Here is my letter, cut and paste, plagiarize, copy, whatever it takes but send a letter!
Maybe some "sporties" following these guys with video cameras?
When you release the smolts they feel like your pets, and to see the disrespect of a deck hand kicking a dead one over the side makes me furious.
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I have been a volunteer worker and a constant financial supporter of numerous salmon enhancement projects in Campbell River and the adjacent mainland coast for the past thirty years. I have worked for hours in muddy stream bottoms, shovelled gravel, broken through brush and dodged grizzly bears just help improve pink salmon habitat and runs. As an ex commercial fisher and avid sports fisher, I felt it was my duty to put something back into the resource.
Lately, I am rethinking this. If theses fishers won’t comply with regulations, why should I bother?
Do you have any idea what it makes me feel like when I see a video of how I wasted of my efforts and money?
I was present in Johnstone Straits last month during the native food fishery. The local First Nations want only sockeye, but must weed through ten times as many pinks, coho and chinook to get there allowable harvest (which I don’t begrudge them). I witnessed one seiner dump 500+ dead pinks to retain 50 sockeye. This has been going on for years, during every “food fish” set. This fishery has to be more closely monitored as does the commercial fishery.
Commercial fishers think of “recovery tanks” as a joke. If they put fish in them, they have to clean them, creating more work, diverting effort that could be used to make money. Unwanted salmon are treated worse than footballs, allowed to die on deck and then kicked into the ocean.
The only time any mention was made of this problem locally, was a number of years ago when a native seiner dumped thousands of dead pinks in the Discovery Harbour. The fish sunk to the bottom, but once rotted (after a couple of weeks) began to float to the surface of the marina. The thousands of dead fish were pushed into Discovery Passage and washed up on local beaches for days. The smell of the marina and beaches was unbearable.
Most times, the dead bycatch just sinks, and is consumed by local wildlife, and no one is any wiser that 100 or 1000 or ten thousand salmon were killed for no reason.
As someone who helped rebuild the Oyster River pink salmon run from close to extinction, I feel enraged, disgusted, sickened by these practices. Why do I bother? Why does anyone? Why would we continue?
Does anyone with the power to monitor the fisheries have the will to stop this slaughter? Don’t tell us, show us!
Signed; An outraged enhancement volunteer