It was a cloudy, cool morning in mid April, volunteers crowded the Seymour Salmonid Hatchery for the grandest event that they had all been waiting for at 9:00am. On this day, the steelhead smolts that were carefully raised in the ponds for a year were ready to be released.

Steelhead (Oncorhyncus mykiss) are migratory rainbow trout that are found along the Northwest coast of North America. They are renowned world wide, for their power and large size. Many travel from far places just to come and catch, or try to catch, these beautiful fish. However, just like many other beautiful things in this world, they are rare, and they are declining in numbers. What led to such disastrous trends, scientists are still puzzled and working hard to find out. The obvious causes are overfishing, habitat degradation and pollution. However, there are other global environmental changes that may contribute largely to their declines, such as global warming, UV radiation and lack of food resource. While searching for the causes, others are currently trying to revive their populations in streams across BC. The goal of most hatcheries is to produce hatchery stocks of steelheads, allowing anglers to harvest these stocks, leaving the wild populations unharmed. The goal of Seymour hatchery is similar, but at the same time it is trying to revive the population of steelheads in the Seymour River, by raising offsprings of wild populations. We hope when these fish return into the river as spawning adults, they will breed in the river and continue the cycles.

The volunteers, mostly avid anglers, were eager to witness the release, after putting in hours of hard work such as spawning, fin clipping, feeding. The smolts were first gathered together by seine nets in the pond, and slowly they were netted by large hand net. The hand nets were passed along by volunteers and loaded into the truck. This process was long and tiring, it took about two hours to fill up all the tanks in the truck. Each smolt was 100 grams in average, however there were some monstrous size fish that appear to be over 300 grams! 

Once the truck was fully loaded, it was time to go for a scenic drive through the Seymour Demonstration Forest to the mouth of Seymour River near Mt Seymour Parkway. The actual release was the most exciting yet the shortest part. The fish were pumped from the tank through the pipes into the river. Within minutes, the river was darkened with thousands of steelhead smolts. As you read this article, most of these fish are on their way into the Pacific Ocean.

The release was satisfying for all volunteers, especially the anglers, knowing some of these fish will return as large adults that will be incredible fighters on the end of that fishing line. It is the operation and event like this, gives hope to all anglers. Maybe one day, with all the hard effort, our streams will be alive again.

For information regarding volunteering at the Seymour Salmonid Hatchery, please check out their website! For questions and feedbacks, feel free to send me an email. Remember, if there are no fish, there are no fishing.