James C. Liu's Weblog

Tuesday September 01, 2009

Another great pink salmon summer

Odd number years mean lots of pink salmon that swim through the lower mainland waters of British Columbia to spawn. These salmon have evolved to have a 2-year life-cycle, and come back in hoards each season to start the cycle again. I've blogged about the subject in the past, and for my section of Lower Mainland waters - Howe Sound - the Squamish River basic supports some very large stocks.

There was some worry this year due to massive declines in sockeye salmon returns. The pathology isn't known, but the Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) thinks that something happened while the sockeye were at sea, as opposed to mortality in the rivers during either travel as young-of-year to the ocean, or as adults returning to spawn. Some research points to sea lice parasites as potential killers of young salmon on the way out to the ocean. The main cause, some believe are the BC salmon farms that have millions of penned up Atlantic salmon which act as a vector for creation and sustaining large numbers of sea lice. These fish farms, having proximity to river mouths and salt water estuaries, say researchers, will cause mortality of many young salmon entering salt water and hanging out near the pens.

Because there are man tens of millions of young salmon, for me, the probability of infection of such a large population set of, say, just the sockeye salmon, is unlikely. Why wouldn't it impact all the other species? The rebuttal to that arguement is that it only takes 1 or 2 sea lice to attach to a small young sockeye to cause mortality. However, it would argue to the fact that we should have seen this happening back in other years, since farming has been going on for years. My theory is more simple. I think the variance and decline is probably due to predation on large schools by increased numbers of top level predators. With new protections on marine mammals, their populations have grown. Seal/Sea Lion populations have doubled, quadrupled, or even more in the last 30 years. Several decades ago, the Orca population, for example, had declined to just about 200 that migrate the west coast from Monterey to Alaska. They've more than doubled now in the last 3 decades. They number 500 now according to some conference I attended at CSU Monterey Bay. My back-of-the-napkin calculation suggests, just a few hundred more orca adults means mroe than 70 million pounds per year of fish protein, and what better schooling species near shore than salmon?

There are other predators that are moving up the coast from South America/Mexico - the large Humboldt Squid. These live just 1 - 2 years and grow from tiny specs to 30 - 60 lbs in that short period. They have ravenous appetites and estimates are between 4 - 40 million occupy the waters of Northern CA and southern Oregon. They come up to the shallows after dark to feed and are efficient predators. If salmon are migrating south in the Pacific, many could fall victim to such predation. And also, due to climate fluctuations, NorthEast Pacific waters in the last few years have gone colder with less upwelling in key areas, resulting in lower smelt and plankton production. Such small changes could result in far less food production in the oceans for fish like Sockeye that have major deep red colour from a diet rich in krill.

Regardless of reason for the sockeye decline, the estimates by DFO did keep the pink salmon season open this year, and I headed north with my Family to take advantage of the fishing. With the pinks, there was a scare when we arrived August 1st. Only a few had arrived along the shores of Howe Sound. Reports of sporadic catches said they had started to come back, but back in 2007, and 2005, my fishing logs showed the big slugs of fish started arriving by between July 25th and July 29th. There was some discussion on blogs that DFO might close the pink season this year as well.

But the moment I waded into the waters of Howe Sound near Furry Creek, the cold made my legs numb after just 10 minutes. I don't recall the waters ever this cold in all years I've done summer fishing since 2000 at Furry Creek. And mind you, prior to our arrival in Canada, the lower Mainland had been experiencing a heat wave for 2 weeks. And certainly, the shoreline waters were quiet warm right on the incoming tide. But at the high tide, after colder waters churned a bit, the layers just below the surface were noticeably colder than years before as I could remember. My suspicion was that such colder temperatures will reduce the rate of food production of plankton and krill. And logically, it should mean that the pinks will be a little late, and they might be a little smaller this year. In past years, like 2007, we were catching lots of 6 lb'ers. Big by pink standards. We even had one top 10 lbs back then. And, as if to confirm my suspicions, for the first 5 days, the salmon fishing was decent, but slower than usual and the fish were smaller. I still limited out (2 per day) each day, but it took a lot of precise casts and great timing to spot the salmon swirling just below the surface at a distance. I certainly was hoping that the El Nino that is said to be in full swing for the equatorial Pacific waters and now affecting Southern California will eventually have some impact to raise more northern Pacific water temperatures. But I'm not sure if anyone has computed the latency or impact of El Ninos on Vancouver waters.

August 6 arrived. And that morning, I walked out and waded into the water, and while a 10 mph wind was blowing onto shore, frustrating the 2 lonely fly casters, throwing a homemade casting spoon which I custom painted, yielded 6 salmon in just 15 minutes. I kept the last 2 fish and headed home for breakfast. The slug of fish had come in. And from that point on, regardless of time of day, every hour, and sometimes twice an hour, some where along a 1/4 mile stretch of shoreline, the salmon would arrive in close and start to jump, and for 10 minutes, anything pink tossed at most 5 times towards any prior swirl would yield a strike by a pink salmon. The kids were even out fishing as well and catching their limits.

The fish were indeed a little smaller on average, just 3 - 4 lbs. each. And this was the first year I saw returning salmon that were just barely legal size (30cm - 1ft!). Usually, no fish would ever be shorter than 20 inches. But a number of anglers in my party hooked, landed and release some really small pinks. At first, I thought these were young steelhead or coho. But they were indeed mature pinks with tiny scales, and one male even evolving a hump.

We caught many fish and lost many as well, due to barbless hooks and poor technique. But no matter, the fight was fun and the kids had a great time. We had 4 families staying with us over the two weeks we fished up there and most everyone who fished did catch fish. Top kid angler award will have to go to my daughter Amanda, who is 7 this year. She had incredible fish fighting skills landing 90% of the fish hooked. While my son, who is 9, and the one who recently earned his cub scout fishing belt loop and pin, lost almost all the fish he hooked, landing only 2 fish into the net during the entire 2 week period. During one morning run, he hooked 6 fish and lost all 6 due to poor technique and poor rod handling skills. And on the 7th fish, he finally got lucky and his Dad (me) with a big net managed to land the salmon before it got away. Now that they're back in California and school just started, Amanda is telling all her brother's friends how she schooled him when it came to fishing.

September 01, 2009 05:30 PM PDT Permalink