NOAA - Fisheries is allowing the state to release 10,000 steelhead in the Dungeness. The 10K release started after an agreement was reached with WFC in 2016 - see link below. Total count as of yesterday was four fish. In the earlier part of this century, I can remember some returns of 30+ fish, but the past few years my memories are of generally less than 10-15 fish. Would need to dig into the records to see what the average is.

https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/wint...nal-watersheds/

Prior to the lawsuit release numbers were in the 25K+ range.

At one time, the Dungeness was one of the Top 10 steelhead rivers in the state. There has been a hatchery on the river for about 100 years. I saw a report from 1944 that said the hatchery had released 1.5 million spring Chinook, 180,000 steelhead, and 700,000 coho. We're back up to over 800K coho now. The Chinook returns are not good. The state has started up a new captive brood program. The last one ended in about 2000 with returns of around 1200 fish that year. The program ended and the run tanked.

Hopefully, we'll get something going again, but the funding for the Hurd Creek facility re-build/update isn't looking too good. The holding tanks need to be moved above the flood plain and the wells need to be protected. Any river flows above about 2000 cfs put the facility at risk. The river hit 1100 cfs yesterday. I've seen it at 7500 cfs and it isn't pretty. Normal flows for this week, historically, are about 300 cfs. In looking at the data for the past 10 years, to date, the flow has exceeded 2000 cfs 9 years and has gone over 3000 cfs in 6 different years.....so much for being in the "rain shadow". Sure would be nice for the legislature to fund the Hurd Creek project.