Just got word tonight that last springs final tally on the Quillayute system for steelhead was only 4700 fish.

That's 1200 fish short of goal ... 20% under.

And that's assuming that the numbers are spot on which we know they probably aren't. This follows a pretty steady decline over the last 7-8 years.

Workin' hard on wiping these out too. Thanks WDFW & Quillayute tribe for managing another run down the tubes.

And to the meatheads that can't figure out that you can't kill everything you catch ... we told ya so!

I got to spend a couple of years playing fish bum out there on the west end.

Got to see first hand what was reely happening to those once great fisheries.I think I have been back twice.It is ruined for me.I do not even feal right fishing them anymore.

It starts with the state allowing the tribes to net so much and ends with way too many guides.

Sad thing is that they are all we had left.

Your paper cup holds no water.

You have more than just one system that is down in numbers. Many of the systems in Oregon are wild only and allow no harvest and have almost no access, yet those runs are almost gone too. How do you explain that.

I'd buy your guess at harvest if it was true accross the board, but it is not. The Nehalem river is a prime example of a C&R fishery that has 100's of miles of untouched waters and these fish go up and down in cycles, just like the ocean.

so what is it kevin???

Lewis and Clarks account of so many fish in the Columbia river they could have walked on there back and not got wet.
Just must of been one one of those good up cycle years with good ocean condition to boot.

What gets me is after all these years of trying to educate we still consistently see people killing fish out there! Fricken travesty!!!!

Well, common sense would say that every female steelhead taken from a system would take 3000-3500 eggs from the gravel.

But then Kevin has a strong arguement with the Oregon Coastal numbers.

Our SW WA trib numbers have been in the tank for all but the Grays and Kalama and ironically those two have hatcheries and one has a falls with a side channel that they can sort what goes into the upper river and the other has the hatchery on a tributary so "most" of the hatchery fish are out of the main system... Ours have been in the tank since the late 80's.

Another system that has recovered well which I find very interesting is the SF of the Toutle since it was all but wiped out in 1980 with the eruption and it get's hatchery summer steelhead plants.

In my eyes, there's a lot of directions the fingers can be pointed. Hatchery fish mixing in, nets, habitat, predation, harvest, etc. But one that always seems to hold true for all the species of salmonids is when the ocean is in a downward cycle so are our fish returns....

The odd thing about the Olympic Penninsula is back in the 80's-90's there were great #'s of wild steelhead that returned.. It was an area that most people had to travel long distances to get to and it wasn't until that time frame that it became publicly known that the area harbored some of the biggest steelhead in the state.

I know when I first went up there in the early 90's there was some amazing fishing. One thing that amazed me was how far behind the talent levels were with most of the people we came across. I guess what I'm trying to say is since the early 90's the general public has become a lot better fisherman.

In the recent years I've been up there I've never seen an area with so much pressure and pressure from a lot of "great" fisherman. It reminds me of spring chinook fishing in SW WA. To me, there's no way runs of fish can support that amount of angling be it harvest/catch and release. As much as we don't want to face it, we are our own enemy.

I would be interested in what sort of run sizes rivers like the Dean and some others that you have to fly into to access. If those runs are declining then harvest or fishing pressure isn't the answer...

Keith

Sorry to read that Bob. Of course we realize the issue isn't all harvest. The season was definitely a down cycle for coastal and Puget Sound steelhead marine survival. But harvest never helps a low runsize make escapement, but it's almost like that doesn't matter. Our collective addiction to harvest vastly supercedes our committment to conservation. Harvest trumps conservation, especially on the coast and Columbia, in contrast to the Puget Sound region. It seems like society, and the agencies that represent us, never get seriously interested in conservation until there is little left to conserve.

Addiction to harvest, addiction to electricity, addiction to oil, addiction to extraction of every resource instead of stewardship of the natural resource currency that actually sustains life on this planet. Like Pogo said, "we have met the enemy, and he is us."

Sg

The poster child for MSY/MSH as finally succumbed, question is will it be a catalyst to change or will we simple point our finger at something else as the problem.

Exactly Rich. Finger pointing will definately and you know the WDFW will say they have no responsiblity in this issue the same as always. I am pretty sure that the WSC called this years ago and they didn't want to listen. Wonder if they will listen now. Truely sad news.

They being "who"?

I'm fully convinced that the WDFW doesn't really run the show over there. The tribe(s) do and it's rather apparent that they want EVERY wild steelhead dead.

We can pretty much kiss the OP wild steelhead goodbye at this point.

If the effects you talk about are a river specific problem, then it is a problem with that river. If the problem is region wide, then it has to be something that every river has in common, like climate, oceans, or fishing presure (harvest).

When you take a river with little to no interfierence from man, and you still have a depleted stock, or an up and down pattern, then you must eliminate the things that can make it wrong.

You can't have harvest be a problem when you don't harvest any fish. Look at the Chum runs in the Tillamook district. I constantly refer back to the Nehalem as an indicator stock for wild steelhead. There are multilple reasons, but the best one is the lack of disruption from man. it is as pure as it can get. This River has good years and it has bad ones.

How can one explain the bumper crop of Coho the last two years? It sure as hell isn't going to be a habitat improvment that made these fish come back in good numbers to all areas. The habitat may have been an improving factor in some of the areas, but not every stream has had habitat improvments.

25,000 wild coho over the Willy falls. That river is a pit. it exceeds 80 degrees in the summer and is filled with raw sewage. You couldn't have a better example of poor habitat than the Willamette, yet these fish are popping up out of the clear blue. Why? The Ocean. It is the only factor that all coho share.

I'm not relying on ODFW numbers as much as personal observation. ODFW has very little data on wild steelhead counts for the Nehalem.

I don't know if coho and steelhead live in the same places in the ocean. I tend to think they are totally different. They are both on two year cycles, but thats about as close as they get.

Here's a question...

How much tribal netting is being done now compared to the 70's and 80's and 90's on the Olympic Penninsula?

Keith

I think you just hit the nail on the head Kevin. The region-wide factor limiting wild steelhead production across the entire OP is OVER-harvest by tribal gillnets.

It is THE singular unifying problem causing the continued decline of steelhead runs in the Westside Olympic Peninsula streams.... streams touted as being the last "healthy" steelhead streams in the entire state.

These runs are like a critical patient in need of a full court press by a hospital ICU , not some podunk country doc making the occasional housecall. They're tanking, and if we don't do something soon, these "healthy" runs will be dead, just like so many other wild steelhead runs across the state. It's just ridiculous WDFW has to wait til the runs are on death's door before they are prompted to prudent action.

BTW many of us acknowledge the whims of the ocean pasture as it relates to adult survival. Yes runs go up and down, as they naturally should. But the population trends for steelhead are just like a failing stock portfolio that yoyo's up and down.... some years good some years bad.... but over time, the overall trend line still slopes decidedly downhill.

Francis,

I think the nets are a problem. how much of a problem I don't know. What I do now is there are streams on the OP that flow directly into the Pacific with no nets. The one I am thinking of has a 100% wild run of steelhead and salmon. I have fished it a little. I know people who have fished it more than I have. The populations of wild fish are no better there than rivers that get nets. How do you explain this? The river I am talking about is the Raft. some of you may have fished it, most don't even know it exsists, as there are no improved roads that follow it.

Kevin,
the few small criks that dump into the pacific probably had run sizes that were small enough to be very affected by ANY harvest. There are a couple of those small ones that aren't doing too bad #s wise
Other than those few small criks,
Quilly system-nets
Hoh-nets
Queets-nets
Quinalt-nets
Hump-nets

The Nehalem has been and is being logged to holy hell. It has major recent landslides in important spawning areas and has a railroad bed simplifying half the channel of its most important trib. It has fatally warm temperatures along much of its length during summer and has had frequent record flooding events recently from all the disruption (logging). Recently, the Oregon Board of Forestry decided they weren't logging enough, so they increased the boardfeet targets and acreage open to clear-cutting. The upper river has sedimentation problems from farming.

The 2 things the Nehalem doesn't have are hatchery fish for the last few decades or any netting that I'm aware of.

It is an intersting river to compare to and does have a decent native steelhead run, but it always disturbs me to walk along its mainstem, staring at the gravel beds, knowing the reason I don't see any redds is because the fry can't survive the summers there any more. Oh, what it must have been like before we screwed it up!

BTW, the Native Fish Society had a good article on the Nehalem in their summer newsletter, which I believe is available to view on their web site: www.nativefishsociety.org

Bill Monroe paints a better picture for salmon and steelhead down south.

Bill

I think the runs cycle every 7 ears so things should be like they were in 2002. Last year didn't seem to have a great brat run on the OP.

For the first time ever I have to chime in. I stayed away from the great chum debates of '09 along with the pink stories but this one has got me going for some time not not just here.
I think that everyone is trying to blame one thing or another for the decline of our fish runs, especially steelhead, but never as a collective threat to our fish. Yes the tribes and the state are morons for continuing down this path of destruction. The hand writing is on the wall in big letters and we turn the apathetic eye, and blame the ocean, or it was the loggers, or its all the tribes fault. Everybody is right, and if we stick to just one problem everybody is wrong. As for habitat loss, we need to give these fish more credit than we do, the toutle was brought up and that is a great example of the resilience of these fish. They were written off after the explosion and now there back (talk about a clear cut). Harvest to me will always be the big problem. Its not just us its not just the tribes here in washington. Just like our salmon all of these fish migrate up past alaska as part of their life cycle. So we look for problems at the terminal areas as the reason these fish are not comming back. To an extent it is these fish run the gauntlet of nets in the open ocean from Japan to California , although south not as much as it use to be. You dont need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that around the time they started to figure our runs were starting to decline is about the same time that the alaskan commerical fisheries really started to boom. Targeted or not they still end up in nets, we all know that nets don't care what get caught in them.
So moral to the story, we reward our fish that surrived terrible river conditions and that just ran the thousands of miles of nets strung around the ocean with even more nets and a catch and kill fishery in the home streach that takes half of the survivors WTF great plan guys. So if your confused as to why less fish are at the redds in oregon look north its the same everywhere. Just because you dont have a commerical fishery doesnt mean that nobody else does.