Yes, we can fish all year round. I'd like to clear up some possible confusion and add an update.
In the time period from April 1 until July 15 we love to fish in the channels and inlets on the mainland side of our area. This includes a wonderful scenic trip and requires a full day. This is really a favourite time for me.
If you only have a half day available you can choose a mix of coho fishing and participating in science research for chinooks. We will be measuring fish for length, taking a tissue samples for DNA which will identify the salmon's home river, and tagging each fish with a tiny electronic tag. You will have the full experience of chinook fishing but no keeping. All the chinooks will handled minimally and released carefully. Cohos are smaller than chinooks and until September only hatchery marked cohos can be retained. The update is that in recent years very good numbers of coho have come back to live with us in Georgia Strait and lots of fun when you find a school of them.
There is no downside at all if you are planning a day trip. The fishing is good as ever. However, there is no retention of Chinooks in our nearest waters in the period April 1 to July 15.
It may seem odd to have restrictive fishing regulations when
Chinooks appear to be so abundant. The reason for these regulations is to
conserve certain weak stocks of Chinooks which migrate though our area in the spring
and early summer. Actually only a small
minority of those particular fish migrate past us on the Inside Passage while
the majority travel in the open ocean and turn in around the south end of
Vancouver Island, heading for the Fraser River. Those fish swim
upstream in summer, far into the interior of BC to spawn in the tributaries of the upper Fraser. They have many challenges which are unrelated to fishing ;
droughts with low water levels, warm water, excessive logging, landslides, chemical
pollution from Vancouver, and more. Furthermore, there are two types of
chinooks, ones that go to sea in the same spring that they hatch and ones that spend
a whole year in the freshwater streams before descending to the ocean.
The stream type chinooks are having trouble coping in our warmer modern world.
The ocean passages and inlets on the mainland side of our fishing area are away from the migration routes of those challenged chinooks, so we are still allowed retention of chinooks there during the April 1 to July15 time period.
