Lodge owner fears fishing ban will kill his business
Dan Gerak says the sparkling waters of the upper Pitt River are turning dark from a healthy return of spawning sockeye salmon this summer.
Yet the owner of Pitt River Lodge protests that his clients — many from the U.S. and some from Europe — cannot fish for even one of them because of a blanket sportfishing ban for salmon on the lower Fraser River.
“This river is plugged with salmon,” he said in an interview. “We have the biggest runs we’ve probably seen in 10 years. They put in the closure and didn’t even come up to see what’s happening here. It seriously affects my business. They put on the closure for no reason.
“It’s crazy. They’ve had way worse runs than this before and they never shut it down.”
Jennifer Nener, Fisheries and Oceans Pacific region salmon director, said in response that the federal government is taking a cautionary approach given only about 250,000 early summer sockeye are expected to work their way up the Fraser — half of original estimates. Even catch-and-release fishing can result in fish mortality, she noted, adding that a First Nations fishery on the Pitt River system had been shut down.
Gerak’s operation specializes in catch-and-release fishing, taking clients down river on rafts to fish off remote gravel bars. They can still fish for trout in the river, carefully releasing any sockeye incidentally caught.
“I can’t stop my business or I’ll go bankrupt,” he said. “You try to avoid the salmon, but there’s so many in the river. People come here to fish salmon.”
Gerak said part of the reason behind the Pitt’s success is that the sockeye don’t have far to travel from the Pacific Ocean and that the river is cooled by glacial melt.
“The water levels here are nor- mal, with cool temperatures,” he said. Much of the sockeye destined for the upper Pitt have been hatchery raised.
On Tuesday, the Pacific Salmon Commission announced the Fraser River discharge at Hope is 2,925 cubic metres a second, about 14 per cent below the historic average. The temperature of the Fraser near Yale is 20.6 Celsius, 2.6 degrees above average.
“Sustained exposure of sockeye to Fraser River water temperatures in this range has been shown to cause severe stress and early mortality,” the commission warned in a news release. The commission has estimated total sockeye returns could be about one million on the Fraser, which would be one of the lowest in a century. Only in 1918 and 1943 have the returns been lower, said John Field, executive secretary of the commission.
Gerak is among several commercial guides on the Pitt River system. The wild upper portion of the river where the salmon spawn is north of the top end of Pitt Lake, and is not connected by road to the rest of Metro Vancouver.
The federal closure last Thursday of all recreational fishing for salmon — including chinook and possibly chum when they arrive later in the year — is taking place so that sockeye aren’t inadvertently caught while other salmon species are being fished.