Right on! Let's just take the big fish out of the gene pool. Hell, who needs humpies anyways!

The last line in this article is just killing me!
http://www.king5.com/localnews/10009901_WA1018salmoncaught.html

Personally, I don't have a problem with a 9-year old kid keeping a world record fish. I think DSHS would consider it child abuse if his dad had made him put it back.

K

To many double standards here. All wild fish are important and should be treated the same from Humpies to steelhead. I see to many people saying its wrong to kill wild steelhead but OK to kill wild chinook. Dont get me wrong if there are healthy numbers it should be left up to the fisherman to make the decision. But we havent seen truely healthy numbers of wild fish anywhere in this state for more than 15 years.

Is the humpy run not healthy? After a poor return 2 years ago it bounced right back, just like it has for a long time. Speaking of the Snohomish anyway. I think, 200,000 fish, or whatever it was, keep one. I agree with chinooks tho. Not sure if they can rebound like pinkies.

Cool fish for the kid! Maybe a taxidermist should offer to mount it for free.

I think dad better spring for a mount. How often does a kid catch a world class fish???

200,000 humpies is not alot of humpies for a river the size of the Snohomish. I may be alot of fish compared to the runs of the recent past but I bet if they kept track of the run 75 years ago it would be more like 2,000,000.

I fished the American river on the Kodiak roadsystem about three weeks ago. The American is about the size of the Lyre. It isnt even a humpie year there and the humpies were stacked like firewood. I fished about a mile above the salt and we walked all the way down. You couldnt even see the river bottom all the way to the mouth the fish were so thick, and when we got to the mouth it was solid humpies a half mile into the Ocean.

We fly fished with pink egg paterns and I stopped count at around 100 humpies between the two of us I bet we hooked 500 in about 3 hours. As soon as you bug hit the water it was humpie on.

It wasnt even a humpie year and I bet there were over 100,000 humpies in just the lower mile of river and mouth. You would have to see it to believe it but it is the truth.

I wonder what the Snohomish and skagit looked like 75 years ago? I bet you could walk across the humpies. 200,000 is just a small portion of what the run once was im sure. But we will never know the truth.

Rich if you were over here to see it, I highly dought you would be worried about the few humpies bonked to feed someones poor cat. Those fish were and still are EVERYWHERE. Every square foot of possible space was taking up by them this year. It was incredible.............to watch. 200,000 mt @ss! Its freakin' legal to kill em'"if you actually wanted to" so why not? I would say it was by far the best pink run I have ever seen on the Snohomish system.

Yeah I hate waste and there is no reason for it. We will never see 75 years ago again here. Be pretty cool to have a year like this every couple of cycles though. Which, after coming off the "poor" year of 2 years ago seems real likely. Seems like it hasnt gotten worse in the 20 years I have fished it is all. Ups and downs, sure.
Town I was in in AK had a creek that ran all of 100 yards to an unpassable falls. It got a real decent run of pinks and a chum every now and then.
Are we going to be conservation minded fishermen, get a good run going, then complain that a kid keeps a big fish? Seems a little overboard. Though I must say that, record or not, I would NEVER have kept either one of those skanky lookin fish or have even fished for them.

The run forecast for the Snohomish was originally 375,000+, the Skagit was 750,000+, Stilly 275,000+. Just before these systems opened WDFW upgraded the run sizes and there were(still are)tons of humps in the river waaaaaay before they opened. That is why the limits were bumped to four the day before it opened. If I had hit either of those fish I would have kept it as well. It aint everyday you have the opportunity to h*** not just a state record but a WORLD RECORD!!!!!!!!!
Kudos to the 9yr old for landing the thing. Its a ***** when a hump that big gets its sail turned into the wind.
As far as what the Snohomish looked like 75 years ago. Sure the river would probably get 2+million fish. But that was long before we destroyed the habitat, and WDFW decided to manage everything for commercial harvest. Enough on that subject.

Again kudos to the boy!

Tight lines,
Chumkiller

Funny how the biggest runs are the fish with the least commercial value.

Parker,

He who is without sin cast the first stone.

I would suspect that the kid who kept the big humpy did less damage to that fishery than you did to the sturgeon fishery by keeping those sturgeon whose pictures you put on this web page. It takes 10-15 years to replace a 4ft sturgeon in a river system.

Before keeping sturgeon from rivers that have smaller populations of sturgeon you should do some research on the Naselle and Willapa sturgeon and then you will think twice about keeping those fish.

My gripe is the double standard on this board. It's ok to slaughter the gene pool of fish *you* don't care about, yet you all get your panties in a bunch when someone posts a pic, or tells a story of that 30 pound native steelhead that bit the dust. Same difference, in my book. A big native fish was killed and that genetic make up is now forever lost, "healthy run" or not. It's gone. No more. Good bye.

Take a picture and some measurements. It will last longer then a mount and a "record".

Oh, and by the way Stadle, I'm calling your bluff. I want proof of your statements concerning the river I harvested that Sturgeon on. I don't care about Naselle or Willapa, as any informed Fisheries Biologist will tell you not to generalize. Be specific. You might be able to sling your BS at the uninformed, but you picked on the wrong person. Site me the exact references and I'll go look them up for us. If you are correct about that particular river and it's run of sturgeon, I'll publically apologize to this board for single handily killing that one sturgeon. The only legal size, non-breeding, sturgeon I have harvested in the last 15 years. No generalizations, please. Your references need to site the sturgeon on that exact river. Failure to come up with any relevant information will just show us..well..what we already know.

Parker - The Sturgeon King

[ 10-19-2001: Message edited by: parker ]

Parker I thought I was the Sturgeon King.........

Sorry drift boat, I got carried away there. Once someone accuses you of single handidly damaging a run of sturgeon without any proof, *and* made Bob's Pic of the Day, all in the same day, it goes straight to your head!

Parker - Humble Sturgeon Apprentice

I honestly do not know that much about the spawning habits of salmon. Do they spawn immediately when they reach their grounds or do they h*** for a while and then spawn. Anyway all I am leading to is I wonder if that humpy already spawned, then the question of him keeping it is mute at this point. From the photo, that fish looked like it had been in the river for quite some time.

Come Parker, climb down off that high horse.

You say you have a gripe with the double standard on this board, and then justify your own double standard by saying you kept a sturgeon.

There is nothing wrong with keeping the sturgeon. It was legal to do, and you picked a "non-breading" fish. I applaude your sense of conservation. If more people thought like that, there would possibly be more opprotunities for everyone to make this choice.

But can you honestly tell me that a world record humpy caught by a 9 year old kid is even in the same ball park as a 30 pound steelhead???

I completely understand and support your thoughts on catch and release. However, this was legal fish, in a fishery that the limit was increased because of a large return. The fish was a male, (C&R supporters have been heard many times saying "if you must take a fish, don't take a female"), and it was caught by a KID.

If a kid can't catch and keep a world record fish, then what are we saving the resource for??

By the way, you posted on 8/19 that you "limited out with our 8 fish by 10:00". This was in a thread about humpy hollow and since you could only keep 2 silvers at that time, you must have kept at least 2 pinks. By taking 2-4 fish out of the system, you probably did more harm than this kid taking 1 big fish.

Give the kid a break. It is great to hear of a youngster getting this kind of start in fishing. Who knows, maybe he will grow up to be a great conservationist and help build runs for his kids and my grand kids.


Hooknose

The run of Pinks this year in the Snohomish and Skagit systems has been enormous. Right now you could walk across most upper Skagit tailouts on their backs. The WDFW's revised estimates put the return on the Skagit alone at over 1 million.

And I thought it was one of those "common knowledge" things that wild female sturgeon reach maturity between 15-20 years and males between 7-15 years.

Doh! Forgot that the slot limits for gators are designed to keep the mature ones in the water...

[ 10-19-2001: Message edited by: B. Gray ]

Parker,

There is no bluff to call here. My point is simply the length of time it takes to replace sturgeon on any river, including the river you caught that fish on (which I am not sure of but was probably a puget sound river). The particular river is not what is relevant, but the time frame to replace the fish, ie how long it takes one of these fish to get to 4-5 feet in length. The exact reason we do not keep oversized fish is becuase they take so long to get there. You want proof of the damage, look up how long it takes a sturgeon to get to this size say it is 12 years to get to 50 inches, it then takes 12 years for that fish to be replaced in that river system, are you saying this is not true? And this, could be more damaging to sturgeon than keeping a big humpy male is to the humpy population. Even if there are ample sturgeon there now, enough harvest occurs and eventually the population will diminish. The reason for the reference to the particular rivers above.

Do you want proof of how long it takes sturgeon to get to certain sizes?

My intention was not to set you off, rather to make a point that what one sees as damaging the other may not, ie you see the humpie thing as damaging, i see the sturgeon thing as damaging. I did not mean to imply that i think you single handedly are depleting a strugeon population.

[ 10-19-2001: Message edited by: Stadle ]

Sometimes, I feel like I'm talking to a wall.

The issue at hand is BIG fish. BIG fish with really special genes. That top 1% of BIG Fish. Not just fish.

I've bonked one REALLY BIG fish and for that, I truly regret that decision. I have now seen the errors of my ways. The genetic make up of that one BIG FISH will never get passed on. I've single handidly increased the chance that you will *NOT* catch a BIG FISH on that particular river. And no, I don't feel any better or justification even if it was a tribal river.

I've never talked about populations. Why you all seem to infer that, is beyond me.

B.Gray - That's a HUGE r***e of numbers. There's a huge difference between a 51" 5 year old fish, and a 51" 12 year old fish.

I have been informed that in the river where I harvested that one sturgeon, that 51" fish was around 5 years old, not the 12+ some of you would like to think.

Be careful when you generalize about fisheries. The Number 1 RULE we learned in Fisheries is NOT to generalize about fish.

Parker