October is salmon month at the Lang Creek facility and the salmon have started to return.
This year’s collection and enumeration of salmon will be vastly different, however, with the onset of COVID-19.
Ed Oldfield, president of Powell River Salmon Society, said October is when things start happening.
“We have the start of a new broodstock and the end of the last one,” said Oldfield. “It’s busy.”
The amount of volunteer activity at the hatchery has been significantly curtailed by the pandemic, making operation of the facility much more intricate than a normal year.
There are three hired staff, but it typically relies on 10,000 to 16,000 hours of volunteer help annually.
“Because of physical distancing and the transmission of COVID-19, we have curtailed our volunteer program,” said Oldfield. “We are trying to do this with as few people as possible, which is contrary to our history.
“Our three hired people will handle the vast majority of it and we’ll have a few people who have self-isolated fill in the void.”
Fulfilling the responsibilities with the return of salmon to Lang Creek will be tiring, but it will get done, said Oldfield.
Fish have started to return to the hatchery and Oldfield expects activity to pick up significantly.
“We have the first wave of them coming through with the rains that have come in,” said Oldfield. “We are expecting to see the first of the chinook in the next three weeks. We’ve probably got a couple of thousand coho coming through and up to 5,000 chum salmon. There will be a lot of fish flowing through this place in the next month and a half.”
Fish coming into the Lang Creek facility are sorted, and because of the way the facility is structured, all of the fish swim through the sorting shed, so all are counted and sorted. The largest proportion are released into Lang Creek and spawn naturally. The society has an annual allotment that it is allowed and it can keep up to 25 per cent of the fish for broodstock for the hatchery at the Catalyst paper mill.
Oldfield said an egg take will likely take place in the near future. He said hatchery staff monitor the fish taken for broodstock and when they are ready to spawn it’s “go time.”
“The fish tell us when we work,” said Oldfield. “It’s not a 9 to 5 job.
“Our resources are going to be really stretched. From my point of view, I have to take care of the people who work for the Powell River Salmon Society. You want to get a lot out of them this time of year but you don’t want to work them until they drop. This is a year like no other so we’ll be making it up as we go along.”
Oldfield is concerned with the COVID-19 pandemic. He said it would just take one transmission to shut down the operation.
“That’s always a bit scary,” he added.
Part of the success of the salmon society has been the great community support it receives, according to Oldfield. He said in addition to the many hours of volunteer help the community provides, community members provide donations, support the society’s education program, and they’ve provided advertising dollars for the annual tide guide, which is a major fundraiser.
“Powell River has been really good to us,” said Oldfield. “The problem we’re going to be facing is that with the lockdown, it’s really easy to lose track of the fact that the fish are here and need to be dealt with. Once they hatch, they are going to need to be fed. To do that we are going to need funding. Our ability to raise money is limited, like everybody else’s is.
“It provides really unusual challenges, but I take a lot of satisfaction in knowing that Powell River has been good to us.”
People wanting to support the salmon society financially can login at prsalmon.org and find a donation section on the home page. Money donated goes to general operations, providing food for the fish and workers to look after them. Oldfield said the society will likely have to get one more employee because there’s a limit to how much it can work current employees.
Powell River Salmon Society is funded in part by Fisheries and Oceans Canada, but funding has remained static for nearly 40 years and the cost of doing business has gone up during that time.
“It used to make up a majority of our budget but it’s now down to less than 70 per cent of our budget,” said Oldfield. “The funding stays the same and you’re actually losing ground.”
The society has become more reliant on the generosity of the community to underwrite its budget.
Oldfield said something that is always on his mind is a lot of people in Powell River enjoy fishing and enjoy the resource the hatchery is putting back into the marine environment.
“For those people, I’d like to remind them that chinook were not a natural fish to spawn in Lang Creek,” said Oldfield. “The Powell River Salmon Society introduced chinook to Lang Creek 25 to 30 years ago. If you are fishing around Powell River after the middle of August you’re catching the ones we put into the water. You might consider making a donation to the Powell River Salmon Society.
“There’s been some huge fish caught out here – a 43-pounder and a 33-pounder in the last two weeks. We have some big fish coming back. I think our biggest was 54 pounds, but that wasn’t this year. There’s nothing more exciting than a big fish.”
Oldfield said the salmon society has been successful and has gone from releasing a few hundred thousand fish to about two million fish a year into the ocean in the springtime, coming from the hatchery at the mill. The eggs are taken and incubated and raised in the rearing facilities at the mill before small fry are released into Duck Lake to imprint them. They go into Lang Creek and back out into the ocean, running the gauntlet of predators, such as kingfishers, herons, seagulls, sea lions and otters. It’s a treacherous journey for the tiny fish.
The return of the salmon is an exciting time for those at the hatchery. Oldfield said they know how many were put in the water the previous four years and have no idea whether they are going to get 200 or 2,000 back this year. Last year, for chinook, 1,927 returned and the year before it was 197, so it’s an annual mystery.
“I look at the creek today and it’s chock-full of fish, so I think it’s going to be a good year, but you never know,” said Oldfield. “There’s the excitement of coming here and looking in the water and seeing what our work has produced.”
While the society is not doing tours of the facility this year, people are welcome to go to the viewing areas and see the salmon heading upstream to spawn. There should be fish in the channel until the first week of November.
