The Documentary Salmon Secrets Comes To Cortes Island

Roy L Hales/Cortes Currents - French filmmaker Jérémy Mathieu’s award winning documentary ‘Salmon Secrets,’ will be coming to Gorge Hall at 1 PM on Sunday, January 12.

This 40 minute film was produced by Clayoquot Action, whose co-founders Bonny Glamback and Dan Lewis will be speaking at the screening.

Mike Moore, President of the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI), stated,  
“The film is hosted by FOCI and our streamkeepers who have just done an incredible job working with the highways department to put in new culverts so that the fish can go up beyond Whaletown Road and the Squirrel Cove Road. They've done a lot of work on salmon enhancement projects, but without ocean survival all of those efforts are in vain.”

“One thing that we can do to improve ocean survival of the salmon is to remove the salmon farms that are in their way. We can't affect ocean nutrient levels and upwelling currents and plankton, which all feed the salmon when they're out in the North Pacific, but we can keep the salmon farms from transmitting diseases and lice to the wild salmon.”

The trailer starts with Joe Martin, of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, speaking a Nuu-chah-nulth word I cannot pronounce or spell.

He said, “ It means that everything is connected. The mountains to the ocean and they're actually connected by salmon. All the Nuu-chah-nulth have survived with that. You don't see that anymore.”

As the aerial view of a fish farm came into view, Dan Lewis explained, “The companies are Norwegian. They imported the eggs from the Atlantic Ocean from Europe and those eggs brought with them Piscine Orthoreovirus and the fish here had no defence against it.”

Independent biologist Alexandra Morton is depicted staring into a microscope, “I have been looking closely at hundreds of juvenile pink and chum salmon every single year. By the time the juvenile salmon made it to the open ocean they passed four or five salmon farms and they were just dying, hundreds of thousands of them.”

John K Forde, from the Marine Mammal Research Unit, added, “Right now the gray whales are having a catastrophic die off. In the spring, we're getting gray whales washing up on shore that are starving to death. If they don't have their food because it's been poisoned by Cermaq, then we won't have any whales through the summer months in this area. This is going to be devastating.”

Morton added, “Orcas have culture, and to maintain their culture, they need to gather. For resident orca to gather, there have to be a lot of salmon. That's how they maintain not only their health, but their culture. In recent years, it's been really sad to see them come in. Sometimes they pace up and down, one little family, and then they leave.”

You’ve just been reading a transcript from the trailer for ‘Salmon Secrets.’

Dan Lewis was skiing at Mount Washington when Cortes Currents contacted him.

He stated, “With this whole fish farm transition, we knew that there would be a compromise. When we looked at the war in the woods, and we were saying, stop clear cutting old growth. What they said was, well, why don't we try variable retention in old growth? We knew there would be some kind of half assed compromise like that being proposed.”

“When Cermaq brought a semi closed containment system to Clayoquot Sound in 2020, we knew right away that's what they're going to be pushing for.”

“So we've been focusing a lot of effort on that. Our goal is to make sure that there's nothing in the water at the end of this transition. Fish farms in the water, it doesn't matter what kind, they're not going to work.”

 “We have an amazing videographer on our team, Jérémy Mathieu. He comes on our Clayoquot Action missions where we monitor the fish farms, and he's collected quite a bit of footage.”