Unfortunately for some of the steams in BC, we are getting Atlantic's. There is a huge salmon farm industry up and down our coast growning Atlantic Salmon for the supermarket industry. They are kept in pens - trouble is, seals eat salmon and the seals break into the pens to fee, ripping them apart. The surviving escapees then revert to nature and have started running in some of the streams on Vancouver Island and along the coast. Most of the steams along the coast are inaccessible by land.

We are requested to kill any Atlantic Salmon caught in streams and to send the head in to the Ministry of the Environment so they can see where it came from - apparently they all have a tracking wire injected into their heads.

If we didn't already have fulls streams of spawning 'salmonids', I would have welcomed the Atlantic Salmon. They are very similar to our Steelhead, a sea-run rainbow trout, in that they can return to spawn in the rivers and survive, perhaps 4 times. That is why we have the odd Steelhead that runs well over 35 pounds - records caught on the fly run 43pounds, IIRC. My 'best' was 26 pounds on a genuine spey rod.