Well, I just sent the fellas home for today. Sneaker storm last night did a number on the rivers in our neck of the woods.

I've asked Freymund about this issue in our area ... especially in relation to the Hoh that tends to have lots of channel shifts (heavily scouring some areas and depositing heavily in others) after such rises in the river.

My question to him was if we use the same modeling on a river that will naturally see such drastic changes vs. rivers that tend to stay somewhat stable (the Hoh vs. the Sol Duc in this case).

Bill's answer was that there really wasn't that much shifting that occurred :rolleyes: and that it shouldn't have too much impact since eggs can hatch from significant depths in the gravel and in other areas the gravel still has enough flow underneath to support egg maturation.

Whil I don't disagree with the concepts of how deep and how much water ... I also fish it enough to see areas where fish had been digging going from 6-12 inches deep to many feet ... obviously scouring out some of the redds.

I never got a straight answer as to if and or why we don't shoot for a higher escapemnt goal in situations where you know you'll have a tendancy to lose a percentage of the redds to these events.

To tie this thought to our returns ... the early components of the runs are our weakest (in all area streams), with fish spawning in Dec. and January also seeing the greastest likliehood of having redds scoured out. The Hoh (and Queets & upper Quinault for that matter) have also seen some of the lowest returns of any of the coastal streams. These three streams also see the highest amount of scouring of the streams out this way. Coincidence? Perhaps, but an interesting one, that's for sure.

How does WDFW think you'll have the same recruitment from the models in these streams vs. those that are stable with similar parent numbers? What I would consider a significant portion of the spawn surely doesn't even stand a chance. yes, that's nature's way, but why don't we seem to factor this in??