At its best, LW was for some reason very marginal for sockeye. Returns were generally not much better than 1:1. Another interesting aspect is that the smolts are about 2-3x Fraser smolts for size. This suggests, to me, that there is significantly under-used capacity. BUT, it is also quite possible that the bottleneck is when the fry first hit the river. Few survive but what does then grows well.

LW sockeye have one of the longest spawning seasons for any salmon. They should spawn in about a month. I suspect that they are still evolving to adapt to the lake. They've been there only about 80 years.

The other aspect is that the really big runs that set off the frenzy came about the time that Metro came into being. Or, to put it another way, the lake was cleaned up and became less productive.