Originally Posted By: slabhunter
Originally Posted By: eyeFISH
Chehalis coho turned out much worse than the state and QIN's in-season projection.

Basically a run failure at only about 1/4 of the preseason forecast.

At 31K the entire run was basically at the 110% e-goal threshold... in other words NO harvestable surplus. In hindsight the entire run could have gone to the gravel.

With Hump coho also in the toilet, there was NOTHING to buffer the basinwide coho goal, either. Basinwide goal is 35.4K... which is what QIN manages to.... actual escapement was only 21.1K. You gotta ask... W T F?

Basinwide runsize was 32.9K. Harvest was about 11.8K (fuzzy number as the Hump harvest is statistically indistinguishable from ZERO [1112 - 1097 = 15 fish] Things that make you go HMMMM? )

So the post-season co-manager report card is a big fat "F-".... basically took an unfishable run and put a targeted 36% exploitation rate on GH wild coho when they should have only put a 10% incidental impact on those fish.

Sorry to be so pessimistic... BUT ... the fish don't stand a fukkin' chance in 2016.


Harvest (at any cost) Management should have taken notice that the Chehalis Basin's coho were missing.
Even the charter boats out of Westport were running South to find some catchable numbers.


This is the point that really frustrates me. They knew by July the fish weren't coming in anything close to the numbers forecast, yet they took absolutely zero corrective action before it was way too late. Makes it pretty clear what drives Region 6 fish management, and it also points out that the Co-Managers don't give a flying $hit about conservation. There really is no sense in sugar coating that.

Here's your Grays Harbor fishing forecast for the forseeable future:

If the runs exceed expectations, everyone will catch lots of fish. Otherwise, the gillnets will be the only ones to catch fish. (All forecasts assume salmon have not yet been driven to extinction.)

Any bets on when we'll see a proposal to lower the coho e-goals?