KEY POINTS:
The salmon are back. No one really knows why, they just are.
"It has been the best salmon season in 10 years," says a very excited Rob Bell, from Christchurch tackle store The Complete Angler.
You could argue it has been the only salmon season in a decade.
Such had been the decline in the South Island's premiere sport fishery since the last boom season in 1996, many had come to believe it was in its final death throes.
Salmon were being born in Canterbury's rivers such as the Rakaia and Rangitata. They were heading out to sea all right. They just weren't coming back.
The result for anglers was catastrophic.
Catch numbers at the annual Rakaia three-day competition, which this weekend celebrates in 25th jubilee, tell the story.
In 1983, another boom year, 100 fish were landed by lunchtime on the first day. Two years ago 708 anglers caught just 24 salmon over three days.
Things were so bad the tournament organisers began awarding most of the $50,000 worth of prizes on a pot-luck basis.
Last year wasn't much better, with 67 salmon caught during the tournament.
Certainly there was no reason to suspect this year would be any better.
"It has been amazing," says Bell. "Fantastic. Not only have the numbers of fish been way up, but their condition has been superb as well. They are hard-fighting fish too. It fires everyone up."
Most fish have been in the 7.2-8.1kg range, with more than 1000 landed this season already at the Rangtitata mouth alone.
"I was there the other day and there were 35 fish landed, and that was a slow day," Bell says.
The Hurunui has also been fishing brilliantly, while the Waimakariri is expected to have its best runs over the next month.
It's all a far cry from my own salmon fishing experiences. Having invested around $1600 in shiny new tackle, I put in, at a conservative estimate, about 200 hours fishing time on the Rakaia, Waimakariri and Hurunui Rivers over the course of the 1998-2000 seasons.
I fished the surf, the river mouths and upriver pools. Not only did I not catch a salmon or even encourage a bite, I only ever saw one fish caught.
"You hit a nasty patch there," says Bell.
Sure did. I wasn't alone.
The mouths of the Canterbury rivers are dotted with fishos' huts. Many of the old timers who frequent these huts are retirees - blokes who'd worked their whole lives and had looked forward to whiling away their summers enjoying the superb sport fishing they had become accustomed to.
Doom and gloom wouldn't even go close to describing how these locals viewed the state of the fisheries. The ones I spoke to were angry, frustrated and dejected.
Efforts were made to revive the fisheries. Hatchery programmes were launched. Evidence, however, showed the return rates of the smolts released into the rivers were erratic. Certainly there is no evidence to suggest the programmes are behind this year's bumper runs.
Bell, who as a member of a by-catch committee that measures the number of fish being caught at sea by commercial boats, is closely involved with the science of the fisheries' management.
After being born in the rivers, salmon spend two or three years at sea before returning to complete the life-cycle by spawning and dying. The consensus among scientists is that it is the conditions at sea that determine the quality of the salmon runs.
Three years ago traps showed the number of salmon leaving the Rangitata was at an all-time low.
No one really knows why the return rate of those fish has been so high this year.
"Conditions at sea have conspired to give us a bumper season," says Bell.
About bloody time.
Catching a salmon should be on the to-do list of any serious angler. Eight years ago I walked away from the mouth of the Rakaia River and swore I would never go back.
One telephone conversation with Bell and I'm already trying to figure out how I can get to the river before the runs slow at the end of March.
Ain't that fishing.
