This season looks to be in deep trouble. The WDFW has posted catch data that looks like the disaster some of the posters have noted here.

The non tribal catch for Oct 6-12 was 820 Coho or 24% of the modeled catch of 3,457 fish. This was the first ever day of tangle net use so it could just be a gear test failure.

Tribal data is posted for week 40, the week prior to the above data. In 2C they caught 604 Coho or 23% of the modeled 2,664 fish. In 2A/2D they caught 820 Coho or 24% of the modeled 3,457 fish. This was the first week after the storm which probably reduced the catch.

Sports harvest so far based on creel checks at 28th St., Cosmopolis, and Montesano have been at 20-30% of the fish/angler rate of last year and with a larger run forecast should have been higher than last year.

Does anyone see a trend developing? If you run the model backward to predict run size the Coho run would be about 24% of the forcasted 211,419 total Chehalis Coho.

The Chinook harvest is in about the same condition indicating that the run size is less than the escapement goal again.

We can hope the early season conditions were abnormal or that the run is just late but right now this looks like one of the least accurate run size forecasts ever. If the next weeks data is the same as what has been posted so far one would have to be thinking that the rest of the season should be shut down for everyone at least if conservation and escapement goals were important.