Floyd Noland and other fishermen dealt with a dry river during the fall salmon return from the Pacific Ocean upstream on the Nooksack River to spawn. 

Floyd Noland has lifelong experience with salmon fishing on the Nooksack River

By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place

LUMMI NATION — On this day, in plentiful numbers, fall salmon are returning from salt water bays of the Pacific Ocean, swimming upstream to spawn in freshwater tributaries like the Nooksack River in western Washington.

The fall return experience to spawn is happening everywhere salmon exist and is a time of harvest for people who have inhabited this area for more than 12,000 traceable years. Certainly the run of salmon each year is among the predictable wonders of nature.

It is a time when commercial fishermen like Floyd Noland and David James — both Native American and enrolled members of the Lummi Nation — gather Coho Salmon, also called Silvers, in gillnets on the Nooksack River.

Both are gillnet fishing the Nooksack beneath the Marine Drive Bridge. On days prior, “not too many” was the fishing story on this part of the Nooksack. The river begins north at Mount Baker in Canada, south through the Lummi Nation Reservation and drains into the Pacific Ocean after coursing 75 miles.

“We need some rain,” Noland said about the Lummi stretch of the Nooksack. “Wind is needed. When it rains and is windy, the water gets milky. There will be a lot more fish. It usually takes a day or two to color up the water.”

Perhaps only people who fish for a living would describe a river as being dry, but that was the description given the Nooksack on this day.

“The river is dry and the water level is low,” said James echoed Noland a day later from a skiff about to launch for another drift. “We need some rain. When the water level is low, it makes it hard for the fish to swim upstream. It’s been dry for about a week. It’s been terrible. There have been days when no fish are coming up the river.

“It’s been rough on the equipment, too,” James said.

“The river needs to be dredged; it’s so shallow,” Noland said. “We have had a rough time with it.”

For Noland and James, possible catches from the Nooksack include King, what Native people call Chinook, Coho, Pink or humpback, Sockeye or red, Steelhead and Sturgeon.

Bob Hall, a First Nation Canadian who married into the Lummi tribe, is hatchery manager of the nation’s Harvest Division in the Department of Natural Resources. The hatchery Hall manages is off Kwina Road, just short of 3 miles from the tribe-owned Silver Reef Casino. The hatchery is on the peninsula that juts into Lummi Bay.

The Lummi are Coast Salish people whose history and cultural traditions are rooted in fishing, hunting and gathering in, what by eyesight, is the majestic Pacific Northwest. Everything here —water, especially water, aquatic life, vegetation, elk and deer — is the created perfect setting for fishing, hunting and gathering.

Coast Salish, among other things that include culture and traditions, is a designation of languages. The Lummi Reservation is seven miles northwest of Bellingham. The reservation is a five-mile long peninsula which forms Lummi Bay on the west, Bellingham Bay on the east, with a smaller peninsula at Sandy Point, Portage Island and the associated tidelands.

The Lummi Nation signed the treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, ceding much of their aboriginal lands in western Washington. In return they received a reservation that originally covered 15,000 acres. Today, approximately 12,000 acres remain in Lummi control.

During the fall run, Hall and his crew scoop Silvers into nets aided by hydraulic lifts from ladders and separate them by male and female into 1000 gallon tanks called sea ponds. Eggs and sperm are harvested and sent to another facility for incubation.

“We do this for the fisherman,” said the avuncular Hall. “We do this for the people.”

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the Lummi fish hatchery. Hall, Ernie Jefferson, a Fish Tech II, and Linda Delgado, the office manager, have been employed at the hatchery since the start.

Salmon restocking is coordinated at Skookum Creek Fish Hatchery near Acme and the Lummi Bay facilities, Hall said. Hatcheries release 2 million yearling Coho and 1 million Fall Chinook fry annually into rivers on or close to the Lummi reservation.

Estimates say there are 6,590 people living on the Lummi Reservation, with 2,564 being enrolled tribal members. The greater number, 3,361, are not tribal members and are they affiliated with the Lummi Nation.

Noland, Hall and scientists think salmon know to return to streams of birth by a scent in the water. Here salmon are born in the fresh-water Nooksack then swim to the salt waters of the Pacific Ocean. Marking the journey of a determined athlete, some salmon have been tracked 1500 miles from ocean returning to a native stream.

Salmon die after spawning, casting wonder of nature alongside mystery of nature.

“They return to spawn after two years,” Hall said. “Some return after three years. We think El Niño affects when they return or don’t return. You hear a lot of talk about global warming and the water temperature. Some years there are hardly any returns, but they come back the next year.”

Hall also operates a small smokehouse here on the peninsula that barely passes the measure of a commercial operation. Still, it is an enterprise to be had and an inspiration to others.

For catching out in the ocean deep, the Lummi invented reef net fishing. Here, on the Nooksack, however, it is gillnet fishing in 14-foot skiffs, following a time-tested protocol of drifting.

“We take turns drifting,” Noland said. “We say I’m plugged-in. When I take off, I say I’m unplugged. I have been fishing all my life, since I was 12 years old. I grew up in it. My uncle owned a boat. I used to take his boat without him knowing and learned on my own.”

James, 48, has been fishing since he was 9. Today, James and his deckhand, a camera shy woman who wished to remain anonymous, are having an excellent day.

“I have caught 30 (Silvers) in about an hour,” James said. “That’s a very good catch for me.”

It’s getting late into the season and the silvers are turning red, what fishermen call “blush.”

The average size of the Silver is 8 pounds, James said.

“Kings are “more of the money fish,” Noland said, “but the buyers won’t buy now as they get darker. Even the Silvers are getting a little blush.”

As much as the Nooksack gives, Noland also has memories of the drowning of a nephew in the river.

If there is a spiritual instinct that comes with fishing, Noland is not possessed of it or by it. He has come when dancers conduct what appear to be purification ceremonies in the Nooksack River, but he is not a spiritual man. Fishing is an everyday experience.

“It’s just a job that you try to make a living by,” he said. “It’s pretty hard. The fish are deteriorating. It seems they are getting smaller and smaller. The season is getting shorter.”

Cars and trucks pulling boats larger than skiffs come and go frequently from the dirt parking spaces under the Marine Drive Bridge. Trucks back into spots to launch boats. A lone fisherman comes and pulls a reel from his truck and casts from the shore. Signs are strewn about that fishing here is also a social experience.

It’s late afternoon now, but Noland will continue drifting late into the night. He fishes mostly at night.

“I fish all the time,” he said, “I catch most of the fish I catch at night.”

Staking pole in place, that’s called set net. Net size is 50 fathoms. There are 6 feet to a fathom, meaning gillnets are as long as a football field. Set net to close net is about 5 minutes a drift.

Drifts are also taking place upriver. Under the Marine Drive Bridge, in the skiff, Noland said fishermen drift to the drift jam. It is a pile of trees and debris in the river.

“Old-timers used to dynamite to keep the river clean,” he said. “The old-timers are just about gone and they won’t just let anybody dynamite.”

A good catch is 100 in one drift. Chums might net 1000 pounds in a single drift, reaching the maximum the 14-foot skiff can hold.

“That’s a good catch when they are running,” Noland said. “You can catch as many as you can. They run just about all the time, turn of the tide, either way, low water, high water.”

The next wonder of nature here upon the Nooksack will be running of hooligan returning from the ocean.

“You will see oodles of cars lined up on this bank and people with their nets out when the Hooligan run,” Noland said. “You feel them hitting at your dip net. You pull up the net and you have about 30 in a matter of seconds.

“Natives fry the whole fish,” he said. “Hooligans are real good eating. It’s a short season. Two weeks and then they are gone, but they come up the river by the millions.”
 

Lummi Nation hatchery staff struggle with a net full of Silver salmons pulled with aid of a hydraulic lift from a ladder. Separated fish are harvested for eggs and sperm.