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!

What does this have to do with the Vancouver Is Awesome Inc office and artwork, you ask? Well, while I was working on that piece I linked to above I inquired to our new friends at the PSF about their gift shop that I used to frequent on my visits to the Capilano River Hatchery (1, 2, 3, 4 blog posts as proof!). The gift shop closed down a few months back and the only things that remain are these cardboard cutouts of salmon, hanging in the window of the potentially-forever-closed store, taunting me. When it was open they hung from the ceiling and behind the cash register, and on more than one occasion I had asked the people working there if they’d be able to sell me one. Of course, as they were essentially pieces of the store itself and not products for sale, the answer was always no.

Cut to the chase, I asked the Pacific Salmon Foundation folks what the chances were that I could have one of these cutouts to hang in the room at the V.I.A. office that I lovingly refer to as The Library but in reality is more like our small meeting room where we keep our book collection. They replied with “Would you prefer a sockeye or a chinook?” and I fell off of my chair. After I picked myself up off of the floor I responded with “Sockeye, please!” and a couple of days later I found myself pounding a nail into the wall so I could mount this fine piece of artwork above the bookshelves. It now hangs there proudly, held up by a piece of fishing line, of course!

The piece of artwork serves three purposes. First as a conversation piece for people who visit us and meet in out meeting room, so we can tell them how awesome the Pacific Salmon Foundation is. Second, it’s a daily reminder for us that we should do more features about this fantastic resource that has so many Vancouver-centric stories to be told. Third, I’m the Executive Director and I personally love fish and fishing, I personally love screen-printed gems from the 80′s and I am personally spending more time in that meeting room than anybody else… so it’s totally self serving!

Join me in being self-serving this weekend and head down to Hadden Park to eat some free salmon at the Pink Salmon Festival!

Fishermen flock to the Fraser River near Agassiz, BC on Sunday August 14, 2011

Last year we brought you the ongoing STORY of the record breaking 2010 sockeye salmon run, the biggest one to happen in 100 years with a jaw-dropping almost 35 million of these fish making their way up the Fraser River! We even travelled all the way up the Adams River to share with you THIS FEATURE about their final destination.

This year the numbers of returning salmon are expectedly lower, somewhere between 1 and 7 million sockeye are expected to make their way up the Fraser to spawn, meaning that sportfishermen will likely only be given one small window by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to catch some. They’ve given 3 days to fish the Fraser, and the first day was Saturday, meaning if you’re a fisherman and you didn’t hear about it until right now then I imagine you’ll be taking the afternoon off to try and find a spot on the Mighty Fraser to reel one in!

Fishermen on the Fraser River near Agassiz, BC on Sunday August 14, 2011

A fishermen reels in a sockeye salmon on the Fraser River near Agassiz, BC on Sunday August 14, 2011

Check out THIS feature in the Province that our friend Sean Patrick Sullivan wrote about the opening. And I suppose I couldn’t find a better time to remind you once again about the Pink Salmon Festival that the Pacific Salmon Foundation is putting on on the 28th of this month. Pink salmon is returning in serious numbers this year (projected 17.5 million) and is perhaps the most sustainable stock of salmon. Learn more in THIS POST I made about the festival and be sure to come out to Hadden Park near the Maritime Museum at noon on August 28th for free pink salmon prepared by a chef.

Exactly one month from today on Sunday, August 28th, 2011, the Foundation is putting on their second annual Pink Salmon Festival, serving up free salmon for everyone who visits from noon until 5PM. It happens at Hadden Park, 1905 Ogden Avenue (at Cypress) the home of the Vancouver Maritime Museum (you know, beside the MOV!). And not only will the salmon be free (donated by Canfisco), but it’ll be prepared by renowned Vancouver chef, Robert Clark, of C Restaurant.

Why all the hullabaloo about pink salmon, you ask? Well, as you’ll remember from last year, the sockeye salmon get a lot of attention. Along with spring salmon they’re widely regarded as superior in terms of quality, but that common conception might all be about to change. Folks like Garret Schack, Executive Chef at the Chateux Victoria Hotel, are adding pink salmon to their menu, being quoted saying things like “Their flavour profile ranks right up there with sockeye or spring salmon”.

Basic description of the pink salmon, courtesy PSF

Of course this is great news for human and salmon-kind alike as in terms of sustainability the pink salmon are the most abundant and the most sustainable. They themselves will be returning in record numbers to the Fraser river this year (17.5 million strong! Take that, sockeye!) and their species has been long undervalued as a food source in BC.

When asked about the pink salmon and why they’re undervalued, Dr. Brian Riddell, president & CEO of the Foundation, says that “Pink salmon have historically been considered a ‘commercial’ fish and usually a canned product of lower grade than sockeye salmon. Commercially, pink salmon have only been the least valuable per pound, but they are much more important than implied by historical use. Pink salmon are the most important Pacific salmon to BC’s coastal ecosystems, they are highly abundant, and have excellent food value for people. Pink salmon have a lower oil content than other salmon due to their smaller size but nutritionally the content is still excellent and they have very low contaminants due to their feeding lower in the marine food chain and maturing at only two years of age.”

Still not convinced? Dr. Riddell goes on to say that “Pink salmon are also likely to be more resilient to climate change than other Pacific salmon. Pink salmon mostly use main channels of rivers for spawning and leave freshwater immediately after emergence from the gravel nests. Changes to temperatures and flows are likely to be damaging to pinks for this reason.”

I personally have never eaten fresh pink samon but you know where I’ll be on August 28th. I’ve also been told that Safeway, Save On Foods and IGA will all be carrying fresh pinks by early August, so give them a try on your own or come out to the Pink Salmon Festival to celebrate the return of this sustainable fish stock that was there all along!

Photo from the first biennial Pink Salmon Festival, courtesy PSF

Sewell’s offers guided eco tours and fishing charters but one of their most popular services they offer is the rental of speedboats, for sightseeing or fishing adventures. We took one out for a few hours up Howe Sound and to say that it quickly got me hooked on exploring the coast by boat would be an understatement: I WANT MORE!

You don’t need a license to take out one of their boats (okay, you need a valid driver’s license but not a boater’s license) you basically just show up and after a quick orientation and safety check you’re out on the water, where you slowly make your way past the ferries and into the Sound.

You’re free to go wherever you want within a pretty broad area of the Sound and they provide you with a list (which you can view HERE) of a bunch of different landmarks and locations to check out. For me one of the best things about being out there was just seeing the area as a whole from a different angle. Also, the feeling of being out on the water is worlds apart from what you might be used to in the city, but it’s just right there. So accessible.

One of the things on the list that we checked out was an old Canadian Forces destroyer called the HMCS Annapolis which is parked just off of Gambier Island and is being prepared to be sunk by the Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia. You can get right up to it, but I figured I’d give you this overview shot.

Another inlet on Gambier Island is home to Halkett Bay Provincial Park which you can access by simply tying up your boat and walking up the pier. That’s our rental there with the red top.

The park is 309 hectares in total but there’s plenty of goodness just two minutes up this trail.

The trail leads to a few campsites and perhaps the best place to have a picnic anywhere.

Wrapping up I think it’s obvious that we had an amazing time. If you’re thinking of taking a boat out Sewell’s’ pricing for a 4 hour rental is around $200 depending on what size of boat you’d like to get (4 to 6 passengers). HERE are all the details. Until next time…

In this current series of posts we’re taking you on an adventure to Sonora Resort, a Relais & Châteaux property up in Desolation Sound. In the FIRST post I showed you what it’s like to fly there with their sister company, London Air Services, by helicopter. In the SECOND I showed you our room. In the THIRD, some of the activities outside our room. In my FOURTH post I took you to the trout pond and the fish hatchery, then in the FIFTH I took you on an ocean adventure where I ended up catching an 11.5 pound salmon and SIXTH an eco tour and some of the natural beauty of the area.

Today I’m sharing something that is incredibly special that’s included in the price of your accommodations when you stay at Sonora Resort: some of the best gourmet food you will ever eat. Period.

The first night we decided that instead of ordering dinner from the regular menu we’d leave it in the hands of Chef Terry Pichor and go with his 5 course Chef’s Tasting Menu. If we wouldn’t have done this I think it might have been the single worst decision I would have made all year; the meal was absolutely incredible. The view from the dining room wasn’t too shabby either…

Chef Pichor is trained in classic French cuisine. Under him, the Sonora kitchen “continues its tradition of sourcing the finest local ingredients and transforming them into a culinary celebration of this spectacular region”. So of course our meal started with dungeness crab salad. I’m not going to say much about the individual courses and will let these photos do the talking.

Next up was Quebec foie gras.

Followed by braised Mt Lehman rabbit cannelloni.

Then olive oil and vanilla poached chinook salmon.

Followed by Salt Spring Island lamb belly.

Lastly, the dessert was rhubarb & lychee pavlova and I must apologize but I devoured it before I thought to shoot a photo of it, so this Sonora Bar will have to suffice. More than suffice, our trip was a couple of weeks ago and I am still daydreaming of this special creation invented by chef Pichor. If there’s a Dairy Queen “Dilly Bar” equivalent gourmet kitchen such as Sonora boasts, this is it. I would order twenty boxes of these for the freezer at home if I could but unfortunately for my sweet tooth you can only get them following a meal at Sonora.

Of course you’re not going to go for a 5 course meal every time you sit down in the dining room, so they have a regular menu as well. Here’s a few plates we enjoyed:

Eggs benny breakfast.

Scallop pasta lunch.

Steak lunch.

Another ridiculous chocolate creation dessert.

All followed (and often preceded) by a latte. Perfect. And if you’re more of a beer/wine/spirits person you could follow and precede your meals with those as well.

The next post about Sonora Resort will be the last in this series, all about the incredible trip home with London Air.

In this current series of posts we’re taking you on an adventure to Sonora Resort, a Relais & Châteaux property up in Desolation Sound. In the FIRST post I showed you what it’s like to fly there with their sister company, London Air Services, by helicopter. In the SECOND I showed you our room. In the THIRD, some of the activities outside our room. In my FOURTH post I took you to the trout pond and the fish hatchery and in my FIFTH I took you on an ocean adventure where I ended up catching an 11.5 pound salmon!

As promised, this post isn’t about killing anything to eat, it’s about an amazing eco tour we went on with Aaron Nagler, the author of the book, Natural Wonders of Sonora Resort, which you can read an excerpt from HERE.

This is the boat we were taken out on for a couple of hours (if you’ve been paying attention you’ll remember that this is actually the view of it from our room). Don’t be fooled by it’s puffy appearance, this thing seriously hauls. We covered so many kilometres of ocean and saw so much stuff it was incredible. The entire time, Aaron was talking to us through headsets that we wore, telling us about everything we were seeing.

Here’s some of the wildlife that we came across. It was super cool to be taken on a tour by the guy who quite literally wrote the book about the natural wonders of the area… but I will be honest and say that some of the stuff I liked the most wasn’t the wildlife!

And it wasn’t the waterfalls or the scenery either, although both were awe inspiring!

What I found the most interesting on our eco tour were the stories that he told us about man and his effects on the area. Starting with these ancient pictographs done in some sort of copper-based ink that have survived generations because they’re slightly protected from the elements under an outcropping of rocks. See the dolphins pictured on the left? So cool.

More recently, an equally interesting story he told us was about some of the abandoned floating houses we came across like this one below. When white men were settling in the area they relied on forestry for work. But as it’s so remote and there were never roads, the only way to transport the logs was by water. Their tools and vehicles weren’t as monstrous as they are now, so they generally only fell trees that were close enough to the water to be able to drag them into it where they’d then be shipped to mills closer to Vancouver. Nowadays you’ll see clearcuts way high in the forest range but back then they didn’t have the means to transport those trees from deep in the forest, so intead of building houses on the land and quickly depleting the forest closest to their homes, the settlers made floating homes that they’d park at certain locations until they had logged all that they could, then they moved on.

I’ll come back to the topic of forestry in my final post about Sonora Resort, but first I’ll show you the incredible food we were served. Stay tuned!

I went fishing with local musician, Rob Butterfield, whom you might remember from our MISADVENTURE at Brohm Lake last year, our LAST TRIP to Alouette Lake or the 5 part Jones Lake ADVENTURE I shared with you. He and I are fishing buddies and he’ll be making frequent appearances in blog posts over the next few months as the season ramps up.

So, the first thing we noticed when we got out of the car were the three ghosts of parking fees past: one sign post that used to have a sign on it telling us what the parking fees were flanked by two square metal poles that used to support machines that would gobble up loonies and toonies in exchange for parking passes. I’m not sure how long these are going to stay up but right now they serve as a reminder that parking is free. Let’s hope they’re not just keeping them there so it’ll be easy for the next incoming party/leader to re-implement the fees on us.

Aside from parking there are countless other things that are free in the park. Here are 3 of them that we took advantage of during our visit:

1. Views of float planes and trees and mountains and just generally some sweet nature.

2. Trails. Lots of them. And some of them are days long.

3. Fishing! Of course you need to buy a freshwater fishing license from the Freshwater Fisheries Society first. But to fish in the lake with a license, that’s free.

Find out more about Golden Ears Park HERE, and be sure to get out and enjoy some of the other HUNDREDS of our Provincial Parks this summer.

In this current series of posts we’re taking you on an adventure to Sonora Resort, a Relais & Châteaux property up in Desolation Sound. In the FIRST post I showed you what it’s like to fly there with their sister company, London Air Services, by helicopter. In the SECOND I showed you our room. In the THIRD, some of the activities outside our room. And in my FOURTH post I took you to the trout pond and the fish hatchery.

Today is a big day, all about what many people come to Sonora to do. It’s about taking a fishing charter on the ocean to try and catch some salmon!

This is the view from right outside our room of most of the boats that Sonora has on site, waiting to take you and your parties out for a day of fishing in Desolation Sound. I’ve been fishing freshwater lakes for trout my entire life but had never had an experience fishing the ocean for salmon before this day. I was pretty excited despite it being early in the season and we were facing the possibility of getting skunked (that’s fishing speak for “catchin nothin!”).

Here’s the boat we went out on. Deceptively small looking, in the front there’s actually a toilet and a place to sit down and chill/sleep if you feel like it.

But there was no sleeping to be done this day! Here’s our guide, Zane, shortly after baiting the first hook for us with an anchovy. Going out with a guide is crucial for a number of reasons beyond them supplying a boat and all of the gear and knowing how to bait the hooks and get the line down: Zane (and the rest of the guides) has been working these waters for years and knows the best spots to troll. He’s also got a lot of stories to tell and he’s knowledgable about nature in the area. As there was no spawning run happening we were after “resident” salmon who aren’t on their way through the area but who actually live in the area.

A lot of sitting around and marvelling at the beauty of the place goes on while you’re waiting for something to bite your hook. It looks like there’s something on my line but it’s actually just heavily weighted down so it can sit at about 90 feet below the surface where the fish were on this day.

Every now and then you’ll catch a small cod which you’ll throw back. Fun to reel in and interesting to look at, there are so many different types of fish in the ocean that even though you’re targeting salmon, sometimes other species are feeding on the same thing. I think that’s a rock cod on the left and a ling cod on the right.

And here is what we came for: the big one! It took a few minutes to reel it in and you can tell by the look on my face how happy I was to land it. This 11.5 pound Chinook salmon is the biggest fish I’ve ever caught and it was SUCH an awesome experience.

I kept marvelling at it. Here it is at my feet on the dock once we got back.

And here it is on the scale with me standing beside it after taking off that cozy lifejacket suit.

Another great thing about going out with a guide is that they’ll prepare your fish for the trip home once you’re off the boat. Zane spared no time gutting my fish and then making filets out of it, vacuum sealing it and then freezing it and putting it into a cooler for the ride back to Vancouver. Here it is on top of my BBQ!

Stay tuned for the next post when I don’t kill anything but instead simply look at nature on a guided eco tour!

In this current series of posts we’re taking you on an adventure to Sonora Resort, a Relais & Châteaux property up in Desolation Sound. In the FIRST post I showed you what it’s like to fly there with their sister company, London Air Services, by helicopter. In the SECOND I showed you our room. In the THIRD, some of the activities outside our room.

Today I’m taking you to the trout pond and telling you about Sonora Resort and Relais & Châteaux‘s commitment to sustainability.

First things first: the trout pond. This is a small body of fresh water that’s about a two minute walk from the room we stayed in, and it is absolutely brimming with trout. It’s a place where experienced fishermen can go to sharpen up their skills and it’s also a place where beginners can throw a line in the water and pretty much be guaranteed to catch something. In the first hour that my wife and I were here I landed an average of one fish every 5 minutes.

Here’s one of them on my line. And by “my line” I mean “their line”; they supply all of the gear if you don’t bring your own.

There are some in the pond that looked to be a couple of pounds but most of the ones I caught were around this size, and of course you throw them all back so that the next visitors who come along can enjoy them.

And speaking of the next ones to come along, let’s talk about that commitment to sustainability I mentioned. Here’s a statement about their goal to help sustain fish stocks globally, and where it came from:

“An organisation’s expression of social responsibility should ideally be closely tied to its core activities, and as such, Relais & Châteaux has chosen to focus its efforts on an issue related to gastronomy. Following its 2009 congress last November, Relais & Châteaux chefs drew up a charter to commit to protecting humanity’s biggest larder: the sea.

According to international scientific experts, fish will disappear from the oceans sometime between 2040 and 2050. In Europe, 50% of seafood is consumed in restaurants. In the face of the devastating levels of excessive fishing to meet growing demand, the members of Relais & Châteaux’s international Association unanimously agreed to commit to preserving sea life through a number of actions, including the use of sustainably fished seafood and most notably the stopping of serving the endangered Bluefin tuna.”

It sounds nice, and sure they don’t serve Bluefin, but what are they really doing? How about giving up a portion of the land that their resort is on in order to house a fish hatchery which directly supports the salmon population in British Columbia? That’s huge!

Here’s a look into one of those vats pictured at their hatchery above. There are roughly 100,000 of these Coho salmon fry in them, which will soon be released into a nearby river once they reach a certain maturity.

Again: this commitment is huge. The hatchery just might be my favourite thing about the resort.

Coming up in the next post: BIG fish! Stay tuned.