Sockeye fish return to Okanagan Lake for the first time in 50 years

A fish ladder installed in the Penticton dam last year gave sockeye an access point for the first time in 50 years and it’s paying off.

The Okanagan Nation Alliance got 100 fish up into Okanagan Lake and have tagged 30 of them so far.

While the dam was installed too late for any fish to make it through in 2019, this year the salmon were ready to use the ladder. 

“Having a 100 sockeye in there is pretty significant both for science and the symbolism behind it,” Ryan Benson, a Fisheries Biologist with the Okanagan Nation Alliance, said. “Just a trickle trying to get up and over into the dam.” 

“We were going to limit it to 100 sockeye in total and we are going tag them, put in these fluorescent tags on them and put in these transmitters”

The transmitters run all the way up to Vernon to watch how far the sockeye venture now that they’re in Okanagan Lake. 

On top of this success, this year's return for the run is looking to break records, bringing home an estimated 30,000 fish to the area. The previous record was 23,000 Sockeye in 2018.

While the full number won't be determined until November, Benson has high hopes with the counts so far. 

“It was pretty much like a perfect storm, in a good way,” he said. “We had a big run expected to come in and really good river conditions.” 

The high salmon return also came from the hatchery’s strong production back in 2016, following the four year cycle and seeing those fish come back to reproduce.

“We got a lot of hatchery production that year, I think that broke a record, so this is the adults from that year coming back.”

Benson hopes to see the forecast and estimate equations for a breaking year come through, but his team will still be counting and monitoring to get those final numbers.

“The big goal is to basically restore Indigenous fisheries and population to the Syilx, to the Okanagan territory,” Benson said. “Doing the best we can to restore it to historic levels.”