Victoria and Area SFAB Committee – Regional Issue Update from DFO

You may read this summary document from DFO concerning fish and fisheries issues being considered by and of interest to the Sport Fishing Advisory Board. If you have any questions or would like your local reps to bring something to the table at the upcoming South Coast SFAB meeting this coming weekend, please feel free to contact Tom Cole at (250) 478-1306 or by email, or Chris Bos at (778) 426-4141 or by email before this Saturday.

Mentioned in the document linked above is the Southern Resident Killer Whale fisheries management proposal from DFO. Earlier this year, in Feb and Mar, the Victoria and Area SFAB Committee held three emergency SFAB meetings (Sidney, Victoria and Sooke), where Martin Paish (SFAB Exec and IHPC SRKW Committee) and Chris Bos consulted with the local angling community so that a suitable response could be submitted to DFO from our sector relating to their proposal. The formal SFAB response was submitted before March 15th deadline and included the recommendations coming from the emergency meetings.

Regarding 2018 Chinook fishing coastwide – the department has recently sent out a document indicating they are contemplating additional Chinook management measures for BC this year. The concern DFO anticipates poor returns of number of stocks including but not limited to Skeena and Fraser Rivers. While no final decision on what measures may be taken has been made, further reductions in exploitation are being considered. For Fisheries Management Areas 18, 19 and 20 early timed Fraser stream-type Chinook are expected to be low too. It is not anticipated to have a closure of the Chinook fishery locally, but DFO might seek some additional tightening of the regs. SFAB reps will discuss this topic with DFO prior to the upcoming South Coast meeting.

Comment on DFO’s SRKW discussion document re: closures by March 15

DFO has proposed measures intended to provide food (chinook salmon) and perhaps less interaction with sport fishing vessels for SRKW. These measures include shutting down salmon fishing in specific areas from May 1 to September 30 of this year.

You can read their SRKW Discussion Paper Final Feb 15 2018.

As an example of proposed measures, for the Strait of Juan de Fuca west of Sooke, they showed this map as captioned:

SRKW forage areas in JDF west of Sooke — Juan De Fuca Map showing SRKW Foraging areas and Rockfish Conservation Areas (RCAs).

and followed it with this information:

Proposed Management Measures: For this area, an experimental approach is proposed with salmon fishing or fin fish closures proposed for Subareas 20-3 and 20-4 from May 1 to September 30. Monitoring is planned to compare SRKW foraging behaviour in these areas with the adjacent Subareas 20-1 and 20-5, which will remain open to fin fish.

Other areas discussed are named as Pender Island, Saturna Island and Mouth of the Fraser.

You have an opportunity to submit your remarks on this topic to the DFO by March 15 using the form Southern Resident Killer Whale Discussion Paper Feedback Form, which is formatted by DFO as a Microsoft Word document.