magically make their way through a weir worked by 1 person?

Everyone fishing (which were too numerous to count) up on the northeast side weir, were coming back with pinks. I felt blessed to have caught my 2.

The fishing was tough, and not what it once was.

However, I would be remiss not to add that the experience of nature was overwhelmingly powerful, and I was glad we made this trip nonetheless. In between fishing with sea lions, having 6 browns (A sow catching a pink right off shore and feeding it to her cub) converge on the river all at the same time, and northern lights that I’ve never seen performed in the Yukon, it was a time to remember for sure.

Just not for it’s fishing!

HP on 08/09 at 09:26 PM

In response to another post Low Salmon Stocks-Pacific Salmon Wars???? Bruce commented:

I’d highly recommend a book I just finished called “The Thousand Year Run”? It is written by a geophysicist who has specialized in river geomorphology of the Pacific Northwest. It was through this perspective that he initially became interested in the plight of Pacific Salmon. But the book actually starts with providing a historical perspective on what happened to salmon stocks in Europe hundreds of years ago, then on the east coast of N. America, and what is happening now in the Northwest. Not surprisingly, in every one of these cases, the same factors have been ignored and history repeated. What is happening in the Pacific Northwest is nothing new, and there is no more “research”? that needs to be done to better understand how to conserve wild salmon. They understood what salmon needed to remain healthy 500 years ago in Europe (and passed conservation laws accordingly - which were undermined, ignored and poorly enforced, just as they are today), and obviously First Nations cultures have understood all along what salmon require.

It isn’t just overharvesting through commercial fishing - it’s also habitat degradation through polution and irresponsible logging practices, habitat alteration through dredging and straightening stream beds, and dams which have disregarded proper avenues for fish passage, many of which are dams that aren’t really even needed anymore, but are stubbornly clung to by industry interests who aren’t willing to adapt. In addition, the fisheries approach of thinking its possible to overcome having to change any of the factors outlined above by simply pumping out millions of hatchery salmon has turned into a huge waste of money with little difference in return rates.

The bottom line is - we know what needs to happen, but just as salmon don’t limit themselves to particular countries, they also don’t conform to the way we divide our management of all the various factors that are involved in keeping them healthy, and getting all of these different agencies and interests, and their greedy agendas, to agree has proved insurmountable. I think that only be reorganizing how we manage salmon habitat - by taking a unified watershed approach, where one agency oversees protection of all of these factors, with the real authority to do so, will anything change.

Bruce on 07/28 at 09:16 AM

Thanks for the comments…keep them coming.

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