64 June . 2014

N A BRIGHT WARM DAY during the middle of April I spent an enjoyable and edu-

cational hour with Grant McPherson near the estuary of Reay Creek. It’s a tiny stream that meanders eastward from the Victoria International Air-port for barely a mile before spilling into Bazan Bay just south of the town of Sidney.

It fl ows through a small culvert un-der Highway 17, the main route from

Volunteers in salmon enhancement projects all along our coast are working hard to protect the province’s salmon

and trout bearing streams

Protecting B.C.’s small streams

Othe Swartz Bay Ferry to Victoria, and for most of the tens of thousands of drivers and passengers who cross this on a daily basis the creek’s existence is unknown. Yet it is a salmon and trout bearing stream, boasting healthy numbers of coho salmon, along with a resurgent population of sea run cut-throat trout. It is also home to sculpin and stickleback, and the occasional chum salmon that strays into the creek during the fall salmon migration.

Protecting B.C.’s Small Streams This short description of Reay Creek is characteristic of hundreds if not thou-sands of relatively small streams and creeks throughout B.C. that contain populations of salmon and trout, and whose existence goes almost unno-ticed by the vast majority of residents who live nearby.

Even if they do know of these wa-terways they are usually surprised to discover that they actually contain salmon and trout or that they are im-portant feeder systems for connected waterways that do support these fi sh. It was not always this way.

Reay Creek is the perfect refer-ence point for explaining how small streams, with historical runs of salm-on and trout lost these stocks through man-made impacts, and then were restored to productive levels through the hard work and commitments of thousands of volunteers across the province.

Grant exemplifi es the current gener-ation of volunteers who are happy to slip on chest waders in order to spend time restoring fi sh to local streams. The work is varied, complex and often physically demanding. For the past month he and other volunteers from the Sidney Anglers Association and Peninsula Streams, a local umbrella enhancement organization, have been manning a coho smolt trap on a daily basis. The trap, located a few hundred metres above tidewater, is designed to safely capture any fi sh that are migrat-ing downstream. Smolts are juvenile coho that have spent at least a year rearing in the stream and are now on their migration to the sea where they will grow into adult fi sh.

Counting Smolts The purpose of this is to get an accurate count of the number of smolts that come out of Reay Creek each year. This information will be used to build a database on the productivity of the creek. Additionally it will provide information to help estimate the poten-tial number of adults that might return to spawn in the fall of 2015. The smolt counts also help to construct a yard-stick for measuring the success of any

Tom

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b y T O M D A V I S

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66 June . 2014

additional restoration and enhance-ment work that might be done on the creek from this point forward.

As of the last week in April nearly 500 smolts and one large sea run cut-throat trout have been captured, as-sessed, measured and released. With a little over two weeks of trapping to go the numbers should improve sub-stantially. In the middle of May the trap will be removed to allow the fish to transit freely between the lower es-tuary and the upper portions of the stream. The trap is fully enclosed and secured to the streambed with re-bar. This is important so that it can with-stand the pressure from heavy run-offs and the unwanted attention that it draws from predators like river ot-ters, mink and raccoons. In fact one of the local otters came by for a visit while Grant was explaining how the trap works.

Saving Reay Visiting Reay Creek is a homecoming for me because, as a member of the Sidney Anglers Asso-ciation at the time, I was in on the project from the very first phone call. One night in the late summer of 1981 I took that call from Stan Levar, a local friend, trout fisherman and commer-cial salmon troller. He asked if I along with the local fishing club might be interested in restoring Reay Creek with sea run cutthroat trout.

At that time I lived in a small cot-tage quite near the mouth of the creek and was taken aback by Stan’s request. Admittedly my knowledge of the creek was limited to walks in front of the estuary and the occasional glance as I drove along Lochside Drive to Sidney. However it looked like so many other muddy drainage ditches that I had never even considered that it might hold trout or much less even some salmon.

However, Stan assured me that the upstream sections of the creek were much different and with some help would be capable of sustaining a trout population. So I contacted Bob Bailey, who was the president of the anglers club, and a week or so later the three of us did the first assessment of Reay Creek. Stan’s enthusiasm was conta-gious so we raised the possibility of starting an enhancement project at the next fishing club meeting.

With the clubs support in hand we

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then contacted the Pro-vincial Fisheries De-partment where we hit our first roadblock. The province quite tersely informed us that they did not allow unskilled folks to play around with sea run cutthroat trout, but thanks for the interest anyway.

Fortunately the Federal Government had recently created SEP, or the Salmo-nid Enhancement Program. This was a bold initiative to bring B.C.’s salmon populations back to historic levels. Within the program there was a rela-tively small allotment of funds dedicat-ed to the Public Involvement Program, called PIP for short. The program pro-vided some funding and technical ad-vice for the volunteers. It was a major leap of faith for government to realize that the public, with guidance and sup-port, could be trusted to carry out this type of restoration work.

Fortunately we were a perfect fit for PIP. We had the option of enhancing the stream with coho or chum and being anglers we choose to go with coho salm-on. Shortly afterwards we had our first formal assessment of the entire stream course. The stream walk participants in-

cluded Howard English, who pioneered salmon enhancement on southern Vancouver Island, and whose contribu-tions have been recognized by having his name given to the Howard English Hatchery on the Goldstream River.

This hatchery played a significant role in the success of Reay Creek as it provided us with coho fry to introduce into the stream at the beginning of the project and in those years when we suffered set-backs from fish kills. Ron Kehl from Fisheries and Oceans, Trevor Morriss the PIP Community Advisor, Ted Clarke from the Town of Sidney, Bob Bailey, Stan Levar, Barry Free-man and myself rounded out the list of stream walk participants. Shortly af-terwards the project received approval and we were on our way.

Diverting Water At the outset the stream needed a lot of work. The water-

Above: A young salmon, also known

as a smolt. Right: This smolt trap is checked

regularly by volunteers.

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67 June . 2014

course was littered with natural and man-made debris including items like toilets, bed frames, rubber tires and a never-ending assortment of smaller pieces of junk and hard-ware. After clean up it was appar-ent that there was lots of work to be done as the creek had just a few spawning areas and even less good quality pool and riffl e complexes.

But the biggest problems were yet to come. Historically the creek ran all year long but according to the only resident with a water license the summer fl ows ceased in the early 1970s when a residential com-plex on the side of Mount Newton was completed. This development diverted a signifi cant amount of water towards other ditches as well as removing a large part of the wa-ter retention capability of the once fully-forested mountain side.

Fortunately there was a problem near the creek that provided the sil-ver lining. The Town of Sidney used to draw its water from a series of artesian wells. When the town went onto the regional water supply they stopped using the wells. This cre-ated a signifi cant all-year surface water problem for nearby residents.

Initially the town pumped wa-ter from the unused wells down existing ditches into the top of the creek to provide some measure of summer water fl ow. However this did not solve the persistent fl ood-ing problem, so the town decided to ditch the water directly into the sea. The anglers intervened and convinced Sidney to divert the fl ow into the top of Reay Creek. As a result this cold artesian water has been the summer lifeblood for Reay Creek for more than 30 years.

Removing Toxins The most severe problems came in the form of fish kills emanating from indus-trial waste principally located on Victoria Airport Authority lands. Toxic chemicals like cadmium from painting and paint stripping opera-tions have collected in the soils since the 1940s and were periodi-cally exposed and carried into the creek during high run-offs.

The chemicals were lethal to fi sh as well as other aquatic wildlife. To their credit the airport author-ity stepped up to the plate and

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68 June . 2014

embarked on a very extensive long-term program of waste clean up and mitigation which has carried on to this day. In fact the airport has embraced the idea of salmon spawning within its boundaries and has become a valuable partner in the project.

Reconstruction Over the last three and a half decades hundreds of vol-unteers have worked on Reay Creek.

However in some cases work has been done by paid contract. One example of this involved ex-commercial fish-ermen. They were displaced from the commercial fishery as a result of the Miffl in Plan, which downsized the fl eet through a buy-back program.

Local fi shermen who were affected by Miffl in formed a group called CER-CA and with funding from Fisheries Renewal B.C. undertook an extensive

stream clean up and gravel bed con-struction program on the middle sec-tion of the stream. Other signifi cant investments have gone into the re-construction of an earthen dam at the headwaters. This was jointly funded by the Town of Sidney, the DFO and the local anglers club.

It became a high priority project after the dam was breached and se-verely damaged during an extreme run-off event. The breach threatened not only the health of the stream but the infrastructure in the Linear Park, which runs along the stream.

More recently the airport author-ity constructed a wetland diversion channel loaded with aquatic plants that will help to purify the water be-fore it enters the productive section of Reay Creek.

Funding These activities are just a few that have been co-funded by the federal, provincial and local govern-ments as well as the angling club and other private volunteer donors, like the Port Sidney Marina with pro-ceeds from its annual Port Sidney Fishing Derby.

Money has also come from regional sources like the Provincial Capital Commission as well as major en-hancement organizations like the Pa-cifi c Salmon Foundation. However, the bulk of the in-stream, hands-on work such as building spawning beds, rip-rapping the stream banks, creating better over wintering habitat and do-ing basic technical work, like the smolt trapping, has been done by volunteers who appreciate the value of streams and want to see healthy salmon popu-lations carry on for the use and enjoy-ment of future generations.

A Better Solution The benefi ts cannot always be measured in profi t and loss terms. On the basis of fi sh produced and money returned to the economy from either sport or commercial fi sh-

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69 June . 2014

ing the balance sheet could never justify the fi nancial and man hour expenditures. It simply costs an extraordinary amount of time, money and resources to rebuild damaged aquatic systems. So the best solution is not to destroy them in the fi rst place.

This mindset is much more in play today than it was a half cen-tury ago when the resource value of the province’s smaller rivers and streams was rarely considered against the immediate benefi ts of industrial, commercial and resi-dential activities and expansions.

The fact that Reay Creek, and oth-ers like it, have been brought back from the brink proves that it can be done through combined com-munity efforts and strong part-nerships. The pay off comes when generations of school kids learn something about the importance of aquatic environments through educational programs including annual fry releases of chum and coho salmon into hundreds of small coastal and interior streams where few or no fi sh existed be-fore. These are also focal points for local residents to observe the re-turn of adult salmon to the rivers. One visit to the Goldstream River during the fall migration, seen by tens of thousands of people annu-ally, should leave no doubt about the value that British Columbians place on the salmon resource.

A Lasting Legacy These volun-teer projects are a lasting legacy of the federal government’s fore-sight when they created the Sal-monid Enhancement Program. While the program never fulfi lled its intended goals because politi-cians either lost interest in the salmon resource or succumbed to pressure for other funding demands, it does still exist at a much reduced level.

Since the salmon resource is still under pressure from many of the same competing and natural pres-sures it might be time to revital-ize the SEP initiative based on the vision from 40 years ago. The streams are there and so are the volunteers. It only needs govern-ment’s will to put the proper poli-cy in place.

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