I discussed this with WDFW at the Mill Creek NOF meeting.

They seem to think they had 28,000 chum return last year, this is an extremely optimistic number, it was actually worse than prior years when they estimated 16-18,000. The escapement is set at 28,000 and they predict 38,000 to return, and the tribe wants to have a fishery on those 10,000 surplus paper fish. WDFW agreed to split the take at 5,000 for each (tribes and sporties), they feel there will be no more than 1,000 or so retained by the sporties, leaving 4,000 more than if the tribes were allotted all 10,000. Nets tend to catch every paper fish they are allotted and then some, so splitting it is a good idea to save more fish.

There is a problem with the current system of allotting the paper fish to each user group, if the sporties can’t show they can catch the number of fish they have been issued the tribes can petition to take the difference. This is an issue with the Baker Lake Sockeye fishery. Each group was allotted approximately 15,000 fish, the tribes came very close to that number, the sporties only landed around half of their share. This is why the lake will open earlier this year and why they opened a section of the river. If we can’t show we can harvest our share the tribes can possibly take them. Which means fewer fish will be put in the lake, in turn we will catch fewer fish (there is no way to catch 100% of the fish put in the lake), which could lead to the tribe taking even more fish., remember every paper fish must die. They also allotted “0” escapement for the Sockeye in Baker Lake, the tribes and WDFW couldn’t agree on a number, the tribes wanted around 1,500 and WDFW wanted more than 3,000. WDFW knew the sporties wouldn’t be able to catch all the fish in the lake, so they left the number at zero and just counted on what we didn’t catch to be the escapement. This means the total escapement came from our portion, the tribes contributed nothing.

Here is the problem with opening it for retention of chum on the Sky.

There are now very few fish that spawn below the Sultan river, the vast majority spawn in the next couple of miles up river from there. This section of river has very good bank access right on the prime spawning habitat. Opening it for retention will permit people to stand over the fish every day and yank them off the redds. Even if they don't keep any these fish will be mercilessly pounded. The result will be each fish being snagged numerous times per day, even if no fish are retained there will be very little chance of them spawning successfully.

Opening it only down river from Sultan wouldn't cause many issues, most of these fish are just traveling now and there aren't many places where you can stand over a redd and repeatedly snag the same few fish. The lower river had very good numbers of spawning fish until the over netting of the recent past, now very few spawn there. The netting opens mid Oct, so the early chums that spawn higher were already in the river, the lower river fish that return slightly later were wiped out several years in a row, plus we had a couple of big floods.

One other problem is the bio’s thought they had the chum returns figured out pretty well, that is until something changed and their formulas to predict the return failed miserably. By the way, they continue to use those formulas and that’s how they figure 38,000 will return this year.