Langara Island Drowning

Ok, so I got the full scoop on this tragic event up on the fishing grounds.  The news clipping said a man and woman went in the water, with the man drowning and the woman surviving.  I was concerned for my friends and people I have met while working up there, so finding out more information has helped.  Nobody I knew was in the incident, but people I am working with were directly affected.

It was a 17′ self guided boat from the Marabel with a father and an adult daughter aboard.  They were at the lighthouse, which means there were swells of some size, the current rips through there and there are shallow areas where things can roil around pretty good.  All told, a fun spot to fish in fair conditions.  I’m not sure if they were fishing there or just passing through, but somehow they flipped the boat and they were both in the water.  The daughter made the decision to stay with the boat rather than swim out to try and help her dad who was not at the boat.  Somehow a mayday was called, and a young guide from NIL responded and pulled the lady out of the water.  The man was then pulled out, and another guide from NIL administered mouth to mouth and CPR on the man, to no avail.  That guide subsequently quit in the following days.

The not so surprising part of all this?  Both the man and woman were not wearing flotation.  It’s not brain surgery folks, people die when they fall in the ocean.  It’s avoidable and tragic and stupid.  I remember when Bob Gainey’s daughter drowned a couple of years ago in the Atlantic gulf stream.  In those warm waters she would have survived 24 hours before succumbing to exposure, but she didn’t have flotation on when she got swept over board and the rough seas took her down.  Wear flotation on the water, ’nuff said.

Back in town, new post soon

Made it back from Haida Gwaii yesterday after a week of guiding.  It was very cold and very wet and was the worst fishing I had ever seen up there.  Among the guides, there were long faces all round.  I pretended like it would be old times and that worked to my advantage for a couple of days, but then I came crashing back to earth.  However, summing up the week, doing the rock star tour was awesome; it was great to catch up with old friends, make a little cash, and do some fishing.

This piece by Andrew Baxter has got me fired up to write a new post that will be about ‘peak oil’ and energy.  Basically, it will be a long time before we run out of fossil fuels on this planet, regardless of what has been happening in the last few years with the price of oil.  But doom and gloom sells no?  The reality is that there is a bountiful deposit of energy on this planet, and no matter what we do in our lifetimes it will not run out.  More to follow.

It’s going to be a busy summer for me with various trips planned in and around about 4 more weeks of guiding, so I’ll post when I can!  Still working on the name…

Pacific Salmon

I’ll often be asked if their is any hope for the salmon stocks of the Pacific.  With certainty, I always say that Pacific salmon are in long term decline.  I’ve worked at a sport fishing lodge for the past 9 summers; most of my direct knowledge is with chinook salmon, the largest of the Pacific salmon and highly prized by anglers, but I do have anecdotal knowledge of pink and coho salmon as well.  It’s not a straight line decline, but fishing is not as good as it was 10 years ago, and it’s not as good at it was 20 years ago.

In the recent past, Langara Island (the location of the lodge I worked/work at) used to support a chinook salmon commercial  fishery.  The big blow to the chinook runs came with the adoption of GPS technology in the ’80s.  It allowed the commercial boats to systematically target a run of salmon as it migrated down the coast, where in the past you’d have to pick a likely spot and wait for a run to swim by.  Naturally fishing regulations were lagging the new technology, and it was boomtime for catching chinooks.  But with a flooded market, fishermen had to catch more chinook just to pay their bills, and so a real death spiral took off.

These days, the commercial boats are seen much less and the fleet is a quarter of what is used to be.  Commercial salmon fishing is a sunset industry with an aging workforce and It’s been described to me as a hobby fishery, where the boat is owned by the captain, and the likelihood of making a profit is small.  As for the sport fishing lodges, they are squeezing a much higher dollar value out of every salmon caught, but the focus at higher end lodges is shifting away from the variables (such as salmon) and moving towards luxury accomodation, eco-tourism and wilderness excursions.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) is responsible for this fantastic resource, but they are beholden to the various interests involved, that being First Nations, commercial and sport fishermen.  This results in an oversight body that seems intent on just managing the decline as opposed to halting or reversing the decline.  DFO is a political organization which doesn’t have the teeth or werewithal to perform its mandate in regards to Pacific salmon; they will not solve or alleviate the problems facing the salmon.

Ocean conditions play a large part in the health of salmon stocks.  If food is plentiful, salmon grow quickly and grow strong and then are more likely to return to the river to spawn.  However, ocean conditions are clearly out of our control except in the long term.  River habitat, harvest limits, hatchery funding and aquaculture are under our control.  Salmon are a fairly robust species with the potential to recover quickly, but they need a chance.  River habitat must be maintained and improved, a reduction in fishing limits for all parties must be considered and implemented, hatchery funding sustained or increased, and fish farming practices need to be fundamentally altered. Think Salmon and let’s keep them around for the future.