Releasing 5,000 Chum fry back into Basil Creek
Cortes Currents
English - April 21, 2022 12:07 - 6 minutes - 14.8 MBNews cortes island discovery islands quadra food security energy indigenous nations Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - More than 20 people gathered at the Klahoose hatchery in Squirrel Cove to watch around 5,000 Chum fry be released back into Basil Creek on Wednesday, April 20, 2022. Six of them were women and girls from the Klahoose village, who came to sing a prayer song. Seven were homeschool students, enrolled in the Partners in Education (PIE) program, who came with their mothers. There were also a handful of Cortes Island streamkeepers, three Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) personal and two reporters.
The salmon fry were survivors.
Klahoose Fisheries Officer Byron Harry explained that close to 20,000 chum eggs had been inside in-stream incubation boxes, in Basil Creek, before a combination of heavy snowfalls and winter rains caused the creek to rise.
The water was too high for the Cortes Island streamkeepers to approach, the first time they tried to check the boxes.
“By the time that stream came down enough to get at them, they were in fact, mostly smothered with gravel and silt that had washed down the creek in I'd say, unprecedented amounts really,” said streamkeeper Cec Robinson. “Anyway, there was a rescue effort and, I guess it was closer to 5,000, perhaps that we managed to salvage from the silted in boxes in the creek.”
The fry have been at the Klahoose hatchery for the past four weeks.
They were about to be returned to the creek.
As everyone waited for DFO, a number of children and adults gathered to watch the fry school together in the hatchery trough.
“They're used to darkness because we have a cover on the troughs all the time. They're just trying to hide, and get away from any movement that's happening about the water,” explained Harry.
The fry were scooped up in nets and a relay of volunteers carried bucket fulls to where a fish transport tank was waiting.
A DFO truck had hauled the tank across, from the Quinsam Hatchery in Campbell River, on the ferry.
When the tank was full, everyone got in their cars and drove down to Basil Creek. Most of the vehicles parked close to the Squirrel Cove General Store, but the hatchery vehicle parked over the culvert at Basil Creek.
Two of the DFO proceeded to scoop the fry into waiting buckets, which volunteers transported to the creek.