Hi ltCleo,

An NOF meeting is a "North of Falcon" meeting, it's where all the salmon seasons for the waters north of Cape Falcon are worked out. These meetings happen over a number of weeks each spring. Since this past meeting was the first one I've ever been to, I don't know tons about the process, but yes, it seems like a few fishermen, if they are there, and if they speak up loud enough, could get a blackmouth season changed.

Here's the thing, this is my understanding of it from this one meeting... in the WDFW's salmon forecasting model (big computer model) the months October through April all have the same impact factor on threatened stocks... in other words, in their model, all of the threatened stocks have gone into their terminal streams by October (remmber, all the Puget Sound threatened stocks are spring runs), and the impact to the stock in the Oct to Apr timeframe is strictly impact to juvenile fish that millign around or are on their way out to the ocean.

SO, with the model being calculated this way, the department doesn't care if we fish a day in Dec or a day in Apr, they both have the same impact factor in their model... understand? The department then just defines how many days per winter/spring they think we can fish, and have an acceptable impact on the stocks in their model.

The WDFW seemed willing to let certain (marine) areas trade fishing days from one time of year to another time of year, dependant on the impact, of course. In other words, trades between Dec and April would be a 1-to-1 trade, again, because these days have the same impact factor in their model. But if you wanted to get more summer fishing, then you'd have to trade 2 or 3 winter days to get 1 day of summer fishing... but no one wanted to do this, because this is VERY dangerous.

Remember, once you give something away, you might never get it back. The impact factors of the summer fisheries can vary greatly, because the numbers of available fish in the summer can vary greatly year to year. So it's extremely dangerous to trade winter days for summer days, because once you have those summer days, they could be taken away next year due to low projected returns, and there's absolutely no guarantee that you would get the winter days your traded away back.

OK, as you can see, this is complicated, and it's politics, not just science. I will say this, though. The department did NOT seem very willing to make trades between different areas, or between sport and commercial. These trades take a lot of work on their part, and are difficult to make in their "model", so they would rather just stick with trades within a certain area, say Area 9.

I'll complicate it further. Earlier I said that in the WDFW's computer model, all the days from October to April have the same impact factor. At the meeting, they told us this was true, but someone pinned them down and said "aren't we getting dinged for more than we should be for the partial months of Feb and Apr? And the department admitted yes, because their model calculates on whole months rather than on single days (don't ask me why, it seems like you could divide by 30 pretty easily), we are getting dinged for more than the days actually add up to. In fact, the figures they quoted were: Feb 16-28th, 62% of a month, and April 1-10th, 53% of a month. The WDFW did say they would look into rectifyiing this piece of the model, but gave no promises.

Anyway, I hope this explains it a little bit, if you've ot more questions, ask away.

-N.