Popular Pinks for the Pier cancelled because of good returns
Neil Cameron / Campbell River Courier-Islander, January 8, 2014
The Pinks for the Pier program for Campbell River has been cancelled.
But in a sense that is a good thing.
The program involved putting about 700,000 pink salmon from the Quinsam Hatchery into net pens on Campbell River's waterfront to help them transition from fresh to salt water.
It was also designed to imprint the salmon on the waterfront area of the city to create a from-shore fishery and which enhanced opportunities from Discovery Pier when the pinks returned.
But recent returns of pink salmon to the Campbell/Quinsam Rivers system - including 2013's historic run of over one million fish - have precluded the necessity for the program.
The original intent was to have the net pens functioning for years of low abundance.
The Campbell River Salmon Foundation had helped fund the program for the last few years.
"It's been proven that rearing them for a couple of weeks (in the net pens) will increase their survival," Quinsam Hatchery Manager Dave Ewart said of the program. "They've actually imprinted on the Quinsam River water because they've incubated there for seven months, but holding them in the pens for two or three weeks and rearing them, doubles their size and gives them a better chance of survival.
"They do tend to have a bit of that imprinting from the release site so that when they do come back, early in the summer as adults, they're looking for the river and they come by and hang around the waterfront because they've got a bit of a memory of this. They hang around here for a while in the summer time. The whole idea was to generate a recreational fishery here near the Fishing Pier." Ewart also said the hatchery would be keeping the "Pinks for the Pier" project in future management plans, but would definitely be skipping this year.
