The Klahoose water taxi brought 52,000 Chum eggs to Squirrel Cove yesterday. ‘Goat 1’ tied up at the Klahoose dock around 11 AM. 

“The eggs come from Tla’amin Fish Hatchery in Powell River. I think the amount is probably based on what they get on returns, because they have their own creeks and rivers where they get their Chum eggs,” explained Klahoose Fisheries Officer Byron Harry.

While Harry drove off to meet the boat, with Ian Douglas and Dave Ewert from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), Cortes Currents waited with local streamkeepers Cec and Christine Robinson at the Klahoose hatchery. 

Cec Robinson: “The Chum run this year has been spotty. Some places, in addition to Cortes, had very poor results, but they got enough over in Lund to be able to share with us, which is wonderful beause that was our only shot this year at getting some fresh life into this particular cycle year.” 

“They’ve been holding those in the hatchery over at Tla’amin until they develop to the eyed egg stage.  There’s just a little window where they’re tough enough to handle, otherwise you can damage them.  They keep track of the water temperature and it tells them exactly what stage of development the eggs are at.” 

“The eggs are arriving in a cooler within the next hour. The idea will be to divide those up and ‘not have all the eggs in one basket.’ There will be 15,000 going into an incubation box directly in Basil Creek. There will be 15,000 retained in the incubation box in the Klahoose hatchery,  those will eventually be released into Basil. So that’s 30,000 in total that are dedicated to Basil Creek and we will take the other 20,000 over to Whaletown Creek today and put them in an incubation box.”

Cortes Currents: What happened to this year’s Chum run? 

Cec Robinson: “As far as Cortes goes, it was a non-event. Certainly a half a dozen or a dozen fish showed up at each of the four streams and maybe there were a few more that didn’t quite make it.”

“The seals know when the salmon are coming, so they show up  for their share, which is natural and good. When there’s several hundred fish and the seals eat a few, that’s fine. But when there’s 8 fish and they eat 8, then it’s unfortunate. But I don’t think there were very many because with low water in the creeks like we had they couldn’t get up.”

“What you would expect to see is fish trying to get up. Right at the very mouth, they would be thrashing around, getting as far as they could and showing anxious behaviour. They’d be jumping and rolling. There would be a lot more predator activity if there was any quantity of fish to eat, but really it was pretty quiet. It just didn’t really happen this year. We don’t know for sure why. They are out at sea for four years.” 

Christine Robinson: “We saw 2 or 3 jumpers in Whaletown in early October, mid-October. Certainly off the Hollyhock beach, there were some jumpers.  There were sea lions cruising by the mouth of Basil Creek, but none of those indicated that there was a substantial amount of Chum pooling, preparing and waiting to come into the creeks.”

Cec Robinson: “Over on Quadra, I know that at one of the streams (Hyacinthe Creek – ed) there were a couple of hundred that just perished at the mouth of the stream because they simply couldn’t get up. They tried and they died.”

In a previous interview, Matthew Clarke from DFO said that when Chum cannot get up a stream, they will move on to another one.

Cec Robinson: “I believe that’s true, but I don’t actually know to what degree it happens.”

Christine Robinson:  “Cortes is right in the middle of the northern end of the Salish Sea. If they had Chum straying from the creeks on our west side – James Creek,  Whaletown and Hanson – would they stray to Quadra? Or to Read?  We’ve actually got calls out to talk to some of the local stream keepers to see if their Chum count was higher, which might indicate that happened. On the east side of Cortes, Basil Creek here – would they stray to up into Desolation Sound? Or to the Mainland?  That’s still   a question that’s being explored and we don’t have the answers yet.” 

“The other thing to know about the Chum lifecycle is that people on paper talk about it being a 3, 4, or 5 year life cycle. So would this have been a year that we might not have seen Chum come. There’s just so many mysteries with Chum, with any of the salmon because they’re out in the ocean for most of their life cycle.”  

Harry and the two men from DFO returned not long after that. They lifted a large cooler off the back of their truck and proceeded into the hatchery. The eggs were in ten cylinders,each containing 5,000 eggs. Three of these cylinders were put into a five gallon pail full of an iodine solution. After they were disinfected, the eggs were poured into a water-trough. 

Byron Harry: “We don’t really have to do much until maybe end of January, or February.  They’re eyed right now and we wait till they hatch. We have a few things that we do after that, which would be just removing the lid,  some of the layers that are underneath  the eggs so they can have more room to swim around. They’ll be there until about April.”

Our next stop was Basil Creek, where another 15,000 eggs were placed in an incubation box. 

Christine Robinson:  “I would just like to comment on how valuable and helpful it is that landowners adjacent to any of the salmon creeks are included in what enhancement and salmon counting we are doing. We’re particularly lucky with the landowners on either side of Basil Creek as it empties into the bay. They’re incredibly supportive and helpful. They have been very supportive of educational school groups coming and have just been welcoming to any of the enhancement work that we’ve done specifically in Basil Creek. Without that, we would have no access to the creek where we’re doing this work. The same thing I think can be said for Hanson Creek, the Fulton family at the mouth of the creek have always been interested in what’s happening. They’re often the ones who first tip us off when the fish first come in.”

In a recent interview, Lynne Jordan described some of the massive Chum runs that Whaletown experienced during the 1930s, 40s and 50s. The Robinsons agreed.

Christine Robinson: “… maybe even through into the 1960s. I’d have to go back and look at numbers that are on file. That certainly predated our time here. Those are anecdotal stories that we’ve been also told. That’s true for all the creeks, but Whaletown had enough coming in that there was an excess of Chum. They were probably spawning on top of each other. Certainly locals, I think, felt quite free and comfortable to use the carcasses after they’d spawn to pitchfork onto gardens. I think there was maybe even concerns about the quality of the water.”

“Those are the historic runs that you can find everywhere on the coast, and there’s been terrible factors that have overlaid each other that have affected these numbers.” 

Cec Robinson: “The Matthews family, that’s on one side of Whaletown Creek, said that those numbers shut off just like a light switch when the first culvert was put in there, the old small pipe which has been replaced. It was night and day. There were fish, fish, fish and then there’s no fish to speak of, been that way ever since.  Those culverts are just deadly and that situation exists all up and down Vancouver Island. It cuts off the majority of the spawning area and all those streams because the main road is crossing all those streams down close to the saltwater. So the fish can get up to the road and they don’t get past it because that’s where all the culverts are.” 

Christine Robinson: “The other factor we were talking about is the eelgrass beds in Whaletown Bay. The natural productive eelgrass beds that, prior to the invasion of the Canada geese, were the nurseries for all of the Chum and Coho salmon when they come out of the creeks, and  before they go out to sea. Given that we’ve lost most of those native natural eelgrass beds due to the predation of the Canada geese, there is another factor that is really adversely affecting the health of any returning salmon.”

The conversation continued after the mic was turned off, and at one point Christine Robinson mentioned 14 factors contributing to the decline of the province’s once great salmon population.

Cortes Island Streamkeepers are concerned with protecting and enhancing the population that remains. 

Cortes Currents did not accompany them on to Whaletown, where the remaining Chum eggs were placed in another incubation box. 

Top image credit: Taking the cooler full of chum eggs back to the truck – Photo by Roy L Hales

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