INSIDE: Yarrow church building a better future for Mexicans Pg. 3 August 17, 2010
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still seek season’s first win 10 Huskers 1985-
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LOCAL NEWS, SPORTS, WEATHER & ENTERTAINMENT chilliwacktimes.com
Records scorched in heat Mercury soars, but cooler weather ahead BY CORNELIA NAYLOR cnaylor@chilliwacktimes.com
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Tyler Olsen/TIMES
Matt Pace of Lang’s Fishing Adventures hauls in a Sockeye salmon for a client Friday afternoon on the Fraser River.
Calming troubled waters BY TYLER OLSEN tolsen@chilliwacktimes.com
Nobody wants a repeat of last year’s shooting
odney Chapman stood on Pegleg Bar, a vehicleaccessible gravel bar just north of Chilliwack, and surveyed the dozen or so fishermen casting into the river for sockeye salmon. Last year, just upriver from this spot, a sportfisherman shot Chehalis Indian Band chief Willie Charlie with a pellet gun. At the time, anglers stood shoulder to shoulder casting into the
Fraser. Some had driven their vehicles through the weak and shallow channel that cuts off much of the bar from the mainland. But on Friday, with the mid-afternoon sun shining down and nary a cloud in the sky, the bar was uncrowded. And that channel? It had become a deep and fast-moving braid of the Fraser that one would have to be brave and reckless to swim across, much less drive a vehicle through.
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“This is where sometimes Mother Nature solves a problem,” said Chapman, the president of the British Columbia Federation of Drift Fishers. “If this stays with the water like this, what happened last year won’t happen this year.” The same can’t be said of elsewhere on the river, though; fishing along the Fraser is one of the province’s touchiest issues, encompassing economic, environmental,
societal and cultural issues, with a heavy-dose of resentment and distrust. It is a search of a resolution to those conflicts, or at least a means to reduce their scale, that brought Chapman and two dozen other sportsfishing and aboriginal leaders onto the Fraser River on Friday. The group boarded four boats
he hottest temperatures of the summer hit Chilliwack over the weekend, and Saturday came within .1 C of becoming the hottest August day in the city’s recorded weather history. For Lynn and Dave Lutz in Ryder Lake that heat has caused an unusual insurance claim after the vinyl siding on the west side of their house melted in the sun. “The part under the window is gapped way out, and all of it is all wavy,” said Lynn. The couple didn’t notice the damage until Sunday evening because they tend to avoid that side of their house on hot days. “The sun beats on the front of the house all day,” said Lynn, “so we’re usually in the backyard.” The city experienced recordbreaking temperatures for three consecutive days, according to Roger Pannett, volunteer weather observer for Environment Canada. “For this time of the year it’s pretty significant,” he said, “because normally we start to cool down a little bit by the middle of August.” Friday’s 33.2 C was 8.8 C above normal and bumped a previous daily record set in 1992 at 32.9 C. Saturday, meanwhile, was the hottest August day to hit Chilliwack in 50 years. The near all-time high of 36.0 C was a whopping 12.3 C above normal and 2.2 C hotter than the previous record for that day set in 2008 at 33.8 C. See RECORDS, Page 6
See FISHING, Page 4
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