About Great River Fishing

Our love for the great prehistoric White Sturgeon is the foundation of everything we do, and the reason thousands of guests join us each year. Our guides are handpicked and trained over years, they're on the water year round, not just summers or the occasional weekend. That consistency is how we stay on top of where and when the fish are biting and what the current conditions are like.

We keep our fleet and our crew in house rather than contracting out, take the time to learn what each guest wants, and run as a true twelve month operation. Much of our business comes from repeat clients and word of mouth referrals built over decades.

Our team has been involved in sturgeon tagging and monitoring since 1995, when the fishery was closed to retention. Since then we've helped to collectively tag more than 46,000 White Sturgeon and scan in excess of 200,000. Every fish is measured, scanned, fitted with a PIT tag and released unharmed. Government documented studies of the catch and release fishery indicate a mortality rate of less than one percent. There is not any other fishery in the World that is so sustainable. We are proud of our involvement and journey with Sturgeon.

Conservation is at the heart of our business. We worked with the Province of British Columbia from 1995 to 1999 as one of 5 guides on the first tagging program created on the Fraser River. We collected data on every sturgeon that boarded our boats and contributed to the first original data base ever. In this time, we measured fish in "total length" from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. We are presently still tagging and monitoring Sturgeon with the FVAGA. The catch and release tagging program records migration patterns and growth rates, and it's the anglers' diligence in tagging and recording that has kept this fishery open and flourishing. This contribution back to the Province of BC is worth over 1 million dollars in volunteer efforts. Guests are welcome to get hands on and help our guides with the tagging process, ask Dean and he can schedule this into you adventure experience.

We also ran a sturgeon education program with the science students of BCIT - BC institute of Technology under the supervision of Dr. Marvin Rosenau. We donated $15,000.00 in free volunteer time each season for many years to BCIT. Team GRFA also provided education for Southridge School students in Surrey, giving young people the chance to meet these living dinosaurs up close, learn about the fishery and take part in real conservation work.

Beyond the river, we actively support organisations working to protect British Columbia's natural resources for future generations: