April Vokey is looking for your flies, your steelhead flies. This is a fundraiser for the Steelhead Society, for habitat restoration and other projects.  Send your flies to April and she will distribute to several fly shops across BC. Your flies will be purchased by anglers and all of the proceeds going to the Steelhead Society.  If you tie, tie some extras up and send them in. If you are a steeheader, look into your boxes and see what you can donate.  Put those flies in an envelope and send to:

April Vokey
8505 Norman Cres.
Chilliwack, B.C.
Canada
V2P 5C6

Steelhead season is in full swing, which means the season for purchasing steelhead flies is ending in a couple of months. So, please act now and send your flies in.

Its time to build up those karma points.

Henry’s Fork Foundation has performed many trout migration/mobility studies using radio telemetry in the upper portion of the river. A new telemetry study is underway in the lower portion (below the Chester diversion dam).  This study is concentrating on brown trout.

Twenty-four brown trout, ranging between 14 and 24 inches were caught with electro-fishing and instrumented with radio transmitters. The location of each trout is tracked periodically and made available as Google earth placemarks. They tracked the locations often during spawning season, and will continue tracking through 2009.

Watching the video below shows the surgery where they implant the radio tracker and transmitter. Ouch. Adding all of this hardware has to affect the behavior of the fish, but from my experience, flawed information is much better than no information.

My take-aways:

• What an outstanding resource we have in river-keeper organizations like Henry’s Fork Foundation.
• Thanks to Jack, Mike, Girls, Wallace, Fish Lips and Emery for sponsoring fish.
• Donate to Henry’s Fork Foundation, the money is put to good use.
• 151.102, watch out, I know where you live

Tiburon hosted an outstanding event today – Kiss and Release. This was a party centered around releasing 1000 baby chinook salmon into San Francisco bay. High-school students raised the salmon from eggs, and had help from hundreds of kids. The kids appeared to be from 3 years old to 10. What a great way to educate kids about salmon.

How it went

The anticipation excitement peaked when the salmon truck arrived- filled with fingerlings that were raised in water from Adobe Creek in Petaluma California. The truck had a thousand salmon, about 3 inches long. The fish were raised from eggs in Casa Grande high school – by students. All of the water used came from Adobe Creek, which hopefully causes the salmon return to spawn.

The fingerlings had to be acclimated to the bay water – so the first order of business was to organize a bucket brigade to bring bay water to the salmon truck. The kids tried, but their (literally) pint-sized buckets didn’t help much.

After giving the salmon 20 minutes to acclimate to the new water, the release started. A new bucket brigade ferried the fish to the water’s edge. The high school kids distributed the fish to the younger set – who had the honors to release each fish.

This was a cool release. This girl released her fish a little too soon, in the grass when a wavelet flooded the area. The salmon was stuck in a footprint, about 2 inches of water. On the next wavelet, the salmon wiggled out of the footprint, then wound it way through the grass out into the bay.

The cool part was seeing that fish use its instincts to head out into the safety.

The sponsors

The United Anglers of Casa Grande high school in Petaluma, CA supplied the fish. They have a fantastic program, adopting a dead Adobe creek and brought it back to life. Cleaning up the creek, planting trees to re-establish a fishy habitat, build a state-of-the-art hatchery, and raised salmon using Adobe Creek water. King salmon returned to spawn in Adobe creek, the first salmon in a century.

The Tiburon Salmon Institute is chartered with educating children on rebuilding habitat and protecting the remaining salmon.

The Romburg Tiburon Center is a marine laboratory for San Francisco State University. The Romburg Center maintains salmon rearing pens and is a very important part of the marine biology education.

Trout Unlimited contributed to this event, and had a booth. My wife actually read the Have Your Salmon and Eat it Too brouchure, cover to cover during lunch.