Thread: Salmon

Originally Posted by mikee

Well fish and game used to run a salmon hatachery at Glenarrife and release salmon every year. Does not happen now i believe.
Water is extracted for a multitude of uses leaving rangitata, rakaia and ashburton as shadows of their former selves.
Licence holders would not mind restrictions in catch if other things were being done to try and improve things.......

Google salmon hatcheries and the evidence is overwhelming in saying they dont work. I personally believe that the smaller fish we have now are a product of mixing hatchery genetics with our wild fish, the genetics have been compromised hugely. I cant see any improvement in this as there are fish farms that have escapes and these probably/undoubtably imo influence the wild fish by cross breeding ?


I think this is one of the major influences in the poor returns and I think Fish and Game have really dropped the ball on this issue.

https://www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3...s-fish-screens


I think the other influence for pooer returns is warmer sea water, salmon are a cold water species.
Not much can be done about this.

Originally Posted by sore head stoat

What is the answer ?

Ban fishing above the sh1 bridges on all the braided rivers. The Waimakariri for example once they get to sh1 there are free to go up and spawn. they have got through the mouth, made their way past mackintoshes dunns bank and the banana hole they should be free to go from there.
I also think that most of the salmon caught are caught by people that know what they are doing above the bridges. You might get 200 people fishing below the bridge that might catch 10 fish between them a day. But you could get 50 people above the bridge in a good hole taking a fish each(if not 2 a day for the dishonest ones)
I also believe the increased number of kahwai has something to do with it as well (this bit might get a bit long winded)
So I think 30 years ago they used to trawl the river mouth and must have caught a lot of kahwai so when I was a kid guys caught a lot of salmon but hardly caught any kahwai. Then I think the trawlers got banded and now there’s heaps of kahwai and not many salmon. There are a lot of videos of guys catching kahwai at the kaiapoi mouth cutting them open to find 2,3,4 salmon smelt in them, hatchery releases 30,000 smelt doesn’t take 5,000 kahwai long to deplete that number (this never seemed to be a problem 30 years ago)
Rather than returning fish maybe they need to somehow figure out how many make it out to sea in the first place
Last the size of fish return is depressing for anyone that’s fished for ten years even more depressing for those that have fished for 30 years. 10lb fish are the norm in the Waimakariri now with a good fish being 15 and anything bigger is almost a modern day trophy. Fish used to regularly get over 20lb (if you caught a 10lb fish in the 90’s nobody even cared) because there had been 20 25lb fish caught already.
One of the only things I can think of for this is the amount of krill being caught and turned into high protein fish food for farmed fish. That’s my 2 cents on the situation
Being a salmon fisherman you spend a lot of time on the riverbank chasing these river unicorns, gives you a bit of time to ponder things.

Originally Posted by Mr300WSM

Ban fishing above the sh1 bridges on all the braided rivers.

I have heard this argument before and its always from guys that fish at the mouths of the rivers..

From memory 75% of the salmon caught in the Rangitata were caught below the marker posts .. would it make more sense to ban fishing at the mouth instead ?

Mid 70s down the Waitaki for xmas holidays,use to catch salmon.About February the 6th,the big runs would start coming in.Youd let 14-16pounders go,not big enough.

@mikee… well mate that’s very sad…. I’ve moved back to kiwi.. but spend the summers in Oregon… we are allowed 40/yr…. And they have a robust salmon fish hatchery program… and had it for years on the Columbia…. I’ll post some photos of a local hatchery ,it’s an amazing programme….. huge shame it ms not being done here…. Funding!?????

Forty plus years ago the Rakaia salmon runs use to be up to 8000-9000 a year till the fast fishing boats use to fish the Canterbury bite in February March north of the Rakaia mouth.Only took a few ton over the yrs to slowly deplete the stocks of wild fish to low numbers.Then the fisheries stepped in,charge the fishing boats so much per kilo of salmon taken.No fast boats allowed in there in the salmon season,only slow small boats with a by catch limit.An observer were or still are allowed on the fishing boats,just one from the salmon association maybe to make sure not many salmon were caught.This was yrs ago,not sure what they are doing now.Maybe someone else has an update.

The odd one gets caught in mullet nets or whitebait set nets in the Waikato River. It's not common but not rare enough that its big news. So, you don't have to be down south to catch a Salmon LOL.

Youre exactly right Sore head stoat. I wrote in the Salmon angler magazine probably 20 years ago about the influence of hatchery breeding on the Wild fish. I think I said something like “ a good farmer selects his best Ram to mate with his best ewes to produce his best stock” or something along those lines. They used to strip any female salmon , mix it with any male salmon basically in a bucket and expect good strong fish to return. At that time the average weight of a hatchery fish in the states was 9lb . The wild salmon weighed an average of 20lb..
So now Fish and game gave decided to let everthing go back to what is was before they stuffed it up.
Admittedly there are other factors but this didn’t help.
Titanium , theres bugger all about so far this season( Rakaia). Was out yesterday down below the main bridge. Water temp was hot enough to have a bath,lol.
That’s after a 509 cumec fresh too.Should have been some come in on that but no.
Best bet at the mo would be to pick an early morning high tide , fish the gut at the mouth. Nice piece of water on south side , thats the way they are going. Splits in two at the mouth, equal streams north and south up stream , so the fishable water is halved until they join up by the pylons, then its very braided too.
Signs are its not going to be a good season, maybe tougher than last. There’s not many fishing , maybe a sign of the times (not much free cash , a long way to go for some and not even see one).
One can only try tho, PS ..never give up, its still nice just being there, haha.

50 yrs ago you could walk across the salmon in the feeder stream of Glenarriff ?so many fish jammed in there.I still got some of those Salmon Association mags about somewhere,good reading.

There is a lot of sense in the above. 100% agree with the first two paragraphs.

No mention of the reduced water flow in the rivers but common sense would suggest that's a factor also??

Quite a few anglers I spoke with last year (waimak) when I was down were blaming trawlers well off the river mouth?? I'm dubious about that one tho....

Lets hope we don't need to ask the canadians for some more, my childhood memories of the clutha and big fish below the roxburgh dam are no more unfortunately !!



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I've done 3 early mornings this week, haven't seen a fish yet, heard rumors of a couple caught last week.

Originally Posted by Titanium

I've done 3 early mornings this week, haven't seen a fish yet, heard rumors of a couple caught last week.

November 2000 i caught my 29 pounder up the rangi about 8ks from the mouth.Day befor a guy from Rangiora caught a fish about the same size from the same pool.Buitifull fish with some power,i had to be carefull with only 18lb line on my 7ft rod.But i had plenty of room to play him out.

I've never fished a river mouth, always up river, have to work a lot harder to get one,more like hunting to me.

out for 4 hrs yesterday 6hrs today. found some good holes picked up 3 trout no large bars of silver yet. all up river on the rangitata .

There’s a lot of great thought here about … fisheries,hatcheries… good /bad … etc etc… they were never designed to replace Mother Nature agreed…,but they have served a purpose whether u agree or not…. I’ve fished hatchery fish and natural (not farmed)…. They taste the same and replenish stocks for recreational fisherman… what has killed there numbers is indiscriminate fishing by commercial operations…. We take fuck-all…. They take millions and believe that’s ok!!!!… I say BS!!!