We’ve had incredible summer weather since May out here in Vancouver and many of us on the coast have been thrilled with the warm weather and lack of rain! But you’ve probably also heard about all the forest fires in BC and we know that all this hot dry weather comes at a price. So, how are the salmon affected and what are we seeing on the fishing grounds?

Salmon require certain volumes of cool water in streams and rivers to be able to travel up-river where they complete their spawning life cycle. So the combination of hot dry weather means that water temperatures are too high and water levels are too low for salmon to travel to the spawning grounds.

To give you an example, a few of the Barkley Sound sockeye that have returned to the Sound have travelled up river, but the water temperature in the spawning grounds is 24 degrees — far too warm for salmon — and Fisheries suspects most of those fish will die before they spawn. Meanwhile, most of the salmon are circling in the Sound, waiting for higher water levels and cooler water temperatures that would come after a heavy rain, before they’ll make their way up to the spawning grounds.

What does this mean for our salmon stocks? Let’s all hope for a heavy rain in the coming month so the Barkley salmon can go home to spawn! If we don’t get some good rain fall and if we have low spawning numbers, then we can expect a lower return of sockeye salmon in 2019, and we can expect it to take two to three 4-year cycles for the numbers to recover to their normal levels.