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Mother Nature’s helpers
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009 by GetawayBC.com
It’s no secret the Kitimat River offers some of the best fishing in the province.
It’s also no secret we owe that to our hatchery.
That’s particularly true when it comes to steelhead.
Two years ago the provincial government introduced a ban on retaining wild steelhead.
However, you can catch and keep a hatchery fish – and the Kitimat is the only river in the Northwest that offers hatchery steelhead.
The Kitimat River Fish Hatchery was first started in 1977 as a pilot project, located across from the Eurocan Pulp and Paper mill.
It came into being to rebuild salmon stocks, particularly chinook, which had been hard hit by overfishing, habitat degradation and a couple of floods that had ravaged spawning beds.
At that time it consisted of an Atco trailer containing a few troughs and only released 50,000-150,000 fish a year.
Six years later a new, $10 million facility was built and now the annual release is in the millions.
At the hatchery five different species of salmonids are raised: chum, chinook, coho, cutthroat, and steelhead. Steelhead and cutthroat are actually trout, but they are sea-run trout, which means that they have the same life cycle as a salmon by going out to the ocean to mature and returning to the rivers to spawn.
Each year adult fish of each species are caught by angling, tangle netting or seine netting to obtain eggs and sperm.
Once the raised fish are ready for release – the time varies from species to species – they are taken back to the streams from which their parents were taken except for a small percentage released through a pipe directly below the hatchery.
From there, they swim out to the ocean to mature, eventually to return to the Kitimat system to start the cycle all over again.
Incidentally, while they may not be the most prized fish, the hatchery is top heavy on the production of chum salmon. That’s because they were historically the most numerous species in the Kitimat.
Call 250-639-9888 to see if the hatchery is offering tours again this year.
You’ll find it a fascinating experience.