Anybody else trying to catch a salmon
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Anybody else trying to catch a salmon
I will be Jan/Feb in the Rakaia.
Hopefully I will be as successful as last time!
:)
Well let’s hope the chinook(Quinnat) is a good run… are there any mechanical fish counters on the Rakia???…Feb/Mar being the peak of the run,…. Would interesting to see the numbers if possible???
Someone caught a good one waitaki mouth two nights ago
40 od years ago on the Waitaki river they had a fish counter.Generally now they do fly overs,over the spawning grounds n cound the reeds.
Yeah only allowed one per day and total of 2 for season. Total farce as thats really the only answer "a learned organisation" can think of!
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.
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.......
@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.
Well I can’t post photos as all my stuff are in videos… but if your interested.. do a google search on … Wizard falls fish hatchery Oregon….
Amazing fish hatchery ,very well stocked ,the numbers are huge….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
The "purpose" the hatcheries have left us is genetically weak fish and smaller fish.
While I agree that the comms guys had an impact on fish numbers in the past there is not much impact now if any.
https://fishandgame.org.nz/dmsdocument/1004
Biggest issue with Ashburton, Rangitata and Rakaia is the loss of water compared to earlier times. Also for many years young fish ended up on paddocks due to poorly designed/function fish screens on RDR irrigation scheme.
Depends where u are… No?
lack of water and crap in the water has had a big impact. can remember going out with my uncles in the late 80s fishing round skipton and mid reaches of the opihi we would see schools of salmon , was a rare day that nothing was hooked . doubt my kids will experience that now
Quote:The "purpose" the hatcheries have left us is genetically weak fish and smaller fish.
Show me the data???…. I’ve fished the Kenai and the copper rivers…. Smaller YES… genetically weak??…
https://washingtonstatestandard.com/...n-populations/
https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/...etic-17022016/
Truck loads more examples , just google "salmon hatcheries weaking genetics".
Yep heaps of evidence.
Increased disease, lower reproductive rate etc etc
What's the name of that movie about it??...ill try to find it.
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Artifishal
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Interesting articles indeed ,hard to despute the evidence for sure…..
what’s interesting for me is that during the salmon fishing opens in the NW,you are specifically only allowed to take specified types ie ,hatchery,coho,chinook,etc etc…. For a period of time we are allowed to take hatchery AND native salmon…… I’ve pulled 2 on the same day,,size,colour,taste texture are almost identical….. very difficult once they’ve been filleted to tell the difference……depending on the time of season(usually late)…. The only real difference is colour,the late season (native)chinook have a deeper red colour….
As someone who dedicated his life to salmonids in the PNW...which is where most of these documentaries and debates originate I'd take all these "fact based" studies and documentaries with a heap of salt as they will spin everything to their side of the story...Seaspiricy says the ocean will be void of fish in 20 years or some such foolishness. Also, I'd just point out...aren't your NZ "wild" salmon runs just strays from hatcheries/farms in the first place? Anyway...
Also I hope to see to Wairau at some point this season...I doubt these fish have seen many backtrolled kwikfish :)
Good luck to all this season!!