“The best decision I’ve made in years.” That’s how Andrew Dukes describes the choice he made to leave the restaurant industry seven years ago and join the Port Hardy Processing Plant (PHPP).

“I wouldn’t go back to cooking for anything,” he said.

Marine Harvest Faroe Islands Site

Continuous improvement is an essential component of successful salmon farming and applying locally gathered information to apply to similar challenges throughout the world is invaluable.

It was really useful to find out we were making the right decision in going to the plastic cages, Rodney said.

Every farm site they visited is bound by strict bio-security measures. Each staff member has separate clothing that is worn on site only. Interestingly enough, staff don’t stay overnight on any sites. It’s not a long trip to and from the Faroes site, roughly the distance from Campbell River to Quadra Island, said Jeff.

Floyd, Jeff, and Rodney spoke very highly of the warm hospitality shown to them by all the Marine Harvest Faroes staff. This friendliness extended to the sites owned by other companies they visited. The trio was treated to a soccer game between the Faroese national team and the Austrian team in the capital city of Torshavn. They were also were treated to many delicious meals, sampling the fine Faroese cooking.

By Gina Forsyth

The CR South area held their annual BBQ at Young Pass on Sept 3rd and this year it was decided that the sites would show off their farming chops by competing head to head in the first annual Fish Farm Olympics. Staff from Bickley, Farside, Sonora, Brougham, Okisollo and Cyrus made up three teams. All Pen Diving fielded a fourth team and lastly, a team called the “Whitehats”. The Whitehats were, as the moniker suggests, a team comprised of supervisors and so they were heavily favoured to carry the day.

Riley McFadyen gave everyone the run down on what to do. First up was the “behind the back bowline” tied to a cannon ball. Then an unlucky “volunteer” got to paddle across an empty 100x with the cannon ball in a plastic boat. Once on the other side, a teammate waited to splice two ropes together and drop the cannon ball to the bottom of the ocean (which at Young Pass is only about 35m). After that the cannon ball is pulled to the opposite side of the cage with a capstan and loaded onto a transfer pen which is towed around the can buoy and made secure on the next cage.  Allpen’s “Dirty Divers” led by Rob McLaughlin surprised everyone by acing the event. When asked how he completed his splice so quickly, Rob replied, “It’s easy above water”. What happened to the Whitehats? They dropped the ball… literally and figuratively. Their cannon ball is sitting on the bottom below the cages and now Rob and his crew will have to go and retrieve it for them.

Good times were had by all. Thanks to Riley for organizing the events and Mike “the human fid” Sharko for the good food!

Submitted by James Rogers

North Island Gazette – Usual suspects in the salmon crisis.

Citing the usual suspects in the Pacific salmon crisis

By Tom Fletcher – Kamloops This Week

Published: October 26, 2009 3:00 PM
Updated: October 26, 2009 3:53 PM

In only a few weeks, Josee Migneault, the Health, Safety and Environmental Systems Manager, will celebrate fifteen years in our industry. It’s clear she is where she
wants and needs to be.

Her area of responsibility is ensuring compliance with health, safety and environmental regulations company-wide, including at the Port Hardy Processing Plant and with MHC’s main contractors. Her main goal and passion, however is to keep all employees free of injuries.

“Born and raised on the ocean” in Sept-Iles, Quebec, Josee remains strongly connected to her parents. “We talk every day,” she said, adding that’s important to maintain a family connection and to “help them (her parents) realize they still matter to me.” Josee’s path to the industry was, in her words, “one of karma”. After joining the military in 1979, she was transferred to Comox two years later. One day she read her horoscope that said she’d become a “fish keeper”. Josee mentioned this to Diana Pickwick, current manager at Pott’s Bay. Josee spent a weekend at Sargeaunt’s Pass, where Diana was working at the time for Stolt Sea Farm. Consequently, Josee “fell in love” with the work and the industry.

“I had to be here,” she said.

Upon returning to dry land, Josee handed in her resignation at Realty World, presented a resume to Stolt, and received a phone call two weeks later. She began as a fish tech, later became an Assistant Manager, and moved into compliance in 1998, an area that energizes her and “makes me want to be here every day.”

Away from work, Josee has a passion for riding her motor bike and wood working. Her current project is a four foot humpback whale that will welcome visitors to her home in Fanny Bay. Her home is in a perfect location to indulge in the kayaking she loves so much because it connects her to nature.

By Gina Forsyth

Feeding fish diets with fishmeal and fish oil partially replaced by plant and/or animal sources can mean both lower levels of organic pollutants in the fish and lower production costs.

This was the hypothesis Dr. Erin Friesen, Product Manager at Skretting North America, decided to pursue when she started her PhD research in Food Science in 2003 at UBC.

In order to meet consumer demands for fish products, the aquaculture industry is growing at a rate of approximately eight percent per year. This in combination with a worldwide commercial fishery that isn’t seeing growth in the amount of fish it catches, suggests that the worldwide demand for fish oil will soon exceed supply, said Erin.

This is where suitable alternative feed ingredients of plant and/or animal origin become imperative, she added.

Farmed fish have often come under attack for containing higher levels of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as polychlorinated biphenyls, dioxins, furans and flame-retardants. The major sources of theses POPs in farmed fish are the fish oil and to a lesser extent, fish meal, in the feed. As a result, in addition to lowering production costs, the use of plant and/or animal ingredients has the potential to lower levels of POPs found in fish flesh.

Erin’s research co-authored with researchers at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans included both tank feeding trials with Atlantic salmon and sablefish and an on-farm field study in 2005 with commercial farmed salmon. She examined the effects of partially replacing marine fish oil in aquaculture feeds with economical and abundant oils from land-based sources such as flax oil and canola oil. In the laboratory feeding trials, decreases in contaminants were found to be directly related to how much marine fish oil was replaced with alternative oil sources.

For the farm site feeding trial, fish were collected from various BC farms in both 2003 and 2005. In 2003 farms were using higher levels of fishmeal and fish oil in their diets and in 2005 the diets were more highly replaced with alternative sources of protein and fat.

“The more knowledge (we) have on replacements, the better”, Erin stated.

The findings from this study showed that with more replaced diets, the contaminant levels in farmed Atlantic salmon were similar or lower than wild Pacific salmon but at the same time had higher flesh levels of Omega-3 fatty acids than wild salmon. Consumption of both farmed Atlantic salmon or wild Pacific salmon can meet recommended weekly Omega-3 nutritional requirements.

Although Omega-3s are needed by the body for optimal memory and performance, our bodies can’t produce them naturally. So that means we must regularly eat foods that contain them. This is where fish comes in, with its significant levels of this necessary healthy fat.

Erin’s research findings have been published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Here is a link to the article citation and abstract

By Clare Backman

Published: September 29, 2009 5:00 PM
North Island Gazette

Teresa Bird’s story on Sept. 16 (Salmon returns unexpected) is good news for all who value BC’s wild Pacific salmon.

However, it’s also disconcerting to know we lack sufficient information to predict returns of pink salmon and other species.

When it comes to the health of pink salmon in the Broughton Archipelago, much emphasis in recent years has been on the interaction between farmed salmon, wild salmon and sea lice.

The question has been: Do sea lice incubate on farmed salmon and transfer to pink salmon migrating away from Broughton streams and cause significant mortality of juvenile wild fish?

There has been debate around this question and independent research. Results of research now provide a better understanding of this relationship, but neither a clean bill of health nor a smoking gun; what we still have is a level of uncertainty that calls for precautionary measures.

A corporate sustainability report done by Marine Harvest in 2008 shows sea lice is an issue of concern and demonstrates that sea lice management is an important task worldwide.

Marine Harvest Canada has been adapting its practices in the Broughton, taking a more precautionary approach to sea lice at individual farms and throughout the area.

The focus has been on the pink salmon out migration, from when pink fry begin emerging from natal streams in early March until the juvenile fish have entered Queen Charlotte Strait at the end of June.

Working with the provincial government, DFO and environmental groups, we have increased monitoring for sea lice on our farms, implemented targeted and strategic application of the therapeutant SLICE, participated in sea lice surveys on juvenile wild fish conducted by DFO and independent researchers. In 2009, in cooperation with the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform—an independent sea lice monitoring program was initiated and we proposed a coordinated area management plan (CAMP) for our Broughton operations.

If fully implemented, the CAMP proposal will ensure that, during the juvenile pink salmon out migration season that one corridor, either Tribune-Fife or Lower Knight would be free of farm-raised salmon.

The only impediment to fully implementing CAMP, a proposal supported by the Pacific Salmon Forum, has been the approval of farm-level amendments required to enact the program, which were long ago submitted to the provincial Ministry of Agriculture and Lands.

How does this relate to strong pink returns in the Broughton and elsewhere? Have the efforts of Marine Harvest and our partners contributed to the good news? Is it due to the actions of others or something yet to be understood in the ocean?

As your article noted, we don’t know, but we plan to continue to reduce the likelihood that our farms are negatively impacting wild salmon.

To do this we need continued efforts from the environmental community, the governments of Canada and B.C., and coastal stakeholders throughout the region.

The good news story of the pink salmon this year needs to be repeated for years to come.

Clare Backman

Marine Harvest

http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_north/northislandgazette/opinion/letters/62695747.html

Inaccurate charges mar discussions over future of B.C.’s fish farms

By Clare Backman, Times Colonist
Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2009

What is a stronger icon of British Columbia than the Pacific salmon?

Not much. Maybe a grizzly, or the Lions Gate Bridge, or Long Beach.

Whatever your answer, we can be reasonably certain that preserving Pacific salmon for future generations is important to everyone in the province, especially those of us who live on the Island and on the coast.

This includes the 500-plus people who work at Marine Harvest Canada, now the largest private employer on the north half of the Island and the largest aquaculture company in B.C.

Objective and fair criticism of our business is welcome. We receive lots of it through the news media and our website or via Twitter and Facebook. Off-base or wild assertions come our way too, and we do our best to respond with an open mind.

In running our business we have to stick with the facts as we understand them and use the best available science to guide our management decisions. We cannot react to every assertion that is made of every opinion that is presented.

Headlines and editorials in the Times Colonist tell us that the decline in Fraser River sockeye in 2009 is a major public concern — and so it should be.

Some observers have already pointed to warmer oceans with less food for the sockeye to eat in 2007 and 2008.

Others ask just how many of these fish never make it back to B.C. waters because they are scooped up in the Bering Sea. Another challenge facing juvenile sockeye is the state of the urbanized and industrialized Fraser River estuary.

This is assuredly not the first time that sockeye have failed to return to the Fraser in the numbers expected. It is the first time, however, that the critics-of-aquaculture crowd has pitched the media with their default finger-pointing at our salmon farms.

The health of the Fraser River sockeye and other Pacific salmon stocks is a serious public issue that merits a serious and informed public discussion. Uninformed and inaccurate opinions and assertions should not be the basis of public policy debates or, frankly, coverage in mainstream and responsible media like the Times Colonist.

Our obligation to the communities where we operate, such as Campbell River, Port Hardy and the Comox Valley, is to listen to concerns and to behave responsibly in minimizing our environmental impacts while providing stable employment that benefits hundreds of families.

After years of listening and participating in studies, it is clear to responsible and knowledgeable fisheries biologists that the weight of scientific evidence lands on a few key points:

- Sea lice can damage or kill very small pink salmon; sockeye migrating past the Discovery Islands are much larger than the threshold risk.

- There is scant evidence that sea lice can cause population level declines of salmon; remember the “almost extinct” pink salmon in the Broughton? They are so numerous this year that a fishery was allowed.

- There is no tracking system to know just where and how numerous the Fraser River sockeye are during their migration, although this is a technology we would all like to see available.

And this brings us to the heart of the matter: Regardless of what we do not know about the causes of low survival of our wild salmon, we all need to work together to learn how to better protect them.

Our commitment to environmental, social, and economic sustainability is key to our business. If this means different management of our farms to further conserve and protect wild salmon, that is exactly what we will do. If we discover that other causes are at fault, we expect that all interested stakeholders will come together to find workable solutions.

Finally, the demand for salmon is growing by five per cent every year, and this includes B.C. consumers. Salmon’s health benefits are clear and widely known. We all know that the wild fisheries cannot meet this demand and, in fact, could not make up the 79,000 tonnes of salmon produced each year by B.C.’s aquaculture industry.

Surely encouraging a sustainable salmon aquaculture industry in B.C. is one of the very best ways to lessen pressure on our wild stocks.

Clare Backman is Director of environmental relations at Marine Harvest Canada.

http://www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/comment/story.html?id=a1e83462-4455-44c5-b0fb-41ef923e5058&p=1

North Island Gazette – Salmon returns unexpected

Teresa Bird, Gazette staff, September 15, 2009

Pink salmon are returning in near record numbers on the B.C. coast but no one is really sure why.

Estimates by fishery officers monitoring rivers in the Broughton Archipelago show returns of pink salmon this year already significantly higher than the brood year in 2007.

“They have over replaced the brood year in at least three of the systems,” said Pieter Van Will, DFO program head for North Island stock assessment. For example, the estimated returns to the Kakweiken River system for the 2007 season were 37,000 returns. But the offspring of those fish returning to spawn were already estimated to number about 270,000 by the first week of September this year. In the Glendale system, the 2007 brood year was estimated at 264,000. The estimates for this year are already at 297,000. The same trend is evident in other Broughton Archipelago rivers and all along the B.C. coast.

“We are having strong returns coast wide,” confirmed Andrew Thomson, acting regional director of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in the Pacific region. “The Quinsam River in Campbell River has record returns. I think it speaks to the larger picture that pink salmon fluctuate greatly. We don’t understand all the factors for this fluctuation. It is a very complex picture.”

But Thomson said pink salmon returns are typically lower in odd years and the reason for the strong returns this year is unclear.

“There are any number of environmental conditions that have an impact on the survival of pink salmon,” said Thomson. Those factors could include, along with others, ocean conditions, feed availability, juvenile mortality and flow conditions.

Overall the strong return of pinks are good news.

A study co-authored by local researcher and environmentalist Alexandra Morton, predicted in 2007 the demise of the pinks by 2011. The study pointed at fish farms for increasing the numbers of sea lice that in turn threatened juvenile salmon headed for the ocean each spring. The study concluded that “sea lice typically killed over 80 percent of the fish in each salmon run” and that “if sea lice infestations continue, affected pink salmon populations will collapse by 99 per cent in … four years.”

Morton, who is happy to see the pinks return, said the extinction forecast hasn’t materialized because fish farms are doing a better job of managing farms.

“The extinct prediction was based on nothing changing,” said Morton. “Since then there have been significant changes.” Those changes include better and earlier administration of the drug SLICE by fish farmers to control sea lice infestations, said Morton.

“It is effectively bringing the lice numbers down,” said Morton.

But while Marine Harvest Canada, operator of the majority of fish farms in the Broughton Archipelago, appreciates the kudos, they say nothing has changed in how they treat their fish for lice.

“Yes farm management is always improving, but we haven’t changed the way we administer SLICE in five or six years,” said Ian Roberts, spokesperson for Marine Harvest. The pinks returning this fall would have migrated through the Broughton in the spring of 2008.

“There was no big corridor of fallowed farms on an out-migration route that year,” said Ian Roberts, spokesperson for Marine Harvest Canada that operates the majority of the farms in the area. “We fallowed three farms. We were managing sea lice as we have in previous years.”

Marine Harvest generally manages sea lice by administering SLICE to kill sea lice on their fish. Last year the company used 15 kg of SLICE to treat 80,000,000 kg of farmed fish.

“Lice levels near or far from farms have dropped in the last five years,” said Roberts. “The returns must be due to other variables in the ocean.

“We are consistent. We are still operating and treating for sea lice the same way. We’re consistent so there’s obviously another factor at play (in fluctuating salmon returns),” said Roberts. “We’ve seen good years and we’ve seen bad years. We have been here for both.”

Paws for a Cause Campbell River organized by Kerri Preus, raised over $30,000 for the SPCA in Campbell River. Our team was well represented and raised $5370.36 for the animals to take top place team in Campbell River. We were $19.26 behind third place in the province. Thanks to everyone who participated and helped in any way to make the Marine Harvest Mutts “tops” in Campbell River.