One of the fun things about being out there on traps and such is that you see stuff invisible to most observers. In a dry but cold year we had coho sit in a hole for two months and then spawn and die in a week. We had a coho female come upstream and spawn in February. Soos Creek had a couple hundred coho blow by Jan 20 of 1993 when Clinton was inaugurated. We had 400 coho go up the Dungeness in July, ahead of Chinook and pink. And so on.

As Rivrguy says, you need many years of actually handling fish to begin to get an idea of what's going on. And we are in in for a whole new world with drier summers (lower flows) and then bang-on freshets/floods.

As Sam Wright once wrote, the real value and skill of fish (any resource, actually) manager is to evaluate the incoming in-season data and make defensible decisions on the fly. That skill only come by having a long Institutional Memory and up to date data.