Skeena Steelhead: quality waters heating up

The Fall steelhead run is in full upstream migration on the Skeena River of B.C. Goverment bodies are forecasting a better than average return this year of the sea run rainbow trout, which means fishing for these lunkers should be good. (Click here for more details on government numbers.)

The Skeena and it's tributaries are considered some of the best steelhead fishing rivers in the world. The region is become the place to go to catch big, hard fighting fish, but as it does the angling experience is threatened. To head off a potential crisis the provincial government and anglers are working to find a balance between access for all, a quality fishing experience and the long-term survival of the fish species.

“This is a critical turning point for the Skeena,” says Pierce Clegg, owner of Babine Norlakes Lodge, a steelhead guiding operation on the Babine River. “Right now we’re loving the steelhead to death. We need to find a way of managing our love.”

Clegg and other guides and resident anglers in the area are working to implement the Skeena Quality Waters Strategy (QWS), signed in 2005. The new process replaces the old classified waters method of management that grouped rivers, with an Angling Management Plan, where each river is micro managed river by river and sometimes section by section.

Geoff Straight, the head guide at Bell 2 Lodge Steelhead Fishing, welcomes the process as a change in tact from the usually politically motivated method of managing fish. “It is new for government to actually have a ‘committee of user groups’ legislated to help in the decision making process and an annual monitoring process, as well as having a reasonable timeline imposed,” he says.

The Skeena QWS is the second such process in B.C. The first QWS plans were approved and implemented in the East Kootenay’s to manage rivers in southeastern B.C., and is showing signs of success. However, the Skeena is more complex, since it involves the mysterious variable of ocean survival of salmon and steelhead.

Thus the government and the Skeena QWS committee is left with a conundrum – how to limit and spread out the fishing pressure without having control over fish numbers. Everyone involved admits there are no easy solutions, but certain commitments are mandatory. “The government needs to support this initiative by dedicating the resources for the QWS to work - enforcement namely and funding at the right time,” Straight says. And he says the fish have to be protected, otherwise there is no point. “Fish farming and commercial fishing is currently destroying our angling resource,” he says. Both provincial and federal governments must collaborate on fish management plans, he believes.

The Skeena QWS is in its final draft stage. Watch this blog for more news on it.