
Photo via The Adams River Salmon Society
Organizers of the Salute to the Sockeye Festival say they may delay the start of the next edition in 2026 to the middle of October, after the warmer than normal late September and early October this year.
That is according to Ken Benoit, the president of the Adams River Salmon Society.
“You’d like to have the salute to the sockeye timed with the sockeye, and this year, they came a little later because of the temperature and the warm dry summer that we had,” he said.
“So possibly shifting the festival to later in October is one thing we might do differently next time.”
Scott Decker, an expert in Fraser River sockeye, told NL News that the warm weather meant some of the salmon were in a holding pattern in Shuswap Lake waiting for water temperatures in the Adams River to decrease.
Speaking to NL News, Benoit said while the warmer weather was great for visitors to the festival, it wasn’t the same case for the fish during this year’s dominant salmon run.
“They like temperatures a little cooler, they like a lot more rain, so the festival in terms of salmon during the first week, they were definitely in the river, but you had to have a little bit of patience,” Benoit said. “The photos that you often see of the salmon run are taken during the peak when its most spectacular and we didn’t really reach that until the second or third week of the festival.
“There were salmon in the channels from day one but it wasn’t until the end of the festival where you could see them in almost every channel and in big numbers.”
Benoit says while they’re still tallying the number of visitors that came to Tsútswecw Provincial Park during the 24-day long Salute to the Sockeye Festival which ran between Sept. 30 and Oct. 23, the Thanksgiving Weekend – Oct. 8 to Oct. 10 – was the busiest by far, with about 10,000 visitors on each of those three days.
He also says organizers aren’t expecting to get data on just how how many salmon returned to the Adams River area until February.
Estimates where that about a million salmon were expected to return to the Shuswap Lake system this year, with fewer than half a million expected to go to the Adams River.
More to come