Home from Sea

The sockeye salmon were coming home from roaming the Pacific Ocean. Now the silver traffic swarmed in millions into Juan de Fuca Strait and up the broad Fraser River. It was the biggest run in four years.

In the grey half-light of dawn the waiting fishermen netted sockeyes by the thousands in the Strait. Captain Nels Floe in his 71-ft. Bligh Island reported a record catch of 15,225 fish in one haul; in one day 160 other seiners took 600,000 -- worth about $1 apiece. As the sockeyes reached the river's mouth, an armada of 3,500 gillnet boats was waiting. Some novice fishermen were war veterans out for a quick stake. In other boats, the whole family lent a hand; enthusiastic moppets helped parents pay out cork floats and nets over creaking wooden rollers.

When fishing boats were loaded, packers' boats chuffed out to tally the fish, ice them down for delivery to nearby canneries. By week's end the Fraser River run had given up 3,000,000 sockeyes to Canadian fishermen, a like number to Americans. To worried fishermen, who had watched the sockeye run steadily decrease for years, this was proof that the sockeye could come back. More important, they hoped that the sockeye progeny of the 1943, '44 and '45 runs, which had been damaged far worse than the present generation of sockeye, might stage comebacks too.

Officials guessed that 4,000,000 sockeyes would struggle up the 300-odd miles from the Fraser delta to Adams Lake in the next few weeks, to spawn and die; in the spring of 1948 millions of baby salmon would head down the river for the sea, would return in 1950 to complete the cycle.

The big bottleneck to the spawning grounds had been the roaring Fraser River chasm called Hell's Gate. Railroad dynamiting in 1913 had spilled tons of rock into the gorge, partially blocking it. Thousands of salmon swimming upstream perished in the turbulent watery so that the number returning four years later was greatly decreased. The loss to the industry was measured in millions annually.

But now Hell's Gate is open, thanks to a joint U.S.-Canadian Salmon Fisheries Commission. About half of a $2 million appropriation has been spent to create flume-like fishways which slow the rush of water, give the sockeyes a chance to rest in artificial pools in their upstream struggle. The commission hopes to restore the sockeye cycle to the pre-1913 catch of $35 million a year. But it will not know for sure whether it has succeeded until 1950, when the spawn of the present generation comes home.

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