Time to hit the river?

From today's Everett Herald -local guide's reoort on Mondays' fishing on the Sky between Sultan and Monroe

""That stretch is full of chums right now ," he said, "and a lot them are fresh in from the saltwater. ...""

Sky guy -
Has the commerical fishing rate increased? As you may recall Twodog mentioned that rate has been fixed. Generally in the past I suspect that the fisheries has been consistently below that rate however with the prices they are getting this year it would not be surprising to see them fishing closer to that rate.

If I recall correctly the exploitation rate cap was a 50% rate. While that may seem pretty high remember that at current survival rates they are very productive. To put in prespective Twodog mentioned that he expected escapement this year would be more than 50,000 fish - preseason run size forecast was for a little more than 100,000 fish. Under the management of 15 years ago that set the escapement goal for odd years at 10,300 this years commerical folks would have been fishing at nearly twice the rate they are this year (90% versus 50%).

IWhile it has been a few years since the last license buy-back the number of commercial lic. has not increased but rather decreased over the last decades or so. However the number of lic. out there has less to do with the size of the commercial catches than the allocations. Even with the lic. buy-backs the portion of the catches allocated to commercial did not change. The result is that individual fishermen do better (more fish) but the over catch doesn't necessarily change.

Dave -
Noticed I was talking about the non-treaty allocation of the various species. It would remain the case that the Tribal fishers would opt to continue to take their share via nets.

The reality is that with a fish like chums it is highly unlikely that sport fisheries could catch huge numbers of them. For example I took a look at the fishing rate of sport fishery in the Snohomish. Looked at the in-river sport catches and the escapements for those years readily available (late 1990s/early 2000s). It looks like we as sport anglers tuypcially harvest about 2.5% of the in-river run. Even if that were developed and we got an addition 10,000 fish from the commerical fisheries. By having the commercial fishermen giving up 10,000 we would only expect an increase in the sport harvest of about 500 fish (5% of 10,000).

While you and I may think that is a good deal ; better sport fishing and more fish on the spawning grounds I suspect it would be a difficult sell to the commercial fishers and the States policy decision makers (legislature, etc). At this point I just thankful that at least in Puget Sound that Chinook and coho are given recreational priority for the non-treaty fishers. IMHO our efforts at this time would be better sprend on getting that species priority established in the other of areas of the State rather than going after chums here.

Tight lines
Curt