A club with very specific rules
In the waters of British Columbia's Campbell River, there is a specific tidal basin known as the Tyee Pool. Here, a unique chapter of fisheries history has been written not by scientists, but by anglers. This is where the Tyee Club of British Columbia, an organization founded in 1924 to standardize the sport of catching the giant salmon that give the club its name. "Tyee" is a word from the Chinook Jargon, meaning "chief," and it refers to a Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) that weighs 30 pounds (13.6 kg) or more.
To join the club, an angler must catch a Tyee according to a strict set of rules that has remained largely unchanged for a century. The fish must be caught from a manually propelled rowboat; no motors are allowed while fishing in the pool. The tackle is also specified: the rod must be between six and nine feet long, the line cannot exceed a 20-pound (9 kg) test, and only specific artificial lures with a single, barbless hook are permitted. This rigid consistency, maintained for decades, has unintentionally created one of the most valuable long-term datasets in fisheries biology. The club's logbooks, which include verified angler records dating back to the late 1890s, provide a year-by-year chronicle of the river's largest salmon.
A century of data in logbooks
The meticulously kept records of the Tyee Club document memorable catches; they provide a timeline of ecological change. The data shows a long-term decline in the number and average size of these large fish. While a 61.5-pound Chinook was caught in 2013, the first over 60 pounds in three decades, the club's all-time record remains a 71-pound salmon landed by Walter Shutts in 1968. In many recent years, fewer than 20 qualifying Tyee are caught during the entire season, different from historical numbers.
This decline is not isolated to the Tyee Pool. Chinook salmon populations across the Salish Sea have decreased by 60% since 1984. Scientific analysis points to several factors, including changing ocean conditions, shifts in the food web, and historical overfishing. The fish are also maturing at younger ages and smaller sizes. Data from the Tyee Club provides a localized, ground-level view of these large-scale trends. Research on salmon from the local Quinsam River Hatchery, for example, confirms that hatchery-origin fish, which now make up a majority of the catch, are traditionally smaller than the wild salmon that once dominated the river. The anglers of the Tyee Club, by following their century-old traditions, have become unintentional citizen scientists, their logbooks a record of a changing ecosystem.