My recent post had several folks concerned over the numbers Chinook harvested by the QIN. The QIN harvest came in above expectations for Chinook but Coho are a no show. Now in the big picture the tribal 2 day set says .............. really nothing other than the QIN need to be keenly aware that the Chinook staging hard in the lower reaches and they could blow through the projected harvest numbers, which would not be a good thing. The other side is maybe the run is larger or early or just about anything so one waits to see. It is interesting that just after PFMC agrees to a lower Chehalis Chinook escapement goal off QIN data then NMFS fires back with the over fishing on the registry. Keep in mind the overfishing is occurring in the MARINE fisheries from AK to OR.

Now Coho is different. A local gentlemen, whose handle is Softbite, has been bringing forth that the ocean PDO is tanking. Below is a down & dirty description of the PDO for those not familiar with the term. Then despite the rain we are well below average flows. Also the early rain scooted the fish holding in tidewater upstream. It is not uncommon in dry years for Coho just park and wait for a weather change to before doing anything. The other side of the coin is that the ocean Coho fishery has been under what was modeled and it came up short on Coho is the thought of many folks. Add to the fact last year we caught a lot of 4 to 5 lb Coho both male & female, which is just weird. Then this year Coho jacks appear to be scarce. Additionally when we do find Coho this year many are the 4 to 5 lb range ( males so far ) so it begs the question, "is the run going to be much smaller than forecast" ? Maybe yes / maybe no but I will stick my neck out and say Coho are going to be short. Now with the runsize forecast we have lots of room before the numbers drop below escapement so no need to panic.

The one thing I am certain of is the timeline for the Coho run is not going to be what we call "normal" and one needs to be adaptive for timing and methods. Going to be a interesting couple of months to be sure.

PDO:

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a robust, recurring pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centered over the mid-latitude Pacific basin. The PDO is detected as warm or cool surface waters in the Pacific Ocean, north of 20° N. Over the past century, the amplitude of this climate pattern has varied irregularly at interannual-to-interdecadal time scales. There is evidence of reversals in the prevailing polarity of the oscillation occurring around 1925, 1947, and 1977; the last two reversals corresponded with dramatic shifts in salmon production regimes in the North Pacific Ocean. This climate pattern also affects coastal sea and continental surface air temperatures from Alaska to California.

During a "warm", or "positive", phase, the west Pacific becomes cooler and part of the eastern ocean warms; during a "cool" or "negative" phase, the opposite pattern occurs. The Pacific (inter-)decadal oscillation was named by Steven R. Hare, who noticed it while studying salmon production pattern results in 1997.[1]

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation index is the leading empirical orthogonal function (EOF) of monthly sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) over the North Pacific (poleward of 20° N) after the global mean SST has been removed, the PDO index is the standardized principal component time series.[2] A PDO signal has been reconstructed to 1661 through tree-ring chronologies in the Baja California area.[3]



Edited by Rivrguy (09/17/15 10:24 AM)
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Dazed and confused.............the fog is closing in