Anglers welcoming back 2008 release

Wayne Olsen
Wayne Olsen
The Otago Harbour is becoming a mecca for salmon anglers and it is down to the efforts of a dedicated group of fishing enthusiasts.

"There have been some really good catches coming on from that 2008 smolt release," New Zealand Salmon Anglers Association Otago branch chairman Wayne Olsen said yesterday.

"We had a 15-16lb [7kg] one caught off the wharf on Monday.

The biggest one caught in the harbour was 33lb [15kg] three years ago."

The Dunedin Community Salmon Trust was established in 2009 to create a self-supporting salmon-rearing facility at Sawyers Bay and release up to 35,000 smolt annually.

"We release in winter, at the beginning of June, to avoid the natural predators in the harbour.

"The shags have migrated north and the sea lions head to the south seas to go fishing down there," Mr Olsen said.

Salmon are born in fresh water and migrate to the ocean to mature, then use their olfactory memory to return to the fresh water where they spawned to reproduce.

"We don't know what they do for the three or four years they're away at sea, but when they come back they're big."

The Sawyers Bay facility operated as a private hatchery until 2006 and the land is now leased by the University of Otago from the Dunedin City Council.

"We've changed our strategy a bit and, rather than releasing them in the harbour at the Leith wharf, we've been putting them in tankers and releasing them further up the Leith stream. It only takes them 48 hours to imprint on the area, which is what we're after.

"In the future, we might put a trap in. That way we can strip the eggs when they come back and we can raise our own salmon. At the moment, we have to buy the eggs and raise them for a year till they're old enough for release," he said.

"If we could get a genetic stock imprinted on the Leith, that would be brilliant. But if that experiment doesn't work, we'll look at establishing a sea cage to hold the smolt before release."

The hatchery was recently given a beer tank from the former Gardens Tavern, which it plans to convert into a mobile smolt tanker.

•The Otago Harbour salmon fishing competition will be held on the weekend of March 5 and 6.

"It's open to allcomers, with a particular focus on children."

- nigel.benson@odt.co.nz

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