Puntledge River Hatchery

October and November is a great time to visit here. The salmon have returned to spawn, and die. If you're lucky you will see workers managing the fish eggs and sperm. They are helping nature produce more fish.

Great informative place to check out the salmon! Great to visit now in the fall to see all the salmon coming back, and they said it's also interesting in the spring when they have all the little newly hatched salmon.It's free to visit, there's visitor parking and then you can just walk in, there's a little video tour thing on a touch screen tv and then you follow a little path along the facility. The staff seem to be very open to questions and are happy to educate! Great place to bring the kids!

We visited the hatchery today! It was open house day. We really enjoyed all the desplays and seeing the fish up close. Educational too!!

Fascinating! Great to tour with the kids and see the zillions of little fish getting ready to be released into the ocean. Very well run facility and friendly knowledgeable staff.

Very informative and great place to see the salmon.

We absolutely loved viewing the fish! As an experienced aquaculture Tech who raised salmon at sea a few years back, it was so nice to share these amazing creatures with my children up close

This hatchery so interesting. Great for kids too. The workers are so willing to explain what they are doing! Only a five/ ten minute drive from downtown Courtenay!

This is a really neat place to visit at this time of year. It was my 2nd visit here, with the prior one being in 1991. Anyway, it is just as wonderous to see now as it was back then. That said, it looks stressful for the fish and they tend to congregate together at either one end of the viewing tank or the other. The photos make it look like they are populous, and they are, it is just that they seem to enjoy swimming around each other and looking at us, looking at them.Outside the fish hatchery, in the actual Puntledge River, many Salmon who were hatched here returned here after four years in the sea. They come back to spawn and die naturally, it seems, guided by some sense of magnetic attraction to home.Anyway, personally, I love this place. One is allowed to have a well-behaved dog on a leash and a baby here. It is a very cool Autumn Experience. It is almost like seeing the Annual Salmon Run at Goldstream Park as a school kid. But, a little less pungent.Definitely go. Otherwise, in the summertime, Puntledge Fish Hatchery is the place from which to launch off on an inner-tube journey down to where the river meets the sea.The Comox Valley has a lot to offer.

Proper blood and guts, and gallons of eggs. Shame about all the salmon carcasses just downstream, nature I guess