Sardine fishery booming
Friday, April 8, 2011
By Natalia Real
The sardine catch around British Columbia’s (BC) Vancouver Island has been soaring in recent years. Fishers in Ucluelet, Zeballos, Port Hardy and other resource-dependent communities caught 22,000 tonnes of sardines in 2010 – just a tiny fraction of the schools some describe as hundreds of m long.
“I’ve seen them on the west coast of Vancouver Island thick enough to walk on,” said Barron Carswell, senior manager of marine fisheries and seafood policy for the provincial Agriculture Ministry.
“It’s incredible. They are all over the place. You can go into little bays and the surface of the water is all sardines,” he marvelled, reports Vancouver Sun.
The sardine harvest in 2009 exceeded 15,000 tonnes — 10 times the amount compared to when sardines received commercial fishery status two years before, and grew to CAD 29 million (USD 30.2 million) from CAD 1.4 million (USD 1.46 million) in 2007. The harvest gives work to fishing vessels and processing facilities in rural resource-dependent communities on Vancouver Island.
In Ucluelet, Zeballos and Port Hardy, more than 14,000 tonnes of sardines have been processed through partnerships between commercial companies and First Nations.
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