Yes.
Annually, the department surveys many streams and counts the species that return to spawn every year. Most of the chinook populations have 25 or 30 chinook. Even a lot of the enhanced systems that have been....
I described the Nahmint River. I was just doing a summary of the 40 years of enhancement on the Nahmint River, and we're right now at an average of 260 fish. For the first 10 years of the 40-year enhancement, 160,000 smolts were released a year. For the next 10 years, there were 120,000 smolts released a year. For the next 10 years—up to the 30-year point—100,000 were released. Now we're down to about 50,000 being released, but the numbers have remained the same. If you look at the coast-wide numbers of chinook, you see that all the numbers are extremely low. In the Chemainus River and the Kennedy River, I think the system last year got 1,500 fish to release this year from the huge system. On the whole east coast of the island, as well, many of those chinook stocks are down to very few adult returns. When you only have a few hundred, there aren't enough to naturally spawn to increase that to over 1,000 to 1,500 to start to rebuild and become self-sustaining.
That's where, in our program with the Phillips River, because the S1s had higher survivals, there were more fish that returned to spawn. Those in turn have spawned, and then the numbers returned last year, 3,500 strong. That is unbelievable. We can repeat that for all the systems.
I just want to comment on what Dave said about there being no S1s in the west coast system. I have 20 to 30 years of research data. All those systems predominantly would be S1s. There's a really good freshwater survey that was done of Bedwell River that saw a very large component of S1 chinook migrate out of the system at the beginning of April. They migrate differently. They're gone, and their survivals are extremely good.
I'll go back to the chinook. If we want to rebuild hatchery intervention, that's what's being done. However, when you take those last few remaining fish, you need to enter them into a program that has the highest survival. We know, from the coded wire tag data, that a lot of the S0s that are released are having 0.2% tag recovery. When we released our S1s, we were at 3.2% tag recovery.
Every tag captured in marine fishery represents 20% of the population, so all of a sudden you have 2% of those tags, near 10%. Our Phillips River ones were at 8.2% survival. The Sarita River and Nahmint River S0s that we released were at over 5% survival, compared to the 1% or 2% with the S0 releases. You can just simply say that we're getting 1% to 3% coming back to spawn, compared to the spawners from the S0s, which were 0.1% to 0.3% coming back. That's a huge difference.
As you keep on taking these last few eggs and you're not getting hardly any fish surviving and returning, you have to change the strategy. We've demonstrated it now with 13 releases. We have seven complete data sets.