This past weekend, along with the Mill Bay and District Conservation Society and the Cowichan Valley Fly-Fishermen, student volunteers (including members of the Environment Club) helped move fish from the Mill Bay fish trap.  For more than 25 years, volunteers have collaborated to lift coho salmon to spawning streams in the Shawnigan Creek Watershed because the returning spawners face a series of waterfalls that are impassable.  To support this effort, the Environment Club was involved with netting, carrying, caging and releasing wriggling and thrashing fish that weighed up to 20 pounds each. The slimy texture of the scales made the effort more impressive, with only a few dropped fish that were quickly scooped up and released into the stream. After about 3 hours of work, with numb fingers and scale-covered arms, we had helped move about 150 fish to their new spawning locations.  During the last few weeks more than 2000 coho have been moved, and on Tuesday, a member of our Maintenance Department notice a migrating coho in Hartl Creek on our campus.  It has been three years since that has happened!

– Scott Noble