Fraser sockeye return is the strongest in twelve years, DFO says
Test fisheries near Mission counted 4.6 million fish through July. Biologists credit cool spring flows and four years of restricted openings.
MISSION — For the first time since 2014, the daily counts coming off the lower Fraser have given fisheries staff something they rarely get to report: a number larger than the one they forecast. Through the end of July, test fisheries near Mission had counted 4.6 million sockeye, roughly forty per cent above the pre-season estimate.
The department attributes the return to cool spring flows in the upper watershed and to four consecutive years of restricted commercial openings — the two levers, one borrowed and one paid for, that salmon management actually has. Neither, the department cautions, is under anyone's control going forward: the openings can be held, the weather cannot.
"A single strong return is a year, not a trend," said a stock assessment biologist with the department's Pacific region. "What we are watching is whether the four-year cycles that used to be legible are legible again."
The immediate question is harvest. The strong count has the commercial fleet asking for the first meaningful opening in half a decade, and the department weighing how much of an unexpected surplus a recovering run can spare. Its answer, expected within the week, will say more about the next decade of this river than the count itself.
