Here's a couple of pics I shot a week ago on the Quilcene. Chum population is incredible and carcasses are piled everywhere. I drove down to the river again today to see if the rain had washed the mess up, but there wasn't enough rain, so there are a weeks worth of more carcasses and the fish are still coming. It is truly astonishing. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the Quil and know that the entire spawning area is confined to just a couple miles. It is fished extremely heavy for silvers, and every kind of mistreatment imaginable is brought to bear on these chum, yet they thrive. There are so many that the spawn of one pair is uprooted by the following pair. These fish are ESA protected. Why? This is not a one year phenomenon, it has gone on for a few years now, so when is enough, enough?
I'm sure you get my point.


edits....good grief, it took me four tries to get the photos right

Aunty is correct. What we are seeing in the form of increasing returns of summer chum throughout Hood Canal is the successes of hatchery supplementation programs aimed at increasing the number of summer chum on the spawning grounds... and to that extent the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's Quilcene Hatchery and staff that work there are to be commended. They have done their job well. As have all of the folks engaged in summer chum supplementation programs.

Now, the trick is to get these originally wild, but hatchery bred summer chum to reproduce with success in the wild. In other words, the spawners that we see all over the Quilcene River today need to produce another generation, another healthy adult return, before we can claim a success story for hatchery supplementation, used as a tool to recover depleted stocks or populations.