In the last 5 years, friends I fish with and myself have noticed a dramatic decrease in the numbers of Chum in the northern Puget Sound rivers. I remember days on the Sky when you could go to one hole and never have to move, hooking multiple fish all day long. Those days are long gone now.


Does anyone know at what rate the commercial Chum fishery has increased in the last 5-10 years?

Here is a quote from the Seattle Times...... "With more than 25 commercial purse seine and gill-netters in Port Susan, don't expect many chums to get past that and up into the Snohomish River system".....Here is a link to the Commercial Hot Line......http://wdfw.wa.gov/fish/regs/commregs/hotline/2007/nov1607.htm.........I herd that they are getting 75 cents per pound and $17 a pound for the eggs........Why are they fishing the chum so hard?.....what will the run be like in 4 years?.....

they have been out in elliot bay alot this year...well either commercial or indians. either way there sure wont be much chum going up the green like other years.

I heard that ex-vessel prices for chum, gillnet silvers, and steelhead are up the last 3 or so years from a number of years of low prices. A lot of boats didn't fish when the prices were too low for the effort to be economical. It's profitable enough now that the fleet will fish down to the escapement goal if allowed. There have been several years of over-escaped chum and in some cases, silvers, due to the vagaries of the marketplace.

Sg

I can tell you they are fishing SW Hat Island hard this year, plus earlier parts of Port Gardner. You can see them from Mukilteo. Don't mnow what the catch poundage is though. DFW must forecast a very large run this year. Don't recall this much fishing last year. The visitor dock in Everett has lots of netters tied up between openings, and there are enough netters that some have to raft off. I suppose the money is in the eggs. Years ago, there was pretty good blackmouth fishing around SE/W Hat Island and N Hat (Port Gardner) at relatively shallow depths (50 - 80 feet). You didn't have to drag bottom like at Possession so it was easy fishing. I hope the commercials are somehow missing the blackmouth.

I talked w/ an engineer off a tender out in the sound just an hour ago, they've been buying fish off the indians an was told to expect a 1,000,000 lb of chums which would have made him $10,000 but they've only taken in 300,000 ...basically 1/3 of what was expected over the last couple weeks...so could be ...chums are running late or the run won't meet expectations....

Commercial chum fisheries are the bane of steelhead runs in many areas...Hood Canal, the Thompson River, and the entire Skeena system...areas with historically great runs of steelhead.

The steelhead have been, are, and will continue to be, snapped up in those chum fisheries.

The lack of chums on the Snohomish and Skagit systems over the past several years has been nothing sort of a monumental disappointment...besides the ease of catching a few dozen in a day rather easily, they are also the backbone of the eagle watching industry, and provide millions of tons of marine biomass to the upper watersheds of those systems, which feeds all the fish and wildlife up there, including wild steelhead.

This is mainly run by the roe fishery, as even with recent increased prices the carcasses aren't worth the gas to go out and catch them...the market for the roe is ridiculous, however,

Fish on...

Todd

i'm starting to wonder how long it's going to be before i'm going to catch a bunch of grief for whacking a couple wild chums...

from what i heard, and several people confirmed, we bought (the taxpayers) sooooo many of those new boats for the tribes and commercials on the Hood Canal...there have been sooo many of them this year and the last year...never seen so many boats...kills me its our tax dollars, and where from...why?

Based on spawner surveys conducted by WDFW, the escapement of chum tot he Snohomish River has been increasing by an average of 1% per year since 1983. When you realize that this is multiplicative, the increase over that period of time is fairly substantial. Formerly, WDFW etablished fixed escapement goal (28,000 for even years; 10,300 for odd years) for the Snohomish system. However I, as a tribal biologist, along with other management biologists realized that these goals were too low. So we changed the management goal to a fixed exploitation rate instead of a fixed escapement goal. The result was the increasing escapement alluded to above. The average escapement tot he Snohomish system for the past 4 odd years was 52,000 (1999, 2001, 2003, 2005) and for the past 4 even years 120, 739 (2000, 2002, 2004, 2006). This latter average includes a very low number of 20,000 for 2000, so the other years were quite high.

The commercial fishery you are seeing this year is being managed on the basis of the fixed exploitation rate, projected catches are well below what would be allowed under that rate, and projected escapement to the Snohomish is currently 58,000, assuming that all the harvestable fish are taken, which is at the upper end of what is likely to happen (in other words, the most likely scenario is that less than the full harvestable number will be taken). Keep in mind, please that this projected escapement is over 5 times the old WDFW fixed escapement goal for chum in the Snohomish system. Also, please keep in mind that Pacific salmon are highly variable in numbers, so we could be up or down on this number when the fish are finally counted. But for chum salmon in north sound rivers, the trends are clear, and up.

If people on this board are interested in the facts and interested in talking to managers, I'd be happy to oblige. But in return, I expect that I, my tribal fishermen, the non-tribal commercial fishermen, and all of us who work hard to manage this resource will be treated with respect. It only seems fair to me. Thanks.

here is a link for those that are interested, gives the numbers that are being caught in the Apple Cove test fishery. There looks to be some bycatch.

Apple cove test fishery link.

Two Dogs,

Thanks for chiming in...but like I and JoJo both alluded to, the steelhead bycatch in many, if not most chum runs can be horrendous.

Probably not quite so bad in Puget Sound proper, but the Hood Canal fishery definitely gets some, and what's happening at the mouth of the Skeena and in the Fraser River is nothing short of a catastrophe for wild steelhead.

Also, before such e-goals were set for the northern PS streams, the numbers of chums returning were significantly higher...as usual, e-goals were set in the context of commercial harvest, not in the context of "what's there" or "what could be there"...or "what should be there".

Fish on...

Todd

Todd -- Steelhead by catch during chum management is actually fairly low these days. the numbers are available. Chum escapement was definitely lower 10-20 years ago than it is now, at least according to the survey data. Also, the big increase in sport interest in chum fishing has only been over the past decade or so in my observation. The reason that we changed the management objective for chum was precisely to let the runs grow and see how big they could get. That's why a harvest rate is better than a fixed escapement goal -- because at any run size a portion of additional fish will go to escapement. Chum management has been successful in my view because we have fish to work with. This isn't he case for coho and chinook where so many are (or were in the past) harvested before they even reach the terminal area. But that's just my perspective.

Like I said, the PS bycatch is somewhat nominal, and is mainly catching hatchery steelhead, anyway.

On the Fraser River, Thompson River wild steelhead are caught in great numbers, as are the Skeena River wild steelhead...a quick Google search should come up with many hits about those fisheries.

I'm familiar with the difference between an exploitation rate and a fixed harvest rate...both can work fine, so long as the numbers are set correctly.

For PS chums, I'm not sure what the limiting factor is for them...but the numbers are down, and down quite a bit, and anyone who spends much time out there looking at 'em knows it.

Back when management paradigms were set for Chinook and coho there "plenty of fish to work with", too...fat lot of good that did the fish..."plenty of fish to work with" is often a euphemism for "let's go catch a whackload of 'em"...

Fish on...

Todd

I am aware of the tendency to overfish. That's why I and other biologists tried to set up a relatively conservative management scheme for chum when we could. Now we'll see if we can make it stick as the demand increases. I'm betting we will because overall the abundance has increased, and the fishermen will see the benefits of that.

In the Skeena and Nass the summer steelhead are harvested concurrently with the sockeye fishery, I believe. We don't have that situation, fortunately, in Puget Sound.

And by the way, I dispute the idea that we had plenty of Chinook back when the escapement goals were set. Recent natural escapements for Chinook in north sound rivers have been the highest in the 40-year escapement database. One reason for that is that fishing for chinook has been greatly reduced in Puget Sound -- both the directed commercial as well as the 365 day/year sport fishery are gone. Before the beginning of the escapement database there was no river by river management of chinook. These fish were fished to near extinction long before any management paradigms were set. So, I dispute the implication that chum will go the way of chinook, at least when it comes to fishing mortality. I stand behind the way we manage chum today in Puget Sound.

I can tell you this...no scentific numbers no surveys really no factual knowledge here just this:

A buddy that is a deck hand for a Gillnetter has been out there almost every day for the past 3 weeks and smashing them! making $2 to 3 grand a week..himself...he called me the other night when they made a monster set which was 800 fish! and then called again a few hours later with a 750 set...

They are getting .78 cents a pound for these slime buckets... reason why?

the cannery is selling the ROE!!! for 5 to 10 times that per pound, even heard of 17 dollars from canery!

I never have been one to biatch about this kinda crap but...just another pure example of how the majority of WA state fisherys are miss managed and going down the drain. FAST

I guess the facts I presented about escapements and management don't interest you. Sorry. it's so much more fun to just rant, I guess. Sorry we have no basis for discussion.

So with your facts and us considered to be ranting what is your solution to fixing the problem that we have with #s returning to the rivers?
just curious

as i'm too ignorant to either rant or review on the subject
i'll instead add that the fact that a tribal fisheries dude would interject with the handle of "two dogs" ? lmao
that alone shows that there is hope for us to get along as humans and figure this out