August 13, 2013 — The captain of a seine boat that dumped pink salmon during an aboriginal fishery in Johnstone Strait said Tuesday he is the victim of federal policy and that he takes care not to waste salmon.
“I’ve been doing this 15 years and we’ve been very efficient and very modernized in the way we handle our fish,” said Josh Duncan, a member of the Campbell River band and captain of the 25-metre Western King.
“We’ve never had issues, never had problems. Like all fisheries there is a bycatch and a mortality rate.”
Duncan explained that during the two-week native fishery he kept almost 20,000 sockeye and 16,000 pinks. He also released 52,000 live pinks of which he estimated a mortality rate not greater than 15 per cent — which equates to just under 8,000 fish.
He added that obviously dead fish were not tossed back. “Not every fish lives, but to say we’re out there viciously killing all these fish, well, we’re not,” he said, noting pinks and sockeye tend to swim together.
He said federal Fisheries officers visited daily and “watched us conduct our selective fishing harvest with no questions or concerns.”
Duncan argued that it would be economically feasible to bring in all the pinks and send them to a processing plant if the federal government allowed this bycatch to be sold to cover the costs of the fishery, including fuel and trucking — but it does not.
Read the full story at The Vancouver Sun