quote:Originally posted by Autumn Ty-ee
I am not so sure about the run of Salmon in the Somass, Stamp and Sproat being a small run in the early 70's unless that is all that was left then. I have seen pictures from my Grandfather of him and my Father and Great Grand father catching lots of Chinook and large ones. Multiple 40 and 50 pounders on the same day. And they were not runs from farther down the inlet as they only had a row boat. I also once say an old video of a Comercial boat from i would say the late forties where they would be hundreds of fish dropping out of the net on to the ship deck. Now the documentery said they were Chinook but to me they looked like Sockeye. I also remember as kid growing up on Sproat Lake in the mid 70s fishing in the small creeks that drain into the lake and seeing 100s apon 100s of Coho in the water.
Autumn Ty-ee
You have to put the two things into perspective.......Native runs of salmon never trended much above 5000 fish....they know this from the research done in the 50's when the idea was first floated to enhance salmon on the Somass River. Chinook & coho weren't deemed to be present in significant numbers to justify the number of years it would take to create a much larger return, so they chose pinks instead. With a start of 1.6 million eggs, they were hoping to get a minimum return of 2% or aprox. 32,000 fish & build from there. Problem was, pinks, not being native to the Somass, just didn't take & the attempts were later abandoned for the less plentiful but more likely to succeed native chinook & coho. The results are the numbers you see today.....even though drastically reduced for the last 6-7 years, still far above what was originally there. Essentially, RCH is the salmon run now.........without it, the natural spawn simply wouldn't be able to carry the types of numbers that people have become used to & quite frankly, demand. The idea of wanting to put 30,000+ salmon on the spawning beds is noble, but hopelessly flawed. History has shown over the years that chinook survival from natural spawn contributes less than 5% to the total return. If they were to take 8 of the 50 million eggs they want in the river & put them into the hatchery, they could achieve significant returns in one cycle. It seems easy, so why don't they do it?? Simple, money. It's easier & cheaper to throw millions of eggs in the river & hope for the best than to raise them in the hatchery. Like I said, noble, but flawed......the chinook have two major factors working against them....geography & timing. Firstly, there is only so much spawning gravel in the upper river....90% of the fish spawn in the upper section from GCL down to Money's. With thousands of chinooks trying to spawn in such a relatively small area, they do quite a good job of digging up each others eggs & hurting their own cause.....throw in somewhere between 20-60,000 coho all spawning in the same small area after the chinooks are done & both summer & winter steelhead in the following spring, & you have a good case for not being the best thing to go first. It's a bad situation for the chinook, but it does have an upside.....the washed out eggs feed an array of animals & other fish...especially summer run steelhead. They are voracious feeders on the endless numbers of eggs washing downstream & provide an excellent fishery between mid October through till the end of November. When you put it all in perspective, the Stamp is doing exactly what Mother Nature designed her to do.....providing a natural salmon return of around 5000 fish....pretty much the carrying capacity for how nature designed the river. The kicker is, since man has artificially enhanced the run far beyond what nature designed the river to support, we have become used to years of big returns that can only be supported by the production from RCH. When those numbers go down, so does the return, & no amount of natural spawning is going to bring them back. Quite simply, if we want more chinook, we are going to have to either convince the Feds to pay for it or find ways to raise money for the hatchery through other means.