Central Island anglers will be keen to cast a line this spring now that thousands of new rainbow trout recently released into Nanaimo’s popular fishing fishing holes.
The Vancouver Island Trout Hatchery, based in Duncan, trucked trout to Nanaimo to stock Westwood Lake, Diver, Green and Long lakes and the three Colliery Dams with catchable-size rainbow trout. Each lake received 500 to 2,000 of the fish.
The stocking program is paid for by the Freshwater Fisheries Society of B.C., a not-for-profit organization formed in 2003 that receives its operating capital mostly through freshwater fishing licence revenues.
Each year the society’s six hatcheries raise rainbow, cutthroat, eastern brook, kokanee and steelhead trout for recreational fishing and white sturgeon for conservation purposes.
The hatchery released 9,800 coastal cutthroat trout and 155,000 trout of other varieties into 58 lakes across Vancouver Island in 2020 and stocked 662 lakes across B.C. with more than 5.6 million fish.
The society releases about 3,000 fish into each of Colliery Dams No. 1 and No. 2 and 2,000 fish in Colliery Dam No. 3 through multiple deliveries of fish annually.
For more information, visit www.gofishbc.com
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Lucas Philp, senior fish culturist at Vancouver Island Trout Hatchery, packs up pipes and hoses used to transfer trout from the transport truck into lakes, shortly after releasing about 500 rainbow trout into Colliery Dam No. 3 lake Wednesday. Chris Bush/Nanaimo News Bulletin photo
