Today was the end of a day-and-a-half of an all-staff meeting. However…I had …more or less…invited myself to the next half-and-a day of a meeting of a subset of the participants of the first meeting, the community program meeting. We all work towards the same end, just on a different scale, massively different in some cases. Where the sites I usually work with produce fish for enhancement in the millions or more, the people I was with this afternoon work with groups that enhance fish at a community level, sometimes just a few thousand fry released. Some of them don’t do any fish culture at all and work on stewardship and restoration projects throughout the province in an effort to improve the habitat for salmon that return to spawn, and for the juveniles during their freshwater rearing phase.
I figured that I could rationalize sticking around for the second meeting since I am often a resource for enough of them unofficially, and I “think” they (mostly) like me, which meant that I could probably crash their party without too much opposition.
However, I didn’t actually think I’d be the only party crasher.
And, I probably should have asked for an agenda before arriving, because then I’d have been better prepared to go on a half day boat ride up and down the Fraser River to visit some restoration sites. In the end the field trip was on a whale watching boat and it was a beautiful day.
But…I’m a boater, and I’ve been on boats in less appropriate dress than I was today, so it was fine. I did borrow a jacket with a bit better wind protection and then spent most of the outing on the top of the boat out in the wind, and the sun, when it came out, felt so good on my face.
And it was amazing. And the people were awesome. And no one seemed to mind that I am crashing their party. I think.
The first site we visited was the jetty at the end of the Steveston jetty that runs 8km out to Sand Heads. It was interesting to visit this restoration project since, just a few weeks ago, I was at a meeting at UBC at which a presentation was made on breaches that were being put into the jetty to improve conditions for outmigrating juvenile salmon from the Fraser. Normally these fish are more or less blown out of the river into the chuck and the thinking is that they would benefit from access to channels that would normally flow through the mudflats down at the estuary where the Fraser meets the ocean; an area that the jetty makes inaccessible. Today we are recognizing that many of the structures that we built to protect vessel traffic also hamper the natural migrations of many species.
You can learn more here –> Breaking new estuary ground on the Steveston Jetty
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