Sorry to have come in so late but am compelled to ask some questions and reinforce some information.

First, Carcassman asserts that water quality is worse than at the high point of the winter blackmouth program. Is that really true given the development of better sanitary sewer treatment systems as well as efforts to reduce the amount of surface water runoff? And even if true exactly how might this account for the decrease? We are talking about salt water here.

Obviously these fish need food or they will not hang around. If the assertion is that a lack of feed caused them to move out of the intended (and historical) areas is there any data that supports these fish being caught elsewhere? If not, where did they go?

Which leads me to Tug having raised the specter of predation by marine mammals. I am not going to research the absolutes again but in general terms information presented during the rockfish recovery plan review process revealed that in the early 70s there were somewhere around 200 seals in all of Puget Sound - in large part because they had had a bounty on them for years and they were generally shot on sight by commercial fishermen and others.

That minimal seal population grew from several hundred to 14,000 in 2007 and 15,000 at the time the initial rockfish plan was put out for review and comment. In the plan the writers opined that the seal population growth rate appeared to be slowing - that is, still growing but at a decreasing rate. Based upon consumption data in the plan those 14,000 seals would have been consuming 28 million pounds of food a year; 15,000 over 30 million. And we do know for sure that seals love salmon and also have herring as a major food source (as well as rockfish; something the writers of the rockfish plan tried to minimize during the hearings).

I suggest it doesn't take a rocket scientist to plot the curves over time and recognize a correlation - and not much of a leap of faith to see the cause and effect. (I am NOT a rocket scientist but I do know one....) And by increasing the legal minimum size the chances of these fish surviving the predators and reaching that minimum became smaller which surely caused a decrease in the contribution rate.

While I don't believe the State Auditor's Office has sufficient technical capability to satisfactorily accomplish performance audits on WDFW programs (they admitted as much by trying to outsource them) they did generate an audit of the blackmouth program. That audit addresses the contribution rates and escalating costs per fish caught over time of the program. If interested the title is Department of Fish and Wildlife Delayed-Release Chinook Salmon dated April 9, 2010 and is assigned report number 1003365.