Saanich News, February 13, 2013

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Where have all the herring gone? Once teeming with fish, anglers warn the Gorge Waterway is drying up

Sharon Tiffin/News staff

Jim Yardley, front, and Bob Briggs try their luck fishing for herring on the Craigflower Bridge. Both have fished on the bridge through snow and ice for about six years catching as many as 700 fish during the season in the old days. Both say the number of herring in the Gorge Waterway has dropped significantly.

B Arnold Lim Reporting

ob Briggs remembers pulling 60 fish out of the Gorge Waterway on a good day. Meandering over to the Craigflower bridge, sometimes with friends, he recalls taking more than 500 fish out of the Gorge over the two month spawning period. He still fishes there today, but his catch is down to about 50 – and he wonders where all the herring have gone. “It was nothing to go down and get a bucketful of fishing herring six years ago,” he said. “There is no way you could fill a bucket in an hour or two now. (But) why?”

Briggs says the days of pulling up with a single bamboo pole and jigs and yanking herring out of the water one after the other are over, as are the days of dozens of longtime anglers lining the Craigflower bridge with lines in the water and overflowing buckets at their feet. The decline is clear, but the reason is not. If anything, water in the Gorge is the cleanest it’s been since the 1920s. Health Canada has given the water a clean bill of health, and it’s even become a swimming hole again. With construction of a new Craigflower bridge set to begin in April,

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World Fisheries Trust executive director Joachim (Yogi) Carolsfeld hopes to bring new awareness to the issue. “It is a unique thing in the Gorge. There are not many places where you can get this in the middle of the city,” Carolsfeld said. “It is on its way out and we have to do something.” He’s heard plenty of anecdotal evidence regarding the food and bait fish, but he says he needs concrete facts and hopes to fund a creel survey, a monitoring method relying on surveying and interviewing fishermen on a daily basis. In order to do that, funds are

needed for a co-ordinator to design and set up the survey – with volunteers required to observe spawning that isn’t currently happening. “In the Gorge itself, I never heard of any herring actually coming back last year,” said Andrew Paine, founder of the Salish Sea Herring Enhancement Society. “We did lots of visits around the Gorge during spawning season. It is pretty disheartening we didn’t see any spawning activity in the Gorge.” PLEASE SEE: Fishing, creosote, Page A6

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