GodLovesUgly-

The critical factors in the test fisheries and the catches is not the numbers of fish they catch or even their catch success (fish/hour) and how that compares to the general angler or the fleet but the ratio of the wild adults and shakers to the legal fish they catch.

Maybe this will help; lets assume that during a month of fishing the test boat catches 20 legal Chinook, 5 wild legal size fish, 10 sub-legal size wild (unclipped) fish and 40 sub-legal size clipped fish. Further for this example we will assume the catch estimate of legal size fish for the fleet for that month was 200 fish.

Using that information we can see that the landed catch was 10 times what the test boat caught. Using the ratio of legal size wild fish to legal Chinook (25%) the creel estimate for encounters of legal size wild fish would be 25% of the estimated number of legal sized fish or 50. Similarly the encounter estimate for the month for the fleet would be 100 wild sub-legal size wild fish and 400 sub-legal clipped fish. That would yield a took encounter estimate for the fleet for that month of fishing of 750 (200 legal fish plus 50 released wild fish plus 100 wild sub-legal fish plus 400 sub-legal clipped fish).

I hope you can see that the how many fish relative to the fleet success the test boat is not critical; only that the ratio of the various groups of fish are representative to the what the fleet does. By attempting to use the same methods (gear) as the fleet and fishing the same area that would be reasonable assumption. One example how the test boat decides comes from the dock side interviews. If the interviews show that 10% of the time checked that anglers were mooching then the test boat would spend 10% of their fishing time mooching.

The fact that the anglers in the test boats are good fishers helps the process by assuring that the sample size is larger than it would otherwise would be if say I was doing the fishing. That larger number of fish sample should improve the quality of the estimates.

Again I encourage those really interested in the details of how these numbers are generated that you looked at the links I provided earlier.

Curt