i have not bonked a native steelhead in the chehalis river system in over 25 years but because of the tribal netting schedule i have decided that the state is trying to wipe out steelhead in the chehalis system. the december steelhead of which there use to be a lot are gone. maybe it is time for the sportman to take back control of the river.
if there are any dept. of wildlife employees on this board could you give the why of the agree upon netting season for the tribe and the numbers used to justify it. i have emailed the state office and received on reply thanks

Good luck with that larryb

Could this be the "why" of the agreement?

Judge Boldt finally held that the government's promise to secure the fisheries for the tribes was central to the treaty-making process and that the tribes had an original right to the fish, which they extended to white settlers. It was not up to the state to tell the tribes how to manage something that had always belonged to them. Judge Boldt ordered the state to take action to limit fishing by non-Indians.

By Walt Crowley and David Wilma , February 23, 2003

Washington State ordered to practice discrimmination?

Prophetic

It's just not the same without the baby doll.

The Chehails gets weird in accounting because the Chehalis Tribe's "share" come out of the NI side. So, they could take half, the QIN could take half, and the sharing requirements are met. And, because fish management is an exact science, the necessary escapement is also on the grounds.

Our share of the Chinook in the Chehalis is zero. How does 2% come out of zero and still be 2%? Figures don't lie but liars figure. Go figure. And who monitors the 2%?

The NI "share" is supposed to 50% but it is over all WA waters. You took them in the bay and ocean. The only species where in-river sharing is 50:50 would be steelhead as there aren't, or weren't, in intercepting fisheries.

WDFW is the Grinch that stole steelhead from fishing past.
Now they sit collecting a pension and still eating doughnuts.

Scapegoating wdfw for something that we all played a part in the demise of is the height of stupidly on this board...like none of us live where we live and have anything to do with it along with all the other declines.
To say that you have a narrow viewpoint on that is a bold understatement. It'd be nicer if people put their adult hats on, educated themselves and started having convos of worth. Rather than the 5th grade bull we get like here and spewing out of Camerons c holster.

Spoken like a true Government servant with zero accountability.

WDFW is nothing but a group of unionized weatherman.

Our state has failed their own mission statement.

Simply pathetic.

There is no better sight on a river.

I'd like a few concrete examples of failure of the Mission Statement. First, what exactly does it say?

We know that WDFW has some influence, but not control, of the harvest of the anadromous species. So, how can they control AK, BC, or the Tribes with Treaty guaranteed rights versus privledges?

How can they control the addition of all those new residents, both by immigration and birth, that make increased demands on natural resources?

How can they, as a state agency, change Federal Law?

Just wondering. There are many ways that I see they have not performed as well as I think they could or should, but they are not functioning in a vacuum and we (the collective we of society) support the increased growth, decreased habitat, ESA, wolves, and so on. One of our (the consumptive users of fish and wildlife) shortcomings is that our view of resources is a minority view.

Why?
Most here would just argue the point and try to justify their failures as they point at others.

The government is one of the very few places you can work and have failure be justified.

Having no species to manage and being buried in debt has long ago become the norm.

On the Swing,

Scapegoatimg WDFW? I think the people who mis-managed the steelhead program should be held accountable! For more than thirty years knowledgeable anglers sounded the alarm about too many wild fish being taken and hatchery programs being cut. I was one of those yelling the loudest. Steelhead management was not forthcoming, and basically dishonest, in their silence to the Commission after the merger, either. Meetings of the so called "Steelhead Advisory Committee" were whitewash jobs to the members, and the WDFW staff buried their collective heads in the sand. And now those of us who love the fish, and volunteered at every level, complied with the regulations whether they made sense or not, are left with what? The history of weakening steelhead runs goes back more than ten years! When I hear about "ten year average" references to salmon and steelhead returns I realize how ignorant the staff is.

Simple questions like "What is the carrying capacity of this watershed"
are never addressed. An entire ecosystem is damaged when fish runs decline or disappear. WDFW staff has tunnel vision when it comes to thinking outside their own program. The legacy of the steelhead management staff will be etched in stone as "Disgraceful".

Amen.

I agree with Tug that we should be using a lot more of the available data; it just makes managers look bad.

As to carrying capacity, it isn't fixed. Here's and example from AK. They fish wild coho at 60 % and the runs, at least over a couple decades up to about 2010 were stable. The annual harvest varied from 1,000 to 8,000. The difference? At the low end there were no Pink Salmon spawning in the stream. At the high end there were 2+ kg per square metre. Carrying capacity for coho varied with the amount of coho spawning and at all levels was "sustainable". So, what CC does one manage for? Coho, and let the Pinks spawn and feed the coho and bears? Or Pink harvest, and have fewer bears and fewer coho. But, since it was different fishing groups chasing the salmon, there was a nice annual conflict.

CM,

Your comment makes perfect sense to me about carrying capacity dependent upon available nutrients. About twenty years ago Gary Loomis demonstrated the value of nutrients in a stream to the natural rearing of juvenile coho. Although I don't agree with his numbers, his example opened some eyes. Then also, the Vancouver Island stream (Keough?) experiment fascinated me in its success by adding nutrients to streams and the boom in steelhead survival. Now we've painted ourselves into a corner, by eliminating many salmon from spawning in the streams because they are of hatchery origin and need to be segregated from wild ones. So, the wild ones now lack a source of nutrients available to them. Meanwhile with fewer and fewer wild spawners the gene pool gets narrower and narrower.

The Keogh was fascinating because the nurtients were an on-off switch. Use them, production jumped. Budget cuts? It dropped. Then, the pink run up there boomed and natural spawners, for a while, replaced the fertilizers. We have seen the same thing in WA when the pinks boomed on some streams. Also, in some streams with good chum runs.

And, too put the Keogh into carcass currency, they were loading it only in the range of 0.6 kg/square metre. There was a long ways to go (like 3X the loading) to hit the inflection point.

I think when we have discussed "habitat" in the past, as vast as it is, we have still under-measured what it entails...MDN is huge, and the pretend "too many spawners is bad for the river" argument took a chunk out of that necessary component.

Overharvest of forage fish is an "ocean conditions/habitat" issue...if the fish can't eat, they can't grow.

We have no problem noting that landslides, sea walls, dams and diversions, dikes, destruction of beaver ponds, and bad culverts block habitat...I would suggest that a fishing net (whether it be an in-river gillnet, an estuary gillnet, an open water seine or drift net) sure as hell blocks fish from accessing available habitat, too.

Hatchery fish taking up usable spawning grounds is a habitat issue.

Those are all in addition to unchecked growth and actual destruction of the rivers, estuaries, and forests the fish all depend on.

It's part of why I never liked the "4 H's" approach...it purposely misses the interactions betwen the Hs...it's all one H.

Fish on...

Todd

Years back CM was helping the local volunteers to utilize hatchery carcasses for nutrients. So he set down and did the math for us and it came out if you took every hatchery carcass in the state and put them in the Chehalis Basin it would not equal what the Chehalis Basin had naturally for nutrients presettler and harvest. Habitat is more than just gravel and woody debris it is about the functioning of habitat.

+1



Similar to my comments re: habitat above, "carrying capacity" only means what someone wants it to mean...

Current carrying capacity? If we include the ocean, Puget Sound, estuary, and the river...well, we're at it, always. Holistically it is literally exactly how many fish we have at this moment.

Carrying capacity in 1855? I'd wager it was a bit higher

Carrying capacity if we did X, Y, or Z, or some or all of them?

Plant 10 billion trees in the watershed, but don't fix the dike-straightened last 5 miles of river before it blasts into the saltwater with no estuary to speak of? I doubt we added much CC with all of those trees.

Go out to the coast, where we have "pristine" habitat...but cold, clear rivers with zero nutrients without a mountain of dead salmon carcasses littering the bottom? There's nothing pristine about that habitat. That habitat sucks for raising fish.

I spent a lot of time throwing hatchery coho off of bridges on small tributaries up on the Skagit, and while it certainly didn't hurt, looking down and seeing a few hundred fish in the river sure didn't look like the tens of thousands littering the bottom and bank when I was a kid.

I agree with Jim, in that we failed to do the right thing a LONG time ago, and we are now reaping the rewards of that failure.

The problem is that anyone who has a "simple" solution is almost always 100% wrong.

"Remember in 1977 when we had so many fish? We should just do what we were doing then!"

Well...what we were doing then is why we are where we are now.

If we want historical levels of fish runs, I think we all know what to do...move 90% of the population somewhere else, remove all of their houses, most of the roads, take out all of the fishing, from Japan to Alaska through BC to here, in Puget Sound and all of the rivers, and wait for the forests to grow back and the fish to grow back.

Outside of doing that, it's going to be all techno-fixes, and we have a long long long history of failing at those.

Other option is that we have almost no fish, and no fishing at all. That sure as hell doesn't satisfy me, or anyone else, I think.

If we want steelhead, we need salmon, lots of them, and lots of spawning and rearing habitat for steelhead young.

If we want salmon, they need forage fish to eat.

If we want salmon, we need to have a lot more than half of them get past the SEAK/WCVI fisheries, commercial, guided, and recreational.

If we want salmon, we need much larger pieces of healthy rivers full of spawning and rearing habitat than we have now.

We need cleaner water, more trees along and in the rivers, and healthy and productive side channels, beaver ponds, and unpolluted functioning estuaries.

Every one of those things are essential, doing all of them but one...any one...and it won't work.

Our society will continue to attempt to "save" salmon by doing exactly zero of those things, and we will get the salmon...and steelhead...runs that you would expect.

My optimism level is not very high.

Fish on...

Todd

Amen! Good summary Todd.

Here is a link to some of the Keogh river steelhead studies

https://www.keoghriver.net/marine-survival-time-series.


I think figure 11 supports some of what Tood is saying. I would expand a bit on Todds point, with most of our stocks that are in trouble there are critical production bottle necks that are limit the populations. The fastest track to stock improvements is addressing those bottlenecks.

Curt

So I guess it would be allowed to say that poaching is still an issue out on the OP all because a warden out there in the 70s or 80s didn't do their job.

It was the late Jeff Cederholm said "Salmon are habitat"

I agree with your statement about bottlenecks...but I would say that entails taking the entire mountainous list of factors that limit steelhead runs, rank them in order from #1 the worst to #1,000,000 the least worst, and get to work. As soon as #1 is done, then #2 will now be your bottleneck, and so forth.

As a society our plan is to start with # 987,321, and do it halfass, and then blame it on someone else.

If our inner Puget Sound bottleneck is getting fish from rivers to the ocean without dying, then adding a million fish to the river...hatchery fish or wild fish...doesn't even remotely address the bottleneck. They all die, too, just as fast as the ones getting out of rivers into Puget Sound are right now.

That's why that simple "plant more fish" plan isn't just simple, it's simple-minded. It would be more cost-effective to just take the money to the nearest bridge and throw it in the water and then go fishing...at least it will be a quicker way to throw away all of our money for zero results.

For Hood Canal steelhead, it's become abundantly clear over the last decade what their bottleneck is...it's the Hood Canal Bridge.

I haven't heard anyone talk about removing it.

For the Elwha it was clearly the dams...and they have been removed, and salmon and steelhead head are on the rise in there, dramatically even, considering how short of a time they have had access to the river.

For Puget Sound, it's 3,000,000 people, and everything that comes with them.

A feel good culvert project that costs $5,000,000 is sure great, probably results in a couple hundred more smolts reaching Puget Sound, all of which die just like the rest of them...because that culvert was number 987,654 on the list of 1,000,000 things bottlenecking PS steelhead.

There is no will, and there is no money, to address what is right now causing the end of steelhead runs, and steelhead fishing, in Washington State.

Fish on...

Todd

Good example of throwing money away with "plant more fish" and getting zero results is the Nooksack River. There is a complete closure on the river, (tribal and sport), for Steelhead fishing. Of a plant of 89,000 fish they are forecasting 74 returning fish this year of which they need 160 just to meet broodstock goals.

While I was working, WDFW did a review of hatchery programs and calculated the rearing cost to put a fish in the creel. Some were over $100 a fish. The Commission should set a standard, and hold them to it, that no program can cost more than (pick a number, say$.50 each) to put a fish from that program in the creel.

Any sort of accounting like this, though, would push production to the release of very young fish. Pink and chum would be the most cost-effective while yearling steelhead, coho, chinook, and large trout the most costly. Bit I think there should be a public, transparent accounting.

Another option would be something like the westside pheasant card where the user bears most of the cost. In this idea, there might be separate "cards" for steelhead, coho, chinook with the buyer bearing the cost of raising that species. This might move WDFW away from raising fish for AK, BC, Tribes, and nets. The Tribal "share" could be paid out of the General Fund, as the whole state benefitted from the swap of land for fish.

Whether a $100/fish is worth the cost would depend on the economic value that such a fish would generate in various fisheries.

Just one example during the summer of 2020 WDFW in their mark selective monitoring estimated that during the summer Chinook fishery in MA 9 there was 45,376 angler days of effort harvesting 3,786 Chinook. The anglers were spending nearly 12 days on the water to harvest a fish. Even at the minimal value of $50 expenditure/day that $100 production cost of a Chinook would be an economic win; enough so to even help support other fisheries.

I would suggest that a better metric for the commission to consider would be whether the cost of production to produce a fish to the creel will generate a positive Cost to Benefit ratio. In my example above it would seem that even at $100/Chinook in the creel is a clear winner. Remember by Commision policy in Puget Sound non-treaty harvest of Chinook has been given a priority to recreational fisheries.

Curt

While that makes sense, Smalma, there is a problem I see in using the overall economic benefit as a driver. Your example of the MA9 fishery shows it to be extremely beneficial economically while biologically it remains a marine mixed stock fishery with all those ills. Same as with the ocean fishery. They obviously are economically more valuable but biologically more damaging.

Is anyone happy spending 12 days to harvest a fish?

So many factors, but doing a return on investment should be required for any project.

In the south sound, predator control would probably be the cheapest and first step. Let the tribes take control and simply reduce the number of seals. Give then a hundred bucks a seal and I bet you there would be a line out the door of tribal members wanting to take part. Make them try to utilize the carcass and its a win-win for everyone.
Predator control at the hood canal bridge could also help.
There are hundreds of ways that could help and are a lot cheaper, but no one seems to want to do them.

https://www.pugetsoundinstitute.org/2020...rom-hood-canal/

Planting inflation??????

LOL

Go Joe Go!!!

Remember the old axiom: "Beware of those who know the cost of everything, but know the value of nothing".

Ask me how much I would value a productive steelhead fishing season again on the O.P. if the science and funding were even available.

Twenty years ago a guy on the Steelhead Committee with me remarked that "Forks could be the next Livingston, Montana". Something to think about, but of course it didn't happen. Tragic.

Believing in wild steelhead recovery at this point is like believing in Santa.

Plant fish WDFW elves.

If wild and hatchery steelhead are not surviving after smolting just how in the world does planting more fish accomplish anything?

You don't believe in Christmas magic?

Fish on...

Todd

Christmas Magic is more real than steelhead recovery.

Ouch. So sad, but so true.

You know, the concept of angling with hookless lures that sounded so silly to me a couple years ago sounds like frigging heaven right about now....

ok just for the hell of it...

how do u know the the low hatchery returns are mainly caused by the ocean conditions and not low plants??? maybe there not planting the numbers they say!!

GO

So your idea is that survival increases as numbers planted increases? Somewhere on one of the threads here was the numbers from the Nooksack. Planted number and forecasted return. Damn close to 0 percent survival expected.

That said, back about a decade ago I was at a steelhead conference and it seemed that the "best" programs, with what appeared to be the highest survivals/returns, were for the programs that released a couple hundred thousand or more. My thought was that the smaller the program the fewer the spawners so the greater chance of poor genetics.

Idaho releases millions of smolts and gets back ten(s) of thousands of hatchery fish. Of course, their returns have been trending downward also, however, they are still able to have some sort of consumptive fishery and meet egg take. I'm not insinuating to release millions into every stream in Wa, however, i think a reasonable number needs to be planted to offset losses. To have any chance at fisheries, you would think 500k smolts per watershed would suffice, although look at the Skagit back 20yrs ago, they released that much and got little return.

I would like to see predators(seals, sea lions, and cormorants) be managed and see what that looks like. It seems like one of the Big factors to address

That's what I was saying, it is the huge releases that return "enough" to fish. The water necessary to rear 500K to a million steelhead is huge and would require year-around water. These sites are rare. Which is why, to me, the hatchery programs should be focused in few systems and be huge.

Perfect! That's gotta' be it! WDFW says they are planting lots of fish when really they aren't. Little wonder that the returns are so bad. All they need to do is start planting the numbers of smolts that they have been telling us that they plant. And then lots of adult hatchery steelhead will return, and everything will be all right, and we can fish and kill hatchery steelhead to our heart's content. Perfect!

Those who want large returns of wild and hatchery steelhead need to invest in a time machine. Set it for the years 1968 - 1972. You'll wear your arms out reeling in fish.

It's on the Xmas list, we'll see how good I was this year. If you guys don't hear from me by noon tomorrow I will be sitting in a lawn chair by a roaring fire near my plunking shack on the Snohomish river circa 1969.

Wow.
Imagine that.
You gotta plant fish to have fish return.
Someone might want to tell the old farts who sit around collecting a pension and making excuses.

Merry Christmas.

Well, if you want to plant steelhead, or salmon, to your heart's content please petition Congress to change ESA. Or convene the God Squad and write off the wild fish. Until then, those "pension collecting/excuse making" staff will need to comply with the law. And while your at it, have Congress abrogate the treaties.

Note Salmo said "68-72". Pre-Boldt, pre-listing, and pre-millions more people.

Plant more so I can catch more.

Socialism much? $400, $500 per crappy little hatchery fish so you can do your thing?

"Plant more, and have a good fishery!" doesn't work. It hasn't worked since the mid-80s.

The number of hatchery fish planted is not the bottleneck that keeps us from having fisheries.

That's the fantasy they sold us in the 70s, that we could have salmon without rivers, steelhead without habitat, and fisheries with overpopulation.

That fantasy is what got us here...it won't get us out of here.

Fish on...

Todd

The Cowlitz should be run to full capacity if you ask me. They should be trying to see how many fish they can get back every year. When they get good runs it makes me question ocean conditions.

Hatchery fish are like sunshine to Frosty around this forum.

This is where the educated come to see who can make the best failure excuse.

Everyone's a winner!!!!

how long has it been since we were able to take unclipped steelhead in the chehalis basin rivers including the Hump.??? at least 20 yrs?? .. has it helped the the wild steelhead numbers grow???

if the state is so worried about the numbers WHY do they take the wild steelhead on the Wynoochee trap and put them up over the DAM???? knowing that (0) zero adults will get back into the river to go out to ocean and come back to spawn again!!!!

they been doing this for how long 30-40yrs?? how many wild have they killed off doing this???

And how many smolt survive the 170ft drop from the dam to the river below???

HMMMMMM something isnt right!!

Discontinuing allowing anglers to kill wild steelhead wasn't about making the wild steelhead population increase in size. What, you say? Then what was it about? Harvest of wild steelhead was not the limiting factor for abundance of most wild steelhead populations. Habitat productivity and capacity were the limiting factors. What the no-kill regulation did was, as fishing pressure increased and catch increased, the no-kill regulation prevented over-harvest from becoming the limiting factor. And it has worked in most river systems until last year, when returning run sizes were so low that even the incidental mortality associated with CNR fishing could become a factor, not the main factor, but a significant factor that limits the subsequent steelhead population size. Major suckitude - that's a scientific term that someone beside me made up.

I may not be up to date on the Wynoochee, but I believe WDFW stopped transporting returning adults upstream of the high dam because of the very poor downstream survival rates. I think they put some adults upstream of the barrier dam to take advantage of the couple miles of pretty good habitat between the two dams. And of course, fish are collected from the trap and taken for hatchery fish culture.

That they ever put adult salmon and steelhead upstream of Wynoochee Dam makes an interesting, but sad, story. When Wynoochee was built, the Corps said the juvenile fish passage system and water temperature control system were going to be fantastic. Shows what happens when you let a civil engineer and an economist play fish biologist. The fish passage part was a complete clusterfvck from the beginning, although the water temperature control part works quite well.

The USFWS studied juvenile fish survival through the system and found it to be extremely poor. It isn't the 170' drop that injures them. Long drops can be very successful if well designed. At the Wynoochee it is the multiple 90 degree bends in the pipe that injures and kills the fish. I don't know why WDFW continued to pass fish upstream. Probably because it was the only show in town, and agencies are really good at following inertia, either in motion or at rest.

Unless something's changed, I believe that the Cowlitz hatcheries are being run at full design capacity. WDFW shifted the numbers of some species and stocks around based on input from an advisory committee some years ago to better meet angler interests, but also to comply with ESA considerations. I know it's a tiring grind, but the reason for the lousy returns is because the smolts migrate out to the ocean and then most of them don't come back. When ocean survival was good, the adult returns were good, and we were all happy to have them. And now they aren't, and we aren't.

Ya' know, if the price of criticism was to offer even one positive idea, no one would consider you a winner.

ive been fishing with a buddy for the last few months, who is extremely knowlegable about most everything going on...

we ran up to the ponds on the Cowlitz and they were empty...

there was grass growing in some of them..

they have 8 back to Barrier, and 5 back to Blue Creek.. meanwhile Tokul Creek has 320 back.. and further south on the Lewis, they have close to 700 i think it was..

odd..

Washington Dept. of Fish and Wildlife
Wynoochee Trap Operations
Background
The Wynoochee River Project, operated by Tacoma Public Utilities includes the lower barrier dam (river mile approximately 48), the larger main dam (river mile approximately 50), and the reservoir (Wynoochee Lake) formed by the larger main dam. The two dams on the Wynoochee River impeded passage for all anadromous fish in the basin. Species include 5 species of pacific salmon in the genus Onchorynchus (Chinook, coho, chum, summer and winter steelhead and cutthroat trout) and pacific lamprey. Through partnership with TPU, WDFW seeks to pass fish upstream in way that maximizes habitat utilization above the dam sites and provide opportunity for recreational opportunity that is consistent with conservation objectives.
The current fish trap facility offers only a rudimentary ability to collect and sort returning adults. Sorting live fish requires dip-netted from the flume, handled and examined individually while in the dipnet. Adults are then sorted to a temporary holding tank, transferred to a transport tank, or marked and returned to the river below the trap. The current plan does not include the practice of recycling hatchery-origin fish downstream. This is due to budget constraints, increased potential risk to wild populations associated with genetic introgression between hatchery and wild populations, and hatchery operations that currently result in hatchery-origin fish straying to the spawning grounds. Future plans to recycle fish will be the product of pre-season plan with stakeholders that include clear objectives and evaluation.
This document describes fish transport plans occurring at the lower barrier dam for these species.
Chinook salmon
Previous analyses suggest that habitat between the two dams is suitable to support up to 100 (50 pairs) Chinook. Transport decision will be based on whether WDFW staff are present. If WDFW staff are present, Chinook salmon will be transported between the dams and marked for identification with a floy tag to distinguish between the fish entering the trap for the first time and those that dropped back over the dam and were recaptured. If WFDW staff are not present, Chinook salmon will be flumed back into the river.
Coho
The quality of coho habitat and the consistent returns of natural-origin coho to the Wynoochee Trap is an indication of productivity and successful passage through the Wynoochee Project and therefore justifies continued seeding of the suitable coho habitat upstream of the Wynoochee Project.
All hatchery-origin coho will be transported to Lake Aberdeen Hatchery until broodstock needs are fulfilled. Transportation of hatchery-origin coho upstream of the dam will be based on whether hatchery broodstock goals have been met.
Throughout the spawning season, WDFW staff will target a maximum number of 50 natural-origin coho to be transported above the barrier dam. The remaining natural coho will be transported above the reservoir. All fish passed upstream of the barrier dam will be marked with a floy tag to distinguish between fish entering the trap for the first time and those that dropped back over the dam and were recaptured.
Chum
Chum are seldom encountered at the Wynoochee adult trap. All chum encountered at the trap will be returned to the river below the trap to support natural production.
Summer Steelhead
Hatchery-origin summer steelhead will be transported to Lake Aberdeen Hatchery until broodstock needs are achieved. Hatchery-origin summer steelhead encounter at the trap in excess of broodstock needs will be surplused and used for nutrient enhancement. Unmarked summer steelhead will be returned to the river below the trap to support natural production.
Winter Steelhead
Hatchery-origin winter steelhead will be used for hatchery broodstock or transported upstream of the Wynoochee Project, with hatchery broodstock as the top priority. If staff or equipment are not available, all hatchery-origin steelhead will be transported upstream of the Wynoochee Project.
When WDFW resources are available, throughout the breadth of the run, up to 58 natural-origin winter steelhead will be used to fulfill hatchery broodstock needs at Lake Aberdeen Hatchery. All other natural-origin steelhead will be transported between the dams to seed the suitable steelhead habitat that exists in this area. All fish transported between the dams will be tagged with a floy tag.
When WDFW resources are not available wild steelhead will be returned to the river.
Coastal Cutthroat Trout
All Coastal Cutthroat Trout will be transported above the reservoir to seed the suitable habitat that exists in this area.

Pacific Lamprey
All Pacific Lamprey will be transported above the reservoir to seed the suitable habitat that exists in this area.

Huh? You make zero sense. Socialism?
Wtf? How? "Plant more and have a good fishery" works in all the lakes they plant non native trout in that have no chance at self propagation with no running water! Worked great in the in several rivers too. Hatchery fish taking up spawning grounds? Oh thats a good one. Psst, news flash they are held in concrete pens. Spawned into buckets.
Fantasy? It worked just fine until hatcheries stopped production but harvest increased, equals no fish. Simple equation.
I see nothing has changed here in 20 years. Still blabbing b.s . Hatcheries seemed to work great through the 90,s until people like you got involved. There were plenty of fish in my freezer back then, and plenty of space to fish while pressure on native stocks was reduced. So you got what you wanted and here we are exactly 100% where i said we would be with baseless anti hatchery policies, while ignoring why we have to have hatcheries in the first place! Yet here you are still spewing b.s. like this failed mantra is somehow still gonna work! Smfh and lol. Hatcheries were cut. Harvest was not only ignored but increased breaking the food chain, still netting in rivers, still netting river mouths, still wiping out whats left of the baitfish populations, still allowing ridiculess bycatch, cutting farmed fish production increasing demand on wild fish, closing more and more rivers concentrating mobs of snaggers on the last remaining healthy runs, and gill plate forward regs that enable the catch and kick back in of ridiculess amounts of fish until "legal" fish kept etc....... But hey the fish are magically gonna come back when we cut Hatcheries! Sheesh, i want what your smokin.

+1 .........

Lol, lay off the turnt up eggnog and 6 paper joints there Ricky

Says the pension casher.

Lol so now it's bad to have a retirement package?
GFY


Love how WDFW is viewed by many here as operating with conspiracy and this and that...like the 2500+ person workforce would be able to hold the lie that long and not sell out to one of you all the industry secrets....even the Trump administration couldn't hold a lie that long, but yet this dept yal call inept supposedly can?
Maybe some of you aren't catching fish anymore because you've finally just become too facking dumb.

It is kinda hard to catch fish when pretty much everything is closed down.

And everything is closed down because our fish managers have and have been allowed to fail.

Failure is now an acceptable goal at most agencies in Washington.
In the real world if you fail there are consequences.

Amazing to me that some say they will just go fish on Idaho's fish. Won't be long until the Columbia basin is the new Chehalis.

Zero consequences and still cashing checks

WDFW X 1 = 0
I'm afraid that day at college that they issued to budding fish biologist that magic wand that would produce steelhead out of nothing I played hooky to go steelhead fishing!

Speaking of the real world - at some point each of us will have to face the reality that we collectively have failed the resource by insisting that we can have both our cake and eat it. With failing freshwater and marine water ecosystems and society unwilling to make the sacrifices required for meaningful restoration extinction of the resource we all care so much about has become the only option.

Curt

To echo Smalma, if you read Aldo Leopold, especially Sand County Almanac, you will see that even in the 30s and 40s he recognized that the "ecologist" and "manager" faced a world that was being systematically destroyed by society's drive to consume.

My best supervisor, or at least the one that kicked me in the *ss and got me to write things for which my career suffered, said that all the biologists were doing was managing the rate of extinction. He was, and is, right because society doesn't give a rip.

I 100% agree with both of you.
Bankruptcy and extinction is the goal.
and
We have all contributed.

Well keep on working until it's your turn to also get that monthly Sociable Security check. But since you keep trying to make this personal, why don't you list the actions I did in my career that caused this failure of which you speak? Double-dog-dare-ya'.

Everything is a conspiracy when you don't understand how anything works.

Fish on...

Todd

It’s also where we finally realized that what we paid for all these years with our licenses, tags, and punchcards, was nothing more than funding “studies” , position papers, and PP presentations telling us why there will be no more hatchery fish, while quietly closing down all the wild steelhead opportunity statewide beginning in January.

Much of money spent on studies was from grants and not from the Wildlife Fund.

The fact of the matter is that there are plenty of simpletons who think if we just plant more, we'll have good fisheries.

How many dollars per fish do you think the taxpayer ought to shell out for you to get your hatchery fish on?

$50? $150?

I bet you right now it's a LOT more than that...socialism at its finest.

You want to go catch a $300 hatchery fish? Buy a $300 tag.

Fish on...

Todd

In an EIS that WDFW did in 1992 or 93, they listed the cost as $25 to put a hatchery steelhead in the recreational creel with 50:50 treaty : non-treaty sharing. Obviously it would be a lot more today, even if SAR rates were the same. But we know the return rates have dropped. So the cost is spinning out of control high today.

Sorry you feel that way.
I have zero interest in talking to your past colleagues just to air dirty laundry here.

If only one person was to blame it would be a far easier fix.

World please take note.......
I'm not singling out Salmo.
It took many past generations to ruin the steelhead fishing in the Chehalis system.

Turn the whole thing over to the native Americans. At least they know how to return fish while the white man seems quite good at coming up with excuses.

Ha!
Run the plant totals and returns

Because that's a bald faced lie when you look at the facts.

White man plant chit.
The truth.

not sure where you all are getting your numbers for the price of the fish, but it aint right...

take the 4 million fish they "saved" at the Nooksack hatchery, if each one of those fish is say 30 dollars, thats 120 million right there alone, at only 1 hatchery, and there are 72 hatcheries that produce salmon and steelhead, and i think 16 for trout...

they have an operating budget of around 400 million (07-09), there is no way that 1 hatchery that doesnt even produce returns takes up almost 1/3 of the operating budget of the entire state...

also, the Blue Creek pens are still empty, and they have like 12 fish back...

Cold hard facts on Hatchery Nooksack Steelhead Plants for this year's return.

89,000 fish planted for 2021/2022 return.
74 adult fish are forecasted to return.
14 have returned as of most current counts on 12/13/21

If each smolt costs just .25 cents to raise & release, (which is probably WAY under cost), each fish ends up being:

If 74 fish return as predicted: $300 each fish
Of the 14 currently being held: $1,589 each fish

Most likely these fish cost .50 cents or more so double my figures . And most importantly, the fishery is closed to all fishing to protect these fish so they can get back to the hatchery.

Plant more fish? Sure, but put them in the lakes and alpine lakes where allowed. It would be a hell of a lot more enjoyable than what we have now.

The economic report in the link for the NW Power Council in 2009 says that cost per smolt produced in Columbia Basin facilities were coho at 35cts, fall Chinook 10Cts, Sp Chinook 60cts, chum 10cts, and steelhead $1.30.

https://www.nwcouncil.org/sites/default/files/ieab2009_2.pdf

The costs of raising fish varies among the hatcheries. Some hatcheries have good quality water delivered by gravity, and some hatcheries have to pump all of their water supply which understandably costs a lot more. I think Darth's figure from the NWPC of $1.30 per steelhead smolt is a good average for 2009. I think we all know that costs haven't gone down in the last dozen years.

Using the 2009 value, at $1.30 per smolt, the Nooksack steelhead smolts cost $115,700 for 89,000 smolts. If 74 adult fish return, then they cost us $1,563.51 each. So this is what it is costing us taxpayers and license buyers to operate a hatchery steelhead program that provides us with exactly zero fishing. How much more would anyone here like to spend in order to not fish?

Salmo,
Do we know how the cost is broke down. Take the Nooksack hatchery. If the hard costs are paid for and the maintenance and basic operation is fairly static, then we have to look and see how much per smolt is left. Obviously the cost per smolt could drop significantly as the numbers go up. The next question is what would happen if they raised several million and started dropping a few thousand a day, almost from incubation, spreading them out over the river. How many would survive and what would the cost be? While the numbers may not work in the Nooksack, it they may start to make a difference in other rivers.

Clearly, dropping then number of smolt in a hatchery will greatly increase the cost per smolt. The question is, what is the perfect number and has anyone tried to figure it out.

Spot on. Saving this one.
Couldn't have said it better.

Th state tried to release steelhead at all sorts of times and sizes. What worked was age-1 large smolts in the spring. I think May release. That is what brought back fishable numbers of adults.

Krijack,

The Department has cost information for each hatchery, so total costs per hatchery can be calculated. Each hatchery records the number of pounds of fish produced. From that, the cost per pound is calculated. Juvenile steelhead are usually raised to about six per pound, so divide the cost per pound by six and we have the cost per smolt.

Hatchery costs per unit production are usually lower at the largest hatcheries. It's that economy of scale thing. Hatchery capacity is determined by the volume of water flow available, measured either as gallons per minute or CFS (cubic feet per second) and by the number of cubic feet of rearing pond space that is available.

As C'man pointed out, releasing pre-smolt hatchery steelhead is pretty much a waste of money due to the near zero survival. There is an exception that has been tried for restoring or enhancing some wild steelhead populations. The juvenile fish are reared to a size of roughly 400 per pound and then released in unseeded habitat. But you can't just dump a truckload of fed fry into the stream and have this work. You have to dip fry into buckets and have technicians and biologists literally scatter the fry, 10 to 20 at a time, into small units of suitable habitat, or niches. I can tell you that stocking 20,000 fry this way is a hella' lotta' work and therefore, very expensive. From an effort like this, about the highest survival to smolt stage is 3%. No one has figured out how to make this an economically or biologically effective program.

The one, and maybe only one, think a hatchery is good at is producing more fish per unit of water can than the wild. Some is obviously management, but the Hood Canal hatcheries produced was more chum, for example, than the whole Skagit. You can and do crowd the fish in a hatchery, make sure they have food, medicate them, protect them form predators, and so on. If bare numbers are all that is important to you, or developing the heck out of watersheds, then a hatchery works.

Like Salmo said, successfully planting fry requires vacant water and lots of handwork. Been there, done that, and even with hand scatter planting the production was close to zip.

Nobody said a fish in the hatchery cost $30, they said bringing an adult fish to the table cost $30, or 40 or whatever it was - and they aren't close to meaning the same thing.

You tried, though.

Funny thing is. I would now gladly pay $300 for an opportunity tag a season, to swing a fly a couple of weeks CnR, on a couple of my local PS rivers, Feb. through April. Lots cheaper than travelling to Russia for a fix. Oh wait! The tribes won't let us even consider that!

Salmo g hits ANOTHER one outta the park.... J F C !

Funding hatchery programs that operate only for the sake of continuing operations... with ZERO benefit accruing to the user group for which they were intended. Sorry, but that's just dummer'N'hell. Is that just a blue state thing?

Fish Doc - You know better than most folks on this BB that isn’t the way it works. There are zero hatcheries that operate where there is consistently zero benefit to the target audience (commercial, recreation, tribal).

As you know, the benefits are highly variable. In some years, the benefit is close to zero due to factors outside the purview of the hatchery, such as weather conditions or poor ocean survival. In other years, there are plenty of benefits when everything lines up perfectly. We can’t turn hatchery ‘on and off’ just because the ocean conditions are poor or on the chance that we might get a major flood just when the adults are returning (as we did for late-run coho in 2021).

Hatcheries need to operate thru ‘thick and thin’. And sometimes things are really thin, as they have been for the past 4-5 years. With the recent up-tick in ocean conditions, I expect those hatcheries that have produced few, if any, harvest benefits will suddenly become quite productive again.

We all wish that hatcheries would provide better benefits to all of us (i.e., more and bigger salmon), but we ought not suggest we eliminate them when they don’t.