When did WDFW start managing for sports fishing? I think I missed that milestone.

corect me if I'm wrong but i thought I seen a rule change that opened the upper river for king retension. If they did it makes no sense. Years past was people snagging boots off of beds. should help the escapement even more.

Definitely another "oversight" on their part.

The 2007 regs are so full of inconsistencies from the season discussed at the committee level... unbelievable!

Doc,

Though never a committe participant, I try and stay tuned at the local level about what is brought forth and discussed. Between you, Harbor Hog and Superfly, my impression is 95% + of the info. you have to share with us is negative regarding what is proposed in committee and what actually implemented.....the current mess being the most recent example.

It seems WDFW views these advisory committes as nothing more than a pain in their a$$ that must be tolerated. Almost like they have a pre-set agenda and only offer these committees to be able to say they took public input.

Being a committee member, do you hit a saturation point where you question the worthiness of participating? I know the hours you guys put in and your statistics don't lie.....pretty credible numbers that you have confronted WDFW with time and time again. Yet, they keep going their own way.

I wonder what the point of even having an advisory committee is
if your input is rarely taken seriously. In many cases, it just seems like decisions are quietly decided before the process even begins.

It's difficult to not get discouraged, Eric.

Apart from an abundance-based harvest framework predicated on pre-season run-size forecasts, almost everything we have brought to the table has been rejected.

We asked for a commitment to conduct in-season run-size updates, as well as in-season harvest estimates... for the purposes of making in-season reg changes in the event that preseason run-sizes and harvest models don't pan out as originally planned . VETOED on all three fronts.

We asked for annual limits on chinook to help limit the harvest and spread the available surpluses over more participants, more areas and longer seasons. VETOED on all three fronts.

We asked for net-free windows of 48 hours/week to give recreational users something to fish over on the weekends when recreational folks are most likely to participate. Instead we get a non-tribal gillnet opener of Thu Fri and Sat in the lower Chehalis to cleanse the river of any fish for the "weekend warriors."

We asked for regs to be more inclusive of all recreational users... the guys trolling in the bay, the mainstem Chehalis river rats, the guys drifting the tribs.... all participating in the bounty when times are good, as well as sharing equally in the conservation burden when runs are in the dumps. Basically, if there's enough fish to have any harvest, all users in the system should be given an opportunity in their favored geography. If there are enough fish for one group to harvest, there's enough for the other groups as well. It would just be a matter of adjusting seasons, daily limits and annual limits to achieve the ideal exploitation rate and still ensure enough fish hit the gravel. If not, then we forgo harvest altogether and just let any extra fish hit the gravel anyway. Heaven forbid anything that horrible (surplus fish hitting the gravel) happen under the watchful eyes of WDFW!

We asked for an earlier bank fishery at Morrison Park (single barbless, baitless, no chinook retention) for the guys without boats and the old guys who can't get around in the woods very well.... targeting huge surpluses of early-timed hatchery coho that show up virtually un-utilized at the Aberdeen Lake Hatchery. Verbal promises were made... but when push came to shove, VETOED!

Humptulips early-timed hatchery coho, same story... single barbless, baitless, release chinook.... a fishery targeting huge hatchey surpluses of coho. Promises were made at the meetings, but later shot down with the stroke of a pen. All too reminiscent of what happened at the South Bend meeting in 2005.

Need I go on?

OK... too damned bad, I'm on a roll....

We work for months on a collaborative Tier framework for executing our plans for more reponsible abundance-based harvest. After much wrangling and tweaking, we finally craft a document that everyone can live with. It is touted as the guiding document for all GH season-setting. HA! Right!? What a joke.

The 2007 regs violate at least five major provisions of the Tier document. Recreational start date for chinook, recreational start date for coho, allocating purposeful retention of gillnetted kings to NON-tribal comm-fishers, eliminating live-boxes, and liberalizing the 45 minute soak times.

And while the issue is NOT specifically discussed in the Tier document, WDFW is implementing unrealistic harvest models that clearly under-predict exploitation rates in every facet of the fishery... treaty, nontribal commercial, and sport. They come up with ridiculously low exploitation rates to habitually justify more days of killing on paper surpluses of fish that may never even materialize as the current salmon return unfolds this fall.

Bass turds... dirty bass turds!

OK, I'm done.... rant over... all better now!

Well I'm here to report cause for encouragement and hope.

With pressure applied in all the right places, the harvest "models" have been re-run for the Hump, and the Oct 1 opener (single hook, barbless, no bait, release chinook) has been re-instated for 2007.

Thanks to all who may have contributed to this collaborative effort!

OK Uncle Joe, one more legal place for folks to wet a line for your tourney!

As anglers busily prepare this weekend for the much anticipated opening day of the Grays Harbor salmon season on Monday, I cringe to think about how many chinook salmon will perish during the month-long kill fishery sanctioned by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife this fall.

WDFW is recklessly basing its proposed October 1-31 chinook retention season in the bay and the mainstem Chehalis on a highly speculative harvest model that significantly underestimates exploitation rates in the sport fishery. The 2007 chinook return is only expected to yield a non-treaty harvestable share of 1642 Chehalis-bound chinook, with predicted sport harvests of 667 fish in the mainstem Chehalis River and 501 fish in the bay for a total of 1168 paper fish. This translates to an average harvest of just 21 fish per day in the river, and only 16 fish per day in the bay. Thirty-one days of chinook retention will almost certainly result in much larger real-life harvests because of the present-day fleet’s ability to very effectively exploit chinook returning to the basin. Allow me to illustrate this with the 2006 season as an example.

In 2006, there were 462 non-treaty chinook available for harvest. WDFW insisted that this measly “surplus” could easily support 15 days of chinook retention in the bay with enough leftover fish to cover release mortalities in the concurrent non-treaty gillnet fishery. WRONG! Over 350 chinook perished on opening day alone! By the most conservative estimates, at least 716 were retained in the sportfishery by season’s end, or about 48 fish per day. This is three times the exploitation rate predicted by the harvest model for 2007.

How can managers rationalize a paltry 2007 prediction of only 501 chinook salmon taken over 31 fishing days when immediate past experience clearly demonstrates that the sport fleet can easily harvest 716 fish in half the time? Do they really believe that allowing fishing for over twice as long can realistically result in 30% fewer fish retained? Do they?

If sport fishermen retain three times as many fish as the harvest model predicts, then without some voluntary self-restraint from participating anglers, they would be expected to take over 3500 chinook … more than twice the entire non-treaty share! And that does not even consider the chinook impact of commercial gillnets!

Moreover, participation in Grays Harbor sport fisheries is expected to be extraordinarily high due to poor salmon forecasts in other regions of the state. To make matters worse, chinook salmon fishing has just been closed in the mainstem Columbia River and all of its major Southwest Washington tributaries (Washougal Lewis, Kalama, Cowlitz, Toutle, Green, and Elochoman Rivers). Angling pressure from those streams will be displaced to the closest and most convenient area open to chinook retention…. you guessed it, Grays Harbor and the Chehalis Basin!

Between the non-treaty gillnetters legally retaining “incidental” chinook, the tribal gillnetters liberally targeting chinook, and the masses of sport fishermen expected to partake in the chinook kill season, WDFW has set up the “perfect storm” next month for unparalleled exploitation of Chehalis-bound chinook salmon.

If you plan to fish local waters for salmon, I would urge you to limit your individual chinook impact in some meaningful way. I am not suggesting that you adopt a “release-them-all” stance as biologists believe harvestable chinook are available in limited numbers. I simply ask that you pause and consider which ones are worth bonking before you decide to wield the wood shampoo.

How can you help? Consider a self-imposed seasonal limit. Instead of filling your salmon tag with chinook, you could target more of basin’s abundant coho. Or maybe consider retaining only those that are mortally wounded by the hooking encounter. You might think about keeping only fin-clipped chinook. You could release all the big fish for quality breeding stock, or perhaps make it a point to release all the hens (females). The choice is yours.

I’m calling out to the conservationist in each and every one of you! If we want chinook salmon to return in healthy numbers in the years to come, it’s our collective responsibility to be a little “softer” on the resource when the need arises. It’s clear our state’s fish managers are unwilling to step up to the plate. Are you?

Will there be anything about this in the forthcoming issue of STS?
Nothing gets a politician's attention like media attention.

Maybe some letter-writing is in order.

Thanks Doc for all the hard work.

I can't believe that the state hasn't adopted an annual limit on chinook. That right there would help keep the harvest impacts down.

On October 5th, 6th and 7th, Ill be in Tillimook instead...

Thanks for all the hard work you guys on the board do for us. Try to do for us I should say.

Thanks Doc.

Well, I guess it's time to eat a little crow... choking on the feathers as I type.

WDFW may just have predicted the exploitation rates a bit better than I.

The fleet would have only drooled to pick up 16 kings today. The lack of success out there was unprecedented! Could it be a sign that the run will be coming in way below the pre-season forecast?

Not sure what the coho:chinook mix was, but between John's River and 28th St ramps, there were a whopping 4 fish checked!

Not sure about Westport ... was there even a checker there for opening day? Last year there wasn't.

Here is what I saw today. Guilt of dropping the ball on an idea of mine was the driving force of these numbers...sorry FnP. Saw your rig parked at both places FnP

The following is a tally of trucks with trailers at all the ramps between 8 and 9am. I went back later to talk with fish checkers:
Fullers 26 no fish checker
Monte 50 no fish checker
Friends 22 no fish checker
Cosi 17 no fish checker
28th 66 at noon no checker though one must have come
later
Johns 60 at 11:30 no checker
Westport 51 at 11 no checker

That is 292 boats for the opener!!

FnP I will let you extrapolate whatever numbers you so choose. It will be interesting to see what WDFW says about numbers of fish caught when they had no "eyes" out there.

Jim

What a dumba$$. Shameless WDFW promotion. "come on everybody, load up yer boat and drive to Aberdeen. It's the new Kenai, conservation? nah, we've revamped the Wishkah mall!"

Fish for brains your hilarious, your killin me dude, we need to fish.

Peace
Fly

I talked to Tony yesterday and he had a 20lber in the boat and lost a coho at the boat.

He doesnt work for WDFW and in my opinion doesn't like the direction of the of the agency, at all.

Before making disparaging remarks about someone know what you are talking about.

Merch

Google it. Regarding the comments, I call it like I see it.

[quote]if you want to catch chinook salmon, this is clearly the year to do it," said Tony Floor, recreational fishing coordinator for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). "The ocean is churning with chinook right now, and they're getting bigger by the day." [quote]

He is on the commitees representing sport fishers not the department. I doubt the rest of the policy members would like to be characterized as working for the department. You could ask some are members of this board.

He works for Northwest Marine Trade Association, http://www.nmta.net/staffcontacts.asp. The people whose businesses depend on sport fishermen to buy boats, motors, tackle ect. They also sponsor the salmon derby series, seems kind of sport fishery centric to me.

Used to work for the WDFW but retired about 3 years ago.

Tony Floor doesn't represent the sport fishers of Grays Harbor, he represents his own agenda(being able to bonk kings) no matter what the impacts are.

Merch,

**discussion taken to PM**...thanks, Merch.

You are talking to people who DO know what they are talking about.

Fish on...

Todd