It’s still too early to tell, but many signs are pointing to a healthy return of sockeye salmon in the Fraser River this summer.
“The forecast for Fraser River sockeye is in the range of seven to 11 million,” Barry Rosenberger, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans area director for Interior B.C., told The Province on Tuesday.
“In the Columbia River this year, it’s three times the forecast, and most of them are bound for Canada.
“Right now, the Skeena River is coming back at about twice the forecast,” he said.
Those numbers buck the trend of recent years’ disappointing data for the much-desired sockeye.
Last summer’s sockeye season was a disaster. While 10.6 million Fraser River sockeye were forecast to return, the final tally reached a mere 1.4 million — the worst sockeye season in 50 years.
Rosenberger said the DFO estimates three-quarters of the Early Stuart run has entered the Fraser and 87,000 of them have been accounted for. The 2010 forecast is for 110,000 in total.
He said the Early Stuart run is historically the smallest of the stock groupings on the entire Fraser River system.
Every year, they must swim up the Fraser and Nechako rivers to their spawning grounds around Stuart Lake, 150 kilometres west of Prince George.
“The Early Stuart run will still be going on for another few weeks,” said Rosenberger.
It is rarely opened for commercial fishermen, and the planned closure for Early Stuarts for the native fishery “would be over at the end of this weekend,” said Rosenberger.
But Ernie Crey, fisheries adviser for the Sto:lo Tribal Council, said that opening isn’t soon enough.
The Sto:lo are the dominant First Nation on the Fraser River between Yale and Fort Langley. There is no formal agreement between the Sto:lo and the DFO for this year’s salmon season, he said.
Crey said a small number of Sto:lo plan to conduct a “dry-rack” fishery, possibly as soon as Wednesday.
“This would be a discrete fishery by the elders and their families at 15 fishing stations in the [Fraser] Canyon above Yale.”
They intend to catch about 3,000 Early Stuart sockeye and dry them on racks in a traditional native custom, said Crey.
“Our folks would have liked to have gotten in earlier,” he said.
“The drying conditions in the canyon above Yale are ideal right now — the wind conditions and the temperature are right and what’s more, the pests like the flies and bees are not there.”
Flies and bees spoil the catch as they feed on fish as they dry on the racks, he said.
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