SW salmon season has turned

The salmon are back and everyone's happy!

The entire South West coast has become a salmon hotspot with fisherman and the dolphins enjoying another bumper salmon season.

While the Easter school holiday period was a bit quiet for the popular sports fish here in Bunbury, the increase in salmon numbers into Koombana Bay in the past week has been a welcome change from the salmon drought experienced a few years ago, when the 2010-2011 La Nina event created record high water temperatures and had significant impacts on their migration.

Now that the temperatures are back to normal, the salmon migration in the past two years has been bigger and better than ever, with thousands of mature salmon following the waters northward around the capes and west into the deeper waters off the South West coast.

Why the salmon migrate north-west from their southern juvenile grounds has everything to do with their love life and the fact they need to congregate to spawn.

Every year, the males and females meet each other offshore along the continental coast, releasing billions of eggs and sperm into the water simultaneously, hoping their efforts produce enough larvae to replenish the population for the following year.

These baby salmon drift south along the Leeuwin Current and back to their juvenile grounds within sheltered bays and estuaries along the south coast of Australia, where the cycle will start all over again.

As cooler waters eventually replace the warm currents of the summer, big schools will then start to invade the South West coast and Perth metropolitan area, especially in the early morning and late afternoons.

They have a vivacious appetite at this time of the year, so they take every opportunity to feed on the big schools of pilchards and herring that can be found in these areas.

This also makes them an easy target for anglers who consider them pound for pound one of the best sports fish in Australia.

Unfortunately, their table qualities are a lot less desirable, so they are usually caught and released rather than served with chips.

That said, they are a rich source of Omega 3 fatty acids, so for those creative chefs out there, a piece of Australian salmon would do wonders for tackling heart disease.

Being a big school of fish themselves, they too are a prized meal for many top order marine predators and the feeding frenzies they create are nothing short of spectacular.

Although there are plenty of bigger fish, sharks and sea lions enjoying the salmon bounty, no animal enjoys the hunt as much as the local bottlenose dolphins.

I have seen some of the most spectacular dolphin action this week - especially along Buffalo Beach, where our dolphins find it easiest to corner the salmon along the shoreline.

The trick for them would be how to manage such a big fish. They are too big to swallow, so - like a dog with a bone - the dolphins will carry the salmon in their mouth for quite a while before attempting to consume the fish piece by piece.