it weighed in at 50 pounds (22.7 kg) — and that’s after two weeks of crash weight loss due to spawning.
The giant fish was one of 94 Wannock River salmon caught by the hatchery for their seasonal “egg take.” To increase breeding numbers, the hatchery uses a gill net to round up a sample group of spawning salmon, manually mixes their sperm and eggs together and then raises the resulting baby salmon until they’re large enough for release.
Incredibly, this year’s 50-pound monster isn’t even close to the largest Chinook ever caught in the area. That record belongs to an 83.3-pound Chinook caught by a catch-and-release angler in 2012.
Rivers Inlet’s Wannock River, or the Kitsumkalum River near Terrace, B.C. are the two sources of these beasts.