You're a TOUGH grader, CM! I'm at least willing to concede some credit where it's due.

I'll give three real life examples and how I would grade them... all on GH chinook.

Scenario 1: WDFW puts an impact season on the books for a marginally harvestable run. Fishing for other species is GREAT, but there's a lot of chinook encounters. Post-season, the managers vastly overfish their intended chinook harvest rate by 150%. Luckily WAY more fish showed up than forecast. Post-season spawner survey shows we comfortably made escapement.

I would give them ZERO credit for making escapement... it was pure dumb@$$ luck that more fish showed. Overharvesting their intended rate shows that their harvest model is low-balling the fishing power of the fleet. I give them a DE-MERIT for a $h!tty plan for NON-target chinook.

...


Scenario 2: WDFW forecasts a small unfishable run. A season is set in the books for a 5% impact cap to gain harvest access to other species. Post-season shows final harvest rate of 3.8%, spawner surveys show we missed the goal by 1000 fish.

Even though escapement was NOT achieved, fishing impacts were constrained within the intended 5%. NO amount of "management" would have achieved the escapement goal because the entire terminal run-size was smaller than the goal. They absolutely get CREDIT for managing within the 5% conservation objective.

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Scenario 3:

WDFW forecasts a marginally fishable run (less than 110% of goal), prosecutes a chinook-directed rec fishery anyway to target a handful of paper fish. In-season data shows the rec fishery has overfished its paper allocation by at least 5-fold. (QIN's simultaneously overfish their share by 350%) Post season spawner survey estimates they barely make escapement by 132 fish. Total terminal run-size was much larger than forecast, but essentially all of the surplus from the return was killed because both sides overfished their intended preseason harvest plans both in terms of exploitation rate and absolute harvestable fish avaialable.

Yeah, they made escapement (by the skin of their left nut) but another huge DE-MERIT from me.... for going chinook-directed at all, and grossly overfishing their intended harvest plan. What was all the more egregious is that Scenario 1 above (still fresh in their minds) just happened the previous season! BTW, the guy who ordained that fishery and gave us pre-season assurances that more than twice as many fish were conservatively budgeted to cover the targeted chinook... well he's now the TOP salmon manager in the state.