Marine areas 2 & 3 are now closed according to emergency rule changes.

They must want more than 20k-30k surplus this year. How dare the taxpayer to whoop on em before they swim into a net. Its also funny that last year you could punch unclipped coho for the first time in forever, and this year nothing? Either, nobody has a clue to what is really happenin off our coast or the state is being drug by their leash.

from what i read they got the coho quota out there.. i dont think they got it last yr?

You'd think with the surplus over the past couple years, the quota would be adjusted accordingly. Right? If they knew how many fish are out there, we wouldn't have 30,000 surplus fish on the satsop. If you've been paying attention. Some of our state agency's as of late have had a real problem with being transparent to the public.

WDFW should conduct, maybe annually, a public, open, live presentation and Q&A for the nuts and bolts of have the rec and commercial fisheries are managed. Reading a lot of comments here and elsewhere it iOS obvious that the how and why has not been either well explained or it slimly doesn't stick in memory.

In the early 80s WDF made a series of presentation to the commercial salmon fishermen (GN, PS, RN) that explained the how and why. It really calmed to communications. It did not, in at least a few cases, get the guys to be happy with or always agree with actions but since they knew why it as done they could at least understand.

There are two main reasons for surpluses at hatcheries. One is an underestimate of the run. We know that preseason forecasts are not as good as in-season updates but we also have a lot of the popular fioerioes before we can update. Smart management should be to fish conservatively until you know. The second reason is that the abundant components of the run can not be accessed successfully in mixed stock areas. With mixed stock including hatchery/wild.


I was involved in management at a time when every effort was made to update every run on a weekly basis. In addition, we would use rack returns, escapement observations, Canadian fisheries; essentially wherever there was some information to tell us what was going on. Unfortunately, from the fisherman's perspective, this meant that management was nimble and responded quickly and often, both to close and open. I think that today's managers prefer the auto-pilot set and and forget. Intensive management is more expensive.

And I will agree that transparency is pipe dream.

Goodness the last years Satsop hatchery numbers were all about damn near 70% of the coho run coming in before Recs tribe NT comm even got after them. The Commercials and tribe pulled early and stopped netting chum because the chum fishery minus coho is not a viable fishery economically.

And again it does not matter what a hatchery return is as for seasons. In mixed stock fisheries only and I mean only the wild escapement matters. Hatchery fish are a bonus in the Chehalis Basin but we are mixed stock wild fish runsize down you manage to that number hatchery fish are not that important as to escapement and seasons.

Intelligent management would balance the hatchery production with the wild runs in areas where one can fished mixed stock. In the first couple of iterations of the Puget Sound Salmon Management Plan all terminal areas were managed for either hatchery or wild. That meant surpluses at some hatcheries and blowing away the wild stocks in others. It works in terminal areas but in the big marine fisheries the controlling stocks are the weakest ones. Massive mixed stock fisheries are a thing of the past unless we, as a society, decide we don't want meaningful populations of wild fish.