As a gill-netter on the North and Middle Arms in the 1950ies and 1960ies, I can remember seeing many big Steelhead in my Chinook catches during Sept. and up to mid Nov. The Fishing companies reluctantly bought them as they were not Red enough for the consumer to buy in cans. These great 20 pound + Steelies as we called them, lost some of the pink color even when they were cooked in the cannery steam canning retorts.
I notice in the late 1950ies in my fish catch records that I received around 20cents a Pound in the round for these huge silver bullets. They hit the net and continued to fight for their lives, pulling down numerous net floats, before leaving a last jumping fight at the end, when they were being removed from the gillnet.
Some fishers said the big Steelhead were only playing dead, as they came over the gillnet stern roller, they were quite right.
I can remember one Huge Steelhead that was so foxy, he or she tried to sneak close into the riverbank at the mouth of Mac Donald Channel in the North Arm, I guess not knowing I had a shallow 10 mesh depth taper, at the end of my fall net. I set the shallow Gillnet end on the edge of the now brown marshes, near the south side of the channel. This is where the Harrison Chinooks moved through on low water Slack. I rolled off about 30 fathoms from the power net drum, the big Chinooks were hitting the corkline everywhere, jumping and bouncing off the web! I let out more net, but the corkline was going down with the weight of the tangled Harrison Chinooks. The boat caught a bit of the tidal Backup from the open Mac Donald Channel and I started to pick up the net with the fish gaff in one hand and my foot hard on the net reel or drum control. My old trusty Easthope Engine was just a pounding out steam rings from the overboard exhaust pipe, it was a big salmon setting of the gillnet. About 15 big Fall Harrison White Springs were in the stern in no time, then at the shallow end of the net I saw this long silver salmon laying on the surface, it was huge and very quite, I thought it was dead when it came across the stern roller. Not so, for as it dropped on the Drum Deck, it made one mighty kick and jumped right over the gunnels of my old boat and shot off like a bullet into the flooding tide! Yep, that great Thompson Steelhead was playing Possum and I fell for its last survival trick of watching me carefully for an escape opportunity.
Its a much different world today as I scan my computer to find out that only 3 Steelhead and about only 95 Harrison Chinooks have moved up the Fraser so far this year, in test gillnets around the Albion Drift, on the Fraser River. Those Wonderful Fraser River Wild Northern Coho have also just about disappeared from the whole river never to return, I find myself missing them all, for they were with us for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. I caught some of them and thought they would be with us forever.
Yes it is a quickly changing world of loosing many species that we all loved and now wait patiently every year for them to return, knowing that probably now many of them are gone forever.
Terry Slack
North Arm Commercial Fisher
Here in Dunbar he will be remembered for his animated walks every year during Salmonberry Days telling us more than we ever thought there was to know about mosses and liverworts. 
