Here's a preview of what's to come tomorrow night.

Nuts and bolts....

Chehalis is Tier 1 for chinook.... no harvestable fish.
Chehalis is Tier 4 for coho.... a pile of harvestable fish. Access to these fish will be constrained by impacts to chinook.

Hump is Tier 4 for chinook.... a pile of harvestable fish, hatch and wild.
Hump is Tier 1 for wild coho.... no harvestable fish. Impacts to wild coho will constrain our access to harvestable chinook, and to some extent, access to harvestable hatchery coho as well.


Sharpen your pencils before the meeting. Things may get interesting.

The bulk of the GH coho harvest will be out of the Chehalis.... not much of a problem as there are plenty of fish and lots of room to spread the effort over space and time.

For all intents and purposes, the Hump will bear the brunt of virtually all the GH chinook retention. The challenge will be how to craft an orderly chinook season that spreads the effort out over space and time. Think about creative ways to access these fish without having everyone and their dog show up for one brief and massive kill-fest. In years past when there were no other harvest opportunities for GH chinook prior to the mid-October Hump opener... the resulting crowds on opening day were downright ugly. And whenever the kill season was compressed to only two weeks, it stayed ugly every day of the season.

And remember, in the end, it's all about putting wild fish on the gravel.
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"Let every angler who loves to fish think what it would mean to him to find the fish were gone." (Zane Grey)

"If you don't kill them, they will spawn." (Carcassman)


The Keen Eye MD
Long Live the Kings!