Smalma,

You know that I know those things...and you also know that you're preaching to the choir when you say them to me.

Nothing that I have stated in this thread has to do with that stuff...except to discuss how they calculate the impacts on the ESA listed stocks.

Here are the options I can see:

An allowable impact is set...how is it measured in season?

1. Unclipped fish are released, and reported as such at the fish checking stations. Whatever number is reported is the number that is used.

This one doesn't work for me...there's really no way to test the validity of what anglers are, or are not, reporting.

2. Hatchery fish are checked at the stations. Since there is a known percentage of hatchery fish vs. wild fish around, you can use the number of checked hatchery fish to calculate the wild fish encounters.

This works much better for me. First, the fish are right there to be checked and counted. Second, reported and verified catches can be later compared to punchcard reports to calculate the percentage of fish that are being reported at the check stations.

You know the number of fish checked, you can extrapolate that to the amount of fish harvested (I'll bet WDFW already has the formula for this), then calculate the ESA encounter rate from this number.

Once you have the encounter rate, then you use whatever mortality rate has been established for the particular fishery, and there's the amount of ESA listed fish that are dead.

My initial response to this thread was wondering why in the heck they would 1. worry about counting released fish in the first place (NOT that the number doesn't matter, but how to properly calculate it), and 2. why a released fish would count against the fishery's quota, unless someone reported that they released a dead one (there was no mention of using the number of released fish in any sort of formula.."...you caught 7, and only kept four. They counted 7 against the quota".)

Fish on...

Todd.

P.S. Sorry Kevin. Talk to you later.