New Pacific salmon research is encouraging anglers to rethink the way they practise catch-and-release

It’s late July and my buddy Carl and I are fishing in the Strait of Georgia, the gap of water separating the B.C. mainland from Vancouver Island. I’d just set my downrigger at 200 feet, and already the subtle, almost imperceptible bumping of my rod suggests either seaweed or a small salmon is on the line. Whatever’s playing with my spoon, nothing else is going to bite while it’s on, so I’m forced to reel up to check.

At this time of year, the regulations allow us to keep one chinook salmon between 62 and 80 centimetres in length, and two coho longer than 30 centimetres—but only if they’re missing their adipose fin, indicating they were released from a fish hatchery. After a lot of reeling, I bring a fish to the boat. It’s a coho big enough to keep, but it has all of its fins. We have to let it go.

After grabbing the exhausted fish by the tail with one hand and twisting out the hook with the other, I watch it swim away. I wonder what its chances are of surviving to spawn. Could I have done something different to improve the odds? It’s the fourth salmon we’ve had to release today, so I’m also wondering if we should continue trying to catch a keeper. Is it sustainable, or ethical, to catch and release so many fish to eventually keep just one?

Anglers were releasing salmon because the regulations told them they had to, not because they thought the fish would live

That was last summer, and at the time no one really knew the exact answers to those questions. Most regulations and best practices for releasing salmon were based on limited research from the 1990s, as well as on studies of other fish species, often in freshwater. Simply, anglers were releasing salmon because the regulations told them they had to, not because they thought the fish would live, let alone go on to spawn.

So observes Owen Bird, the executive director of the Sport Fishing Institute of B.C., or SFI, a non-profit organization advocating for recreational angling in the province. “There are all these opinions and perceptions about releasing salmon—mostly that they don’t survive—that are based on lore and out-of-date research,” he says. “You could say catch-and-release was overdue to be looked at more closely.”

Last fall, a team of fisheries scientists from the University of B.C did just that, publishing 15 best practices for catching-and-releasing coho and chinook salmon based on five years of research (see “Handle with care”). And as a bonus, their research methodology stands as a template for conducting similar catch-and-release studies in other recreational fisheries across Canada.