I had another trip out into the field last week. An early ferry, followed by stops at the marine station and three hatcheries on my way up-Island, before turning west and crossing to the outer coast for a couple of days of work at one of my west coast sites. I often feel badly that I don’t get out to the far flung sites as often as I’d like, usually only once a year. If I lived closer I’d be there more often. But then I’d be farther away from somewhere else.
For now I’ll just appreciate that I have the opportunity to visit some pretty spectacular sport in BC and work with some pretty amazing people while there.
The purpose for this trip was to collect eggs and milt from Chinook salmon on the Burman River, a river that lies at the head of Muchalat Inlet. Getting there involves a combination of logging road by truck and boat, or simply boat. Either way takes just under two hours.
One of the perks of my job is that I get to get out of the office, as much as I like really. That sounds like a good thing, but it really does depend on the time of year, because once we get past mid September, the weather becomes a bit unpredictable and, even out here in September, it can be cold, and wet, and miserable.
On Thursday morning, we drove from the hatchery into Gold River, where we met up with three boats. In all, between hatchery staff and volunteers from the watershed society, we were about sixteen people trying to catch up to 100 pairs of Chinook. The goal was to do one to one crosses, keep them separated in incubation, and test the parental DNA to see if any were strays. And full stray crosses would be culled and we would begin a program to slowly clean up the genetics of the stock.
We weren’t as successful as we’d hoped though, and in the end we only collected 27 pairs. The eggs and milt were bagged and stored in coolers for the trip back to the hatchery, which, this year, was to be by helicopter. As the helicopter landed, Lyndy asked me if I would go back with the gametes to help the remaining staff back at the hatchery.
I got to take rapid transit back to the hatchery. So instead of the close to two hours, it only took me about 20 minutes 🙂
Given the low numbers of fish collected, and the impending rain coming over the weekend, which would bring the chum into the river and collection would need to begin, it was decided to give the river another shot, and see if we could collect some of the green females and transport them back to the hatchery. It meant loading transport tanks onto a boat, and another onto a trailer. Four boats, two trucks and a trailer, and about a dozen people, all went back up to the Burman the next day.
We made three sets, and came up empty. Jacob flew the drone and found that the fish had all moved up river past a log jam, to where we couldn’t get in.
It was a bust. So much effort for so little return. That’s just the way it goes sometimes.
There was a young guy working on casual at the site and I’d had an interesting conversation with him the night before. He was absolutely new to fisheries work, was the son of a friend of someone working at the facility, and available on short notice for some work. When I asked him how he liked the work, he told me that he thought everyone should spend some time at a hatchery. He said that he had no idea how much work it took to make fish for other people to fish for, and that he had an entirely new appreciation for fisheries. We may not have collected any fish that day, but that conversation was worth the trip.
And so I sat on the back of the boat, in the sunshine and cold wind, and took the long ride all the way back to Tlupana Inlet, and it was a beautiful and flat calm sea. And I contemplated the environment as we passed salmon farms, small little dots on a giant body of water, and yet they cause so much consternation in people who have never even seen one. It reminded me of Kyle’s comments on people’s misunderstanding of fisheries work. We love to bash that which we know nothing about.
These trips have a functional purpose, but they also act as a bit of a mental reset button.