Been looking at some historic salmon catch material on WDFW's sport catch reports. The latest report on WDFW's site is for 2011. During 2011 there were 334,593 salmon (all species) caught in the marine waters of Washington. Of those 229,160 (approximately 2/3) were caught in Puget Sound.

For fun I compared those numbers from the earliest year I could find. In 1971 the marine sport catch was 1,199,000 salmon with 282,000 (less than a quarter of the state total) being caught in Puget Sound.

Note neither the above or my earlier posts on the Puget Sound angler use is meant to say the Puget Sound angling is great; in fact the catch/rod is lower than many area in the state. That said the current management is generating a lot of economic activity in the backyard of much of the State's population that may be similar to what was seen 40 years ago (pre-Boldt) at least in terms of fish caught.

To put the Puget Sound recreational salmon fishery with other popular fisheries I compared the number of salmon caught in 2010 and 2011. In 2010 the numbers were-
The ocean salmon catch (MA 1 to 4) was 68,404,
For Puget Sound (MA 5 through 13) it was 50,697,
For Buoy 10 Washington licensed anglers caught 5,121 salmon,
For the Willapa Bay anglers caught 1,893.

In 2011 the numbers were -
For the ocean the catch was 74,599.
For Puget Sound it was 229,654 (thanks to the pinks)
For Buoy 10 Washington licensed anglers catch was 5,996
For Willapa Bay the catch was 6,314.

Curt