"Did anyone see the flying fish floating over False Creek today? Can't tell where they were coming from. The insides were painted red. From a distance they looked like fish swimming in the air. Closer they looked like soap bubbles. I caught one and as soon as I touched it it dissipated. The red colouring was then all over my hands. They were amazing. No idea how they were molded and from where they were launched."
That was a status update I saw on a friend's Facebook wall on the day of the Pacific Salmon Foundation's biennial Pink Salmon Festival a few days back. HERE's a leadup post I did about the festival and the importance of the pink salmon as a sustainable food source, and HERE's a video of what the heck's going on with those floating pieces of fish-shaped foam you might have spotted (or caught) all the way on the East Side. I heard some of them made it past Main Street that day and if you don't want to watch the video on how they're made I'll break it down real simple: eco-friendly, helium-filled, coloured bubble shapes made by some crazy patented machine called a Flogo maker. It was so rad to see pink salmon love spread far and wide over the city that day, beyond all of the booths and free food and fun contained at the festival in Hadden Park.
Pink salmon Flogo
I headed down to check out the festival with V.I.A.'s youngest blogger, Arlo, who quickly made his way to the Stream Of Dreams booth to colour himself a magnet to put on the fridge.
Stream Of Dreams is the organization that's responsible for all of those fish that you see swimming in schools on the fences of schools around the city. They go in and do workshops with kids about the importance of taking care of our water sources and each one of them gets to paint their own life-sized fish, which they then hang on the fence outside of the school.
Here's one of the free pink salmon dishes they served us. To be honest I had never had this variety before so a large part of my excitement around the event was trying it for the first time and weighing it against the sockeye and chinook we usually get for the BBQ at home. The verdict? It ranked right up there and the next time we're BBQing, before this weather turns, I'm definitely going to opt for the pink.
Overall? Super glad we went down to celebrate the return of this sustainable fish stock that was there all along. HERE's a gallery of photos the PSF shared from the day, showing all of the different booths etc. See ya next time!
