Two dogs

Its good to see you posting on this subject.

What I've seen first hand from being located on a prime spawning area of the Sky, is a big change in where the fish spawn and when they enter the river. The last two years there was an early push of fish that moved to the upper portion of the spawning grounds and as soon as the nets went in the run stopped, very few fish came in after that and few spawned low in the system. I normally fished for Coho until at least November 1st in Snohomish and when they slowed down I’d switch to Chums. Now there are fishable numbers of chums in September and almost none in November.

These fish came in with the Coho weeks earlier than normal, so by netting this heavily later are we changing the run timing?

The years prior were much better, but the sport fishing success has been dropping off steadily for at least 7 or 8 years, there were far more fish in river over a much longer period of time in the mid to late 90's.

I can also get an idea of the run size by the number carcasses I find on the bank and my dogs don't miss a single one. The last 4 years I've seen far fewer and the last two years they were almost non existent.

In 2007 I caught more steelhead in one day on the OP than I did chums in the Sky all season, the last two years I've caught far more kings on the Sky than chums.

There were a couple of places on the Sky that had good numbers of fish, but these were small areas with about the normal number of fish. These places were pounded hard day after day by a guide boat side drifting with long leaders, at times the same fish were being hooked time after time. This success was reported so frequently it seemed the run was better than it actually was. These spots started early and ended early, with few fish elsewhere in the river.

This is another question for you. Were the record high numbers of chums earlier this decade determined by accurately counting the number of spawning fish, or was it by subtracting the number reported as being caught in nets from the estimated run size?
I can see management thinking returns were great when there was a huge number reported in the nets and then not counting fish in the river accurately by only looking in a few locations, or thinking the numbers they counted were wrong by looking at gill net numbers and run estimates.