CHILE’S REIGNING
KINGS Fly fishing for Austral Chinook. By Ken Morrish
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FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT visited the rivers of southern Chile’s Pacific coast, with the exception of differing plant species, their resemblance to some of the of the Pacific Northwest’s greatest rivers, like the Dean, are at times, uncanny. So why not dump a few salmon smolts in a few likely rivers where they might take hold? Interestingly, Chile’s efforts to establish naturalized returns of Pacific salmon go back as far as 1924. Since then there have been many attempts with multiple species, all of which failed until Japanese ‘fish ranchers’ invested heavily in 1978. From 1978-1989, these ranchers released hundreds of thousands of Chinook smolts from the lower Columbia’s Cowlitz Salmon Hatchery into the Petrohué River and the adjacent systems of the Reloncavi Estuary (41.5 degrees south, the southern equivalent of California’s Klamath River). Their plan was to release smolts into the rivers and commercially harvest them when they returned. For multiple reasons,
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ken morrish photo
F 25 YEARS AGO SOMEONE predicted that in 2017 Chile would be home to some of the world’s heathiest returns of wild Chinook salmon, I would have predicted that by 2017 they would be long since institutionalized. But the facts of the matter speak differently. Today Chile is a powerhouse producer of ‘wild’ kings, most of which run larger on average than those in their natal northern waters. How did this come to be? Is it a miracle or a mess? Likely time will tell.