Submitter: Billy Proctor

Community: Simoom Sound

Date Submitted: November 2, 2023

Summary:

In the early 1990s, DFO hosted a meeting in Alert Bay at which local fishers identified appropriate areas, or zones, for fish farms to be located. Today, 12 fish farms are located in zones that were identified as being dangerous to wild salmon, and chum and pink runs in the Broughton Archipelago have declined. The size of the 2010 Fraser sockeye return may have been caused by the simultaneous return of three- and five-year old sockeye, as well as by the absence of an IHN outbreak on fish farms when the 2010 return migrated north to the Pacific Ocean as smolts.

Submission:

Hello,



I am Billy Proctor and i have lived in the broughton archiplagoall of my 76 years and i have been a commercial fisher for over 60 years and i have run a hatcher for 27 years.



we used to have good runs of chums and pinks in the broughton runs of 3 000 000 were common even when the commercial fishing was open for 4 days a week.



now there has been no commercial fishing since 1986 except for one little opening in 2 little sub areas but even with the commercial fishing closed the runs are going down.



when the salmon farms first came to the broughton in the early 1990s there were still some good runs of pink and chum but since then they hae declined till now some of the streams only have very few spawners and some of the smallers creeks have none.

when the farms first came they told us that they did not want to put farms on the migartion route of the wild salmon because they said that the farm salmon would pick up sea lice from the wild salmon so the salmon farmers would come and ask me where the wild salmon migarted.



so d.f.o ,called a meeting in alert bay and we all went and marked on a map all the areas where there were prawns crabs and the migration routes of the wild salmon so they came out with a chart with green zone yellow zones and red zones green zones were good for farm sites yellow zones were a maybe and red zones were a on go for farms.

now there are 12 farms in the red zones.



my idea of the big sockeye run this year is its a year when 3 4 and 5 year old fish come in in the same year and another thing when the smolts for this years run came north the farms did not have the disease known IHN which is a deadly disease for sockeye.

.

when the mature sockeye are migrating down through johnstone strait the always follow the vancouver island shore and there are no salmon farms on that shore yet.



billy proctor..