At first glance, I could have sworn that just said....

"Fish got rapped / netted out by high sea otters."

Otters got stoned. Otters got the munchies. Otters ate your fish.

Bad otters. Bad.

That report of 13 steelhead from the nooch was for 7 anglers who felt somewhat slighted that they were one fish short of limits for all. There is a photo of the fish, but that doesn't say anything about where they really came from or if it was one day and one river even.

Sg

The most believable statement I have ever read here on PP!!!

+1

Shhhhhh. Always How Never Where.

so what happend at the close door meeting?????? superfly or Doc..

Soon....

isn't soon enough.

I'm thinkin' that one was below the belt. Oh the pressures of being the point man!

OK... here goes.

Four sports, two gillnetters, and three highly vested WDFW staff in attendance.

Constituents all agreed that for chinook and coho, the GH Basin must be managed as two separate sub-basins.... Chehalis and Humptulips.

The principles in the Tier Plan should apply to each sub-basin. We suggested that the thresholds for each Tier should be adjusted in proportion to the respective escapement goals for each sub-basin for chinook and coho.

Chum management shall stay aggregated for now as WDFW does not have the historic numbers segregated by sub-basin.

We came to an agreement that chinook staging in the usual and customary MA 2-2 fishery are virtually ALL Chehalis-bound. Exploitation in that fishery will be counted against the Chehalis chinook escapement.

We reviewed the 2008 gillnet catches in the 3-day season for Chehalis coho. Why did 220% of the non-treaty share of wild coho end up in the nets?

Here's the explanation. After the allocation to the sport harvest (1 wild thru Oct 30... correction Oct 15) there were still some wild coho left on the allocation table. These were expended as "impacts" (incidental harvest/bycatch) to access what was forecast to be a non-treaty share of 12.5K hatchery coho. On paper, the limiting stock was ultimately chinook... i.e. chinook impacts (45% per encounter) kept the season down to "only" three days. Even with those three days, there were still paper wild coho left on the table.

So what happened?
1) Hatchery coho were a no-show...
2) Mark rate in the catch was 2:1 wild....
3) Gillnetters just happened to pick the best three days to be on the water (i.e. they were there when the fish were there, and they spanked 'em good)

It was a perfect storm for wild exploitation that no one could have anticipated based on the recent years' performance of the same 3-day gillnet fishery during the same general time frame.

So in their defense (and no I am not the newest lobbyist hired by the gillnetters association) they did NOT allocate away all the available wild paper coho when they gave those fish to the gillnetters. And while they acknowledged that doing so was contrary to the Tier Plan, the justification was that by giving sports a 1 wild retention thru Oct 30 ( correction Oct 15) , we would still have opportunity to harvest a full limit of two coho adults given the amount of hatchery coho that were expected. But since that hatchery projection didn't happen, there were no hatchery coho to backfill the withold on the sport side. That's why guys like DrifterWA, ronnie, Bathtub Bob and the rest of those old duffers couldn't buy a fish for the box when the 1 wild coho retention went away on Nov 1 (correction Oct 16).

And therein lies the rub. On paper it all works out, but the reality is you're never really sure what's going to happen until the season unfolds before your eyes in real time. Too much uncertainty in the run-size forecast. Too much uncertainty in predicting the anticipated exploitation rate. Bottom line too many dead wild fish.

At this point we still do not know whether wild Chehalis coho escapement was met for 2008.... numbers aren't all in yet and still haven't reached "technical agreement" with you know who.

A more worrisome revelation (and one that has not surfaced in ANY of our previous GH Committee meetings) is a trend of chronic under-escapement in some of the major wild coho-producing tribs. Because of his dogged tenacity in sending RELENTLESS e-mails to Region 6, DrifterWA is already privy to one... the Wynoochee. But the other one that might surprise all of you is the Satsop. Chronic under-escapement with sport seasons willfully prosecuted with 1 wild Satsop coho retention. I am embarrassed to admit that it's even happened on our watch... that we did not press harder for that info in previous meetings. In hind sight, it seems so brainless... how could we let a detail like that slip under the radar screen?

Well it's front and center on the radar screen now. I would welcome any CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions for getting more wild fish to these tribs. If you do not want to air your suggestions in public with your name/moniker attached, please feel free to PM me.

DAMMIT... almost 2 AM.... again!

FNP,
Thanks for the update. The Satsop is no surprise to me, my original post in this thread will indicate that. If the hatchery fish arent making it back, chances are the wilds arent either. Escapements for the late wild hatchery in particular have been steadily declining for the last 5 years. I wish I had anything constructive to halt this trend other than everyone stop fishing, but I dont. Considering that some of the best habitat post recent flood is in the Satsop/nooch drainages, this is a bad indicator for the rest of the watershed in my opinion. Also, kind of surprising that WDFW didnt make this clear sooner considering their smolt trap is on Bingham Creek, which enumerates wild production.

quit pretending like we can predict run sizes.

FNP

Thanks for your efforts in trying to make some sense of the demise of our fishery in the GH basin. It boils down to less netting, selective fishing and closer monitoring of what is actually happening during the fish runs in my opinion. If we can't agree on a workable plan let's shut it down.

Captain

Thanks to all on the Sports side.......

Only thing I can suggest, and I've been doing this for years, only allow net fishing "every other tide".....no cowboys above bridge or why cowboy netting at all. Because there is no historial data on tangle nets or WDFW is afraid to make that a requirement.......lot's of "incidental" salmon are killed in the gill net process......grrrrrrrrrrr then to top it off, they are allowed to sell those incidental caught fish for profit.

Cowboys should be BANNED from Grays Harbor and only netting used should be the tangle nets.

Chehalis tribe has got to be made to "dance to the beat of the WDFW war drum", they are affecting up river fish be it spring chinook, coho, fall chinook, steelhead, and chum.


Doc....in your post you said wild until October 30.....I believe fishing for wild ended October 15, for sports.....

Francis, Thank you for another informative post and your time spent on our behalf.


System cannot handle 2 separate gillnet fisheries. We SHOULD have the ability to change this. You know, the old "clean up our own backyard first" saying.

Wild retention ended Oct 15 above 101 bridge.


I heard you worked for the QIN!!!

Yes it was 1 wild until Oct 15. Also it is hard for me to believe that the nets got 2/3 wild and 1/3 hatchery while we "old duffers" up-river encountered about 1 to 12 hatchery-wild. If the "hatchery fish" did not show up, how was 1/3 of the netted catch hatchery fish? Shouldn't the up-river ratio also have been 1to3? Drifter Wa had a good handle on those numbers.As I recall there were checkers for a while at the ramps and they were checking very few hatchery fish, if any. I believe someone ask about the netted wild to hatchery numbers and was told by Monte the wild to hatchery count was not taken. Now they have a count??? 2 wild for every 1 hatchery? Me thinks NOT!

If we want to recover wild fish, whether it be Chinook, coho, chum, or steelhead the first thing we have to do is stop killing them.

It will take a paradigm shift of huge magnitude. Set a base fishery that will cover one "brood cycle" essentially 4-5 years for Chinook and chum, 3 for coho. IF the natural escapment levels show a (pick a number) 15% average increas over the preceeding brood cycle, the fishery can continue. If escapement is lower, fisheries are reduced. If escapments are higher, fisheries can be expanded.

Currently, the burden of conservation is borne by the fish. The runs have to "prove" they are in trouble to get any protection. Rather, the onus ahouls be on the fisheries to prove, by placing fish on the spawning grounds and not on paper, that there are fish that can be killed.

Until we manage for the fish escapment first, all we are managing for is the rate of extinction.

Ronnie:

Good point about the ratio...I forgot about that.........I do have emails to WDFW, that requested a complete tally of hatchery to wild, was told that some monitoring was done by "on board" WDFW personnel.......I asked to be a "on board" person.........guess what......no email or phone to me....

Me thinks that WDFW speak with "forked tongue".....I it sounds good, and keeps my job...then to hell with what is right.....

I recall back in the 80s where the Canadians put a purse seine fishery at the mouth of the Fraser in order to get their "share" of sockeye. The fishery went sideways and took the target amount in something like four hours. Because they had active monitoring of the fishery, they closed it at 4 hours instaed of whole day.

3 day gillnet fishery, catch landed every day. The data should have been availble of the numbers and composition by mid-morning of the first day. If something was not hoing according to the model there was time to close off the last two days. Or last one.

But, since on paper 3 days were called for there was no need for a reality check.

The "reality check" does NOT happen because it is agreed by the co-managers that there shall be no in-season management.

We railed on that subject again, and were given the same story... they don't have the means to accurately assess run-strength in-season. My analytical side says, yes there must be a way to do this... but as time goes on, my practical side is beginning to realize it may not be as easy as we all think.

Unlike the Columbia, there is no dam on the Chehalis where fish passage can be readily enumerated. If we wait for the fish to show in the tribs to count 'em it's too late to make any meaningful in-season management changes. The only other thing we are left with is how the fisheries are doing... catch per unit effort (CPUE). The conventional wisdom would hold that if the catching's good, then the run-size must be good. Seems logical enough.

Well.... not always.

Again how good you spank'em is predicated on several factors... weather, effort, rain-timing and run-timing. If weather's good, the fleet shows up, and the fish happen to move thru while they are on the water.... DAMN... it's a slayfest. You can all relate to the "glory day" phenomenon... it happens. But the opposite also happens.... hostile weather, rain already pushed the fish thru, or the fish are simply late. The water seems barren.

The gillnetters whacked all those coho because all the planets came into alignment... the perfect storm was set up... and they had a glorious 3 days. One could interpret that to mean a much bigger coho run-size than originally forecast. With in-season management in place, would we have further liberalized the fishery in response to the splendid CPUE? Or would we have shut 'er down due to the catches exceeding the paper non-treaty share? Glass half empty or glass half full?

The same thing happened in my boat the week before the gillnetters hit the water. My week started off with a bang and some of you might remember Parker's post about my PP birthday bash... the catching was silly good. If that CPUE was used as an index of the run-size about to unfold... crikey... it was gonna be HUGE! Should we have liberalized the fishery? Or should we have shut it down before the SS eyeFISH cleansed any more biters from the gene pool.

But things petered off in a hurry, and along with it, the optimism for a big run. The hatchery fish simply did not show in near the numbers they were expected. They just came in one early wad.

The week after the gillnetters fished, I couldn't buy as many strikes in an entire week as I did in one day the week previous. The difference was that dramatic. If that week had been used as the index CPUE, we'd be scrambling to shut 'er down.

I guess what I'm saying is that it's a frustrating situation and I'm starting to sympathize just a bit with the department's position on the reliability of invoking an in-season update based purely on catches.

The only way to compensate for those uncertainties is to build in enough of a buffer in the harvest models to minimize the risk of erring on the side of over-exploiting any given return. That type of responsible restraint could be very painful for stakeholders as it would mean that there could be many years of erring on the side "under-exploitation" in our attempts to be more conservation minded.

The first challenge to overcome is abandoning the concept that we can manage these fisheries on such miniscule margins. When a kill fishery hinges on the balance of a couple hundred fish, does it make sense to have it at all? Present day management seems to believe their models can parse up these runs of paper fish on the allocation table with surgical precision.... the reality is that their scalpel is no better than a butter knife.

I stand corrected... but it was 2 in the morning, you know.

(corrections added to my original report)

Maybe they can't do a "in-season update" but they sure can comare what the model said to what is happening. If the hatchery fish were not showing in the catch is the answer to keep fishing?

The problem with a true in-season update for Chinook and coho is that somebody (generally the non-Indians) have already caught their share, or most of it. So, the burden of conservation rests on the shoulders of the last fishermen in line. Or, the resource. This is what Hoh v. Baldridge was about.

The Tribe's like it when there are outside fisheries; it guarantees them a season regardless.