In the presentation to the Commission Region 6 put forth the two items below and frankly kinda confused some, myself included. So I was asked to see if I could get clarification and I asked staff for just that.

From Commission briefing:

WDFW and Quinault Nation have developed an in-season monitoring tool used to evaluate the abundance of the current year’s coho return. Evaluating the catch per effort during the Quinault Nation fishery has shown a close relationship to final escapement for coho in the Chehalis basin. WDFW will utilize this tool in 2022 to monitor the progress of the Chehalis coho return and adjust fisheries, as needed, if the return does not look like it will achieve preseason objectives.

WDFW will implement a fishery monitoring plan to evaluate effort and catch during WDFW sport fisheries. This is a new tool available to Grays Harbor fisheries this fall and will provide information needed to implement adaptive management actions if needed, as provided in the Adaptive Management section of the policy.

Staff Clarification:

Forgot and your email got moved down below my screen. What we are talking about is the moneys we received to monitor freshwater areas in the Chehalis basin that was discussed in the earlier public meetings. These are funds that haven’t been provided for in the past, but we will be able to put up to four freshwater fishery monitoring techs out on the Satsop, Chehalis, and a few other places this fall to collect coded-wire-tags, mark rates, and data needed to evaluate catch per unit effort. We won’t be doing harvest estimates this fall, that would require a bunch more effort and money, and a justification. It’s the same work was we are doing in the Humptulips, collecting enough data we understand the progress of the fishery. We will also use QIN commercial data to monitor the coho run. This is not a new method, we used this in 2015 to evaluate the returns in-season and those data helped to make the decision to close fisheries early that year. The forecasted runsize in 2015 was over 100k, but only 28k returned. These are the things that are within the Commission briefing. If you want to chat more about this, please give me a call.