Commercial sockeye salmon fishing at rock bottom

Larry Pynn
October 20, 2009
The Vancouver Sun

Look B.C.'s top fisheries official in the eye and ask what advice he would give his own son or daughter wanting to get into the commercial salmon fishery.

"Weigh carefully the implications," offers Paul Sprout, a fish scientist turned regional director general for Fisheries and Oceans Canada. "Go in with your eyes open. Sprout is a bureaucrat swimming upstream, tasked with the job of managing salmon stocks that once represented the backbone of the fishing industry but today provide only a fraction of past harvests, with no change in sight.

"We're going through a challenging period," Sprout says from his Burrard Street office. "The way we may have fished in the past may not be the way we fish in the future. Change is a force and it's here."

Down on the lower Fraser River, near the Alex Fraser Bridge, veteran salmon fisherman Bob Rezansoff doesn't need to be reminded. "Fishing now is dismal," he laments after 46 years in the business.

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