Big B.C. Fish

I was at a local sportsman show the other day and had a great conversation with Jim Hall, the owner of Cartwright Sound Charters up in the Queen Charlotte Islands in beautiful British Columbia. Listen to the number and sizes of the fish they get. "The wonderful thing about our fisheries is that Canada has a wonderful management of their fishery. and 30 pounds chinook in 1997 was worth $97 dollars caught a commercial net. That same fish caught on a sporting line was $1000 dollars. They reprioritized who got what. Indians are always number one. They moved commercial sport fishing from number six to number two. So we don't have any commercial fishing for chinook after 30 May. They get 50,000 fish and then they shut them down. We open up, they don't fish in our fishery until September 15 and then they get however many DFO decides are available based on how many have gone up the rivers. We are a premier chinook fishery but we also get coho, six ling cod where most parts of Alaska only get one now for the whole year, we get to halibut, 10 Rockfish, five of them can be yellow eye which are hard to come by anywhere. We get 4 coho and 4 chinook. Our largest halibut that we have caught at our lodge over the years is 375 pounds. I have heard of a 460 pounder. Our ling cod are about 100 pounds.