Paddle Report

A Sickening Paddle - 6 June 2003

On Sunday morning (25th May) I got my wife to drop me down at the Nedlands foreshore. Everyone in Perth, it seemed, was at the UWA event upstream. Great time to get a 'secret' training paddle in for the Avon whilst nobody was watching!

I left the calm of Matilda Bay and made my way towards the Narrows. Boy, are there some big pleasure craft cruising the Swan in that region. One more powerball and the kayak is gone! Not quite white water but a lot of big swell especially as the wake from these big craft bounced off some of the vertical walls of the riverbank along Mounts Bay Road. A good practice spot for bracing strokes, with wash and waves coming from every direction.

I made my way up river at a brisk pace, along Riverside Drive and around the island. At the old power station opposite the Burswood Casino, I saw a small dead bream. There were a couple of anglers further up and I surmised that they had caught an undersized fish and thrown it back. I paddled through the ski area alongside the Polly Pipe and turned the corner towards Ascot Waters. It was then that the horror struck.

This first thing I noticed was the smell. It reminded me of the fish and seaweed based fertilisers my mum used to spray on the garden. Then I saw them. For as far as the eye could see the calm flat water was broken by hundreds of partially submerged objects. As I came up alongside the first one, it hit home. Dead fish. At first it was hard to convince myself that all of these hundreds of objects could be fish. I rushed over to the next one. Fish. The next was also a dead fish. Bulging clouded eyes looked up at me as I passed fish of all shapes and sizes. Most were small bream but the odd dead blowfish made for a relatively nice change to the monotony. At the boat shed across from the Sandringham the dead fish became larger. A Mulloway that must have weighed 5kg at least drifted past my boat. Larger bream - some up to 2 kg continued to hit the boat as I made my way upstream in horror. After the boat shed the numbers of dead fish decreased but I saw many more. The last one I came across was just before Hinds Reserve.

I listened today to the radio where on several channels the Swan River Trust and the Waters and Rivers Commission were cross examined and put under the spotlight as to how this could happen. The answer is complex and possibly too hard to put into practice. Fertilisers from lawns, gardens and even farms and vineyards was washed in to the Swan by the rain we had a few weeks ago. However with no follow up rain the high nitrogen and phosphorus levels allowed the algae to proliferate. This depleted the water's oxygen killing the fish. The estimates of dead fish numbers range from 100,000 to three times that. Possibly the only good thing is that the fish at this time of year migrate up and down the river and the damage may actually be less than if this happened at another time of the year. It's not only gardens and sporting grounds along the rivers that are to blame. Everyone in Perth is responsible as all the run off from gardens and drains ends up in the water table and eventually the river.

When I got to Middle Swan I felt deflated and depressed. The clothes I was wearing and the kayak still carried the smell of the rotting fish corpses. Despite the fine weather it was not a good day to be on the river. Perhaps I should have entered the race….

by Martin Dolinsche