Vedder River Boxing Day Derby - a bust - no steelhead

Here on the Sunshine Coast at a salmon enhancement hatchery we had permission to enhance the Steelhead on the Rainy River and Chapman Creek. We had a couple of the guys that were trained to air spawning at the Abottsford trout hatchery and we did for a couple of years (I think we had permission to take 20,000 eggs), after a couple of years we were told to stop air spawning because of the off chance of getting stuck by the needle and getting an air embolism. After that we bonked them when they were ready. The Rainy river had 15-20,000 smolts released one year, there wasn't a up tic in the adults return (we had a fish ladder with a trap and were able to count them quit accurately.
 
Almost every fish so far this year has been a hatchery. Have been out almost everyday and between friends in the know who are out everyday we know of/caught 9 wilds with 2 of those wilds being recaptures. These wild numbers are for all of December as well.

Using the Wally hall (hero) derby is a decent indication of what is in the river as almost every fish that gets caught gets weighed in. However the wild component at this current time is very very poor. But obviously the tackle stores and multimedia voices are not addressing those issues as they still need to make money off a depleted resource.

Another concern is the amount of predation marks that we have seen on fish this year, almost every fish brought to hand this year has had some sort of a seal bite on it. Would love to our FN friends get paid to take care of any seal within freshwater in the Fraser and it’s tribs.

The little push of 20-30 hatchery fish that came in with the high water last week has been killed off. Odd fish here and there now.

While nowhere near the extinction level of the gold, one has to wonder how far we can push the balance of the most pressurized stock of wild steelhead in B.C.

A big thanks to Dave and a few others who are actually putting in some work and trying to address some of these issues before there is nothing left to exploit!
 
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Port Eliza Fishing said:
There were 29 fish weighed in by January 14th last year, and 18 this year in the Wally Hall Jr derby. While the Boxing day Derby was a bust and the numbers are down it doesn't seem the run is gone like the Gold winter run.
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The amount of fish weighed in at the derby more represents the success of the hatchery workers + fresh and salt water survival.

It’s pretty impressive how much hatchery fish return given the 80 wild fish they take. I think something like 175 fish were weighed in last year.

It does not mean the wild fish population is that successful far from it.
 
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