Sockeye salmon are known to be hell-bent during their spawning journey up the Columbia and Snake rivers. And that rapid pace is apparently true for the young fish when they leave freshwater for their ocean sojourn.

Snake River sockeye "High Speed Harry" last year was clocked by Canadian researchers swimming north up the continental shelf at four tiny body lengths per second. That's twice as fast as the previous research speed champion, Snake River spring chinook.

To put it in perspective, if a human, say about the size of Michael Phelps, were to swim continuously at two body lengths per second, he could circumnavigate the globe in four months if there was no land in the way, according to a calculation made by Canadian scientist David Welch.

The Snake River sockeye swam the same distance, in relation to its body size, in a mere two months. Harry was nearly 7 inches long when captured.

Welch and research scientist Marc Trudel in separate, though complementary, research projects chart the progress of young salmon that stream up the coast after leaving the Columbia River and other freshwater systems.

The sockeye was caught by Trudel's research team just south of southeast Alaska, about 1,100 kilometers (684 miles) north of the Columbia River on July 1, 2007. The fish was released from the Sawtooth Hatchery in central Idaho on May 8, 2007.

The travel speed was estimated with the assumption that it had swum in a straight line, 24 hours per day in covering the distance from Idaho to the ocean (1,600 kilometers or 994 miles) and up the coast from the Columbia River plume.

It had to be swimming much faster at times, since it would have had to stall to search for food, Trudel said.

As surprising as the speed was the fact that the researchers even caught a Snake River sockeye. Only about 100,000 sockeye smolts were released in Idaho last year. That's a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions of young fish that pour from the Columbia River and other U.S. and Canadian streams.

"To our knowledge, this is the first recovery of a juvenile Redfish Lake sockeye salmon at sea," according to the 2007 annual report to the Bonneville Power Administration for Trudel's "Canada-USA Salmon Shelf Survival Study."

"It's like finding a needle in a haystack," Trudel said. Another two sockeye believed to be of Snake River origin were caught this year, one about halfway up the west coast of Vancouver Island and the other near the location of last year's catch. Both would also have had to maintain a four-body-lengths-per-second beeline to reach the locale where they were captured.

"This is quite impressive and unheard of, as far as I can tell, for juvenile sockeye salmon to migrate that fast," Trudel said. "All in all, it looks like these fish are darting north very quickly once they enter the ocean and don't linger for too long in the Columbia River plume."

The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans' Program on High Seas Salmon, headed first by Welch and now by Trudel, has been collecting juvenile salmon and oceanographic data off the west coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska since 1998 to assess the effects of ocean conditions on the distribution, migration, growth, and survival of Pacific salmon. Trudel's expertise in the marine ecology of salmon.

The intent of the shelf survival research is to map ocean conditions that are determining the growth and survival of Pacific salmon along the west coast of North America from southern British Columbia into southeast Alaska, and to identify which stocks of Columbia River salmon forage in these areas. It is funded by BPA with the DFO matching by providing ship time a well as the services of half the research team.

Each year they spend up to eleven weeks at sea collecting salmon and associated fish communities' specimens, as well as water and plankton samples. A June-July survey that spans 2-3 weeks usually nets Columbia River salmon almost exclusively, Trudel said. October-November and February-March cruises typically catch local Canadian and Alaskan stocks, though some Columbia River fall chinook are counted in the mid-winter survey.

"The working hypothesis of this research is that fast growth enhances the marine survival of salmon, either because fast growing fish quickly reach a size that is sufficient to successfully avoid predators, or because they accumulate enough energy reserves to better survive their first winter at sea, a period generally considered critical in the life cycle of salmon," according to the 2007 annual report.

Knowing where the fish go and the quality of food there potentially can help estimate future years' adult returns to rivers.

"Our research shows that different populations of Columbia River salmon move to different locations along the coastal zone where they establish their ocean feeding grounds and overwinter," the report says. "We further show that ocean conditions experienced by juvenile Columbia River salmon vary among regions of the coast, with higher plankton productivity and temperatures off the west coast of Vancouver Island than in Southeast Alaska."

The Snake River sockeye and many of the Columbia and Snake spring chinook don't appear to linger and feed, instead rushing up past Vancouver Island, southeast Alaska, the Aleutian Islands "and apparently go into the deep blue sea," Trudel said.

"Hence, different stocks of juvenile salmon originating from the Columbia River and Snake River are exposed to different ocean conditions and may respond differently to climate changes. In particular, our work shows that the growth and fat content of chinook and coho salmon vary along different parts of the coast and among years," the report says. "These growth differences appear to be associated with differences in prey quality rather than by a direct effect of temperature on salmon growth or prey quantity, indicating that changes in ocean conditions and circulation affect salmon production indirectly through changes in prey community composition and quality.

"Taken together, our analyses indicate that the relative survival of different stocks of salmon in the ocean will depend on where they migrate in the ocean, and that changes at the base of the food chain must be taken into consideration to understand the effects of ocean conditions on salmon growth, and hence, on salmon survival."

Trudel said the research is similar in intent to research being carried out by the NOAA Fisheries Service's Northwest Fisheries Science Center. That research is keeping tabs on fish and ocean conditions along the Oregon and Washington coasts.

The idea ultimately is to determine what ocean variables have the most effect on salmon growth and survival.

"Basically we now have 10 years of data on various measurements of ocean conditions," Trudel said. A short-term goal is to use the information in modeling intended to forecast adult returns 1-2 years ahead of time.

"Although fishery managers should be cautious before they start using these relationships to manage Columbia River salmon due to the low number of data points presently available, these results indicate that the research conducted on the ocean environment in British Columbia has the potential to influence harvest strategies and conservation measures for Columbia River salmon," according to the annual report. "However, the development of these predictive models will require a long-term funding commitment, as the stability and reliability of these models needs to be assessed over a longer time frame."

The report also says that "Without an understanding of the effects of ocean conditions on salmon production, it is also not possible to adequately assess the success of mitigation measures such as habitat restoration and flow regulation on the health of Columbia River salmon runs. Ocean conditions may mask, enhance, or even override actions taken in the freshwater habitat to improve salmon returns."

"Confounding effects of ocean conditions and hydropower system operation may lead to unnecessary and costly mitigation actions for BPA." Bonneville, which markets power generated in the Columbia/Snake hydrosystem, funds a large share of the basin's salmon restoration work as mitigation for the dams' negative impacts.

Endangered Snake River sockeye is the most imperiled of the Columbia basin's 13 listed salmon and steelhead species, kept alive only through a captive broodstock rearing program. This year, however, the largest return by far in the history of the program arrived at the hatchery and at Redfish Lake Creek.

Prevailing ocean conditions may have contributed a swelling of the return. But the magnitude is surprising.

"At this point I don't see anything that stands out in 2006," Trudel said of the year most of this year's return would have gone to sea.

Ocean conditions were much improved over those that prevailed in 2004 and 2005, but "did not look exceptional," he said. But the 2006 migrants may not, like Harry, have spent much time in the area monitored for the research. Instead they may have sped to that deep blue sea, which largely remains a black box.

High Speed Harry was named in honor of Lonesome Larry, the only Snake River sockeye to return to Idaho in 1998.