Over a million salmon in a Campbell River tributary
The Quinsam River near Campbell River on Vancouver Island had its biggest return of salmon ever recorded this year. I don’t know how they came up with the number, but reportedly some 1,035,766 pink salmon came back to spawn in the Campbell/Quinsam river system this year. This number is quite remarkable when one thinks of the returns of Atlantic salmon on Canada’s east coast or in Europe, where the biggest spawning population shows up in Norway, and seldom exceeds 600,000 fish in total. This also points to the inappropriateness of comparing the potential or speculative interaction between salmon from farms and those roaming in the wild. It is not unusual to see over 30 million salmon streaming down the cost of British Columbia heading for the Fraser River that runs out through the city of Vancouver.
Besides the all-time high run of pinks to the Campbell River system this year, a five-year high of coho salmon was also recorded, with some 12,750 adults and 2,564 jacks (same age class as the Atlantic salmon “grilse”) returning. According to the Courier-Islander newspaper, preliminary counts add another 3,200 Chinook salmon to these rivers, and estimates suggest a run of somewhere between 10 and 20,000 chum salmon spawning in the Campbell/Quinsam rivers this fall.
There was an undeniable buzz around the sport fishing campfires along the beaches of eastern Vancouver Island this year, too. Jeremy Maynard, a regular contributor to the above-mentioned paper and a local fishing guide wrote in a July article that the area between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland just south of Campbell River had the largest recorded Chinook salmon catch in June this year- with some 4,316 fish caught- “about three-and-a-half times the previous five year average”, and another ~7,000 fish were released- nearly seven times the recent five-year average. But the biggest story among sport fishers in this area was the fact that in June alone, over 5,000 coho salmon from hatchery origins were caught, compared with a five- year average of only 86 fish! And over 17,000 wild coho were caught and released, while this average has been only 263 fish.
Farther south into Georgia Strait the story was much the same- with some 2,271 Chinook salmon caught- about four time the five-year average. Another 6,700 fish were reported released- more than fifteen times the average. Near Vancouver and the mouth of the Fraser River, 2,316 hatchery released Coho salmon were reportedly caught- the five-year average for this area is 37 fish. The 7,194 wild coho that were caught and released are just about 72 times the recent average. Fish farms have clearly not had the negative effects on wild stocks of salmon as predicted by the many extreme environmentalists calling British Columbia their home, and other salmon stocks are benefiting from the technology developed by the salmon farming industry.
