“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” said Greg Taylor, senior fisheries advisor to Watershed Watch and SkeenaWild.
That’s over the DFO’s last-minute fix for an incorrect sockeye multiplier that was applied to the Tyee test fishery throughout the season.
The Watershed Watch Salmon Society shared in an email from Bradley Koroluk of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which states that the incorrect multiplier resulted in an underestimation of daily escapements. According to the DFO, the update resulted in additional available remaining Skeena sockeye for total available catch for two area fleets.
The DFO then informed that they planned two new area openings for additional fisheries to occur within the following week.
There’s a problem with this – say both the Watershed Watch Salmon Society and the SkeenaWild Conservation trust, and it’s in the timing.
They say these late-season fisheries will impact depleted sockeye populations, as well as chum and steelhead salmon runs that will be caught and discarded as bycatch in the controversial gill net fishery. Both groups are calling the proposed late-season fisheries “irresponsible and unnecessary.”
Taylor says the commercial marine fleet has had many days of fishing already. And that any additional allowable catch can be harvested in more sustainable fisheries-
“Close to the spawning grounds of the more abundant populations, where there will be less impact on depleted salmon and steelhead populations.”
He says the fleet’s demands to open the fishery ignores the fact that the enhanced return has passed through their area, and any opening at that point targets endangered wild sockeye populations.