Probably not the smoothest fishing day today. Seven people, one crew, Lower river only, three trucks….almost.
We weren’t focusing on finding ripe fish given the week so far, the Chinook spawning seems to be late this year. Instead, given the slow start to natural spawning, we were focused on bringing fish back to the hatchery. I was also looking for three hatchery males for blood sampling, for someone’s research project back in Vancouver.
Two trucks left, I jumped in the third, the five ton. But we didn’t get far as it had an issue that wasn’t letting it past idle speed….which would mean it would take us about three hours to get up to Belarko. While a couple of people tried to get the truck back in action, the other two trucks were not heir way…almost.
One truck returned because one of the crew went to the nearby gas station to refuel, only to discover they were out of fuel and so they needed to backtrack and head all the way into Bella Coola town for fuel. Then one of the crew realized they’d forgotten their wader boots and so discovered our issue on returning to the site to retrieve them.
The two of us jumped into their truck with them and headed up towards the river entry spot. When we FINALLY got there, about an hour and a half late, we met back up with the other truck and all headed into Pacey’s to do some fishing.
The original intent had been to bring three hatchery origin males back to the hatchery for sampling tomorrow, but after losing the truck and larger transport tank, I had grabbed the syringes and blood tubes and popped them into a small cooler to do the blood sampling on the river.
We walked upriver with the raft, nets, and gear, made a set and sighed again over ALL the pinks in the river and pulled in about 18 females in that set. I got one hatchery male and took a blood sample. And then we picked pinks salmon, over and over and over.
There are pink in every condition. Fresh and ready to find a spawning partner, all the way down to in the process of decomposition and returning nutrients to the system.
They just wrap themselves up like little alligators and those damned little teeth nick and scratch you in a way that doesn’t seem like much until later int he day when your fingers just hurt from all the little micro-cuts. But damn they are tough….way tougher than the much larger Chinook.
That one set filled the transport tank and one crew member drove them back to the hatchery while we ate lunch and then headed back up river to make another set that saw us put another 18 or so fish into tubes. Oh, yes…and pick a ton of additional pinks out of the net. I also got one, only one, hatchery male Chinook to sample on the river, before we packed things into the raft and headed back to the access point. Two divers followed in the water, walking the fish in tubes in the river.
While we waited for the truck to return with a fresh tank of water I poked around in a shallow little side flow and was amazed that even in that tiny waterway, there were pink salmon spawning. There are so many of them that they are probably hunting anywhere for spots that other pinks haven’t already dug up.
Finally the transport truck returned and we loaded the second batch of Chinook brood into it, and then drove back to the hatchery to unload. The amazing thing was that, despite getting away over an hour late, our sets were so full that we still only spent three hours on the river before heading back.
And lastly, to round out the day, it was a short drive up the valley for dinner at a colleague’s house, followed by a badminton match on the lawn, she and I with a glass or wine in one hand, and a badminton racquet in the other…her son on the other side of the net. We didn’t do too badly, and little wine was spilled 😉