Those numbers are stagering,Ouch.Good luck,
STRIKE ZONE

Bottom line? 20 years ago a retiring bio told me the ONLY way to preserve salmon stocks and maintain harvest was simple. All harvest must be terminal. ( for everyone, AK / WA / OR / BC / CA ) It would mean change but for all it means you have to manage watershed by watershed.

I told him he was nuts! Now I am 62 worked to restore fish for 30 years and you know what? He was not just right 20 years ago but absolutely, 100%, not a bit wrong. It is the critical fact that has a price to do BUT if we don't we will ( and the fish ) pay the price anyway. Not to many choices as what we have to do but what we have at the present can not be maintained.

You can thank G G G G Gregoire!

Give that Bio a gold Star, he's looking at the whole picture..

So, a handful of US commercial trollers get a whack at a portion of one run in one river and the canadians/Alaskans, in return, get to put the f*** to numerous chinook runs in numerous drainages up and down the U.S. west coast?

Seems fair...........NOT!

Terminal fisheries only. But then, that wouldn't be any fun for the commercials would it? Gotta preserve that outdated way of life you know?

That may not be the exact scenario, but you definitely get the gist of it.

The paper fish are traded on the allocation table across a variety of stocks and international borders for the benefit of the fat cats... the tonnage dudes.

But it's REAL fish and REAL livelihoods at the local level that are at stake here.

As Rivrguy posted, this harvest model is unsustainable.

The overall health of Pacific salmon is only as good as the health of its component subpopulations. That means individual runs of fish and the basins where they are actually produced. In the present day mixed-stock harvest paradigm, in order to maximally harvest strong stocks, unsustainable exploitation rates are simultaneously perpetrated on weaker stocks. The killing continues until the weakest stocks are fished to extirpation or near-extirpation, at which point managers just throw their hands up and concede that the remnant populations are now inconsequential to total production, so f**k 'em. No way we'll ever get 'em recovered, so let's just do the absolute bare minimum to slow the extinction curve to keep harvest going to the maximum extent possible.

The only logical solution is local (terminal) fisheries with 100% local control of production and exploitation. This ensures that stewardship, conservation, and accountability for the success or failure of the fishery rests entirely on local stakeholders. Bottom line, they OWN it!

Just like in every other aspect of life, this crisis will never be solved until folks are made to personally OWN it. AK and BC could care less about PNW salmon because they don't "own" our crisis.... they can just go their merry way doing business as usual as long as salmon (regardless of origin) are available to fill their totes.

Time for our representatives at the Pacific Salmon Commission to roll up their sleeves and start advocating for the home team.

Darn tootin!

Before she became governor, we could walk across the backs of all the salmon that were returnin' to WA rivers!

Ohh wait...

Beezer the US got the rights to fish Frasier Sockeye for putting up the money to fix Hell's Gate many years ago. Canadians kinda figure that with the development of AK fisheries that maybe that is a bit much now a days.

History is strange. When the Grand C was built and closed off, five years later several villages in BC and AK disappeared. Seemed the up river brights tracked a different route than others and so the dam / no fish and the villages are gone.

Today we still do the same things. Oregon troller fleet tied up because of low returns of SACROMETO CHINOOK? What the hell is OR kicking the hell out of CA fish for.

Simple fact terminal harvest only, take the pain and manage river by river and you piss all over your watershed you pay the price.

There was an economist, maybe a bio of some sort, who was saying in the 60s that the ocean troll fisheries were biologically and economically stupid. Actually, that was what I learned in college; just wasn't a WA college.

I have a report from about 1920 where the head of WA Fisheries said the ocean fishing going on the outside the mouth of the Columbia was wasteful. Small fish, not as high quality as the adults, and so on.

Kinda dishearening what we know then, and didn't act on. How can it be changed?

I was reminded today of a fact I must have blocked from my memory banks.

Our U.S. appointee to the Pacific Salmon Commission is none other than WDFW's dearly departed Dr. Koenings.

terminal fishing is a pipe dream but think how fast we would start seeing those 70 and 80 lbers again.

Keeping nets out of the salt would cure evils of many varieties......and perhaps force other solutions to supplying the world's fish appetite. But it ain't gonna happen because it is not even close to cost effective....not even here in the land of free money trees.

Last year at NOF, WDFW staff threw out a shocking number. Does anyone know the percentage of AK fish that SEAK fisheries catch? I went through the handouts and couldn't find it, and the numbers don't add up according to harvest records, but I'm absolutley sure WDFW reported that number at 4%.

The Canadian ocean fisheries catch only 30% their own fish.

Wasn't there DNA testing a few years back that came up with an over 80% non-targeted catch rate for SEAK fisheries?

Neither is spending 8 billion on recovery. Eliminating distant fisheries in favor of terminal fisheries doesnt mean one less fish for the market. It shifts the harvest from one place to another, that's it , that's all. Actually, it might increase the amount of fish for market, if we indeed harvest more hatchery fish and less protected fish.

The info that eyeFISH presented is something that everyone who fishes for chinook should consider. It is also worthwhile to know how the Pacific Salmon Commission works. It is an organization formed to implement the provisions of the Pacific Salmon Treaty. The Pacific Salmon Treaty is a treaty between the US and Canada, not between BC, Alaska, and Washington. It does not specify how the individual countries and regions should manage their fisheries, except that each country should get benefits that reflects the production of that country. Scientific info from a wide variety of sources is presented to technical committees. The technical committees develop a set of management recommendations that are presented to the commissioners. The commissioners negotiate a final plan and it is passed on to the federal governments of Canada and the US for final approval. What starts as a science based process ends as a political decision, in the US it is the State Department that has the final say. The father along in the process, the more politics has an influence. Senators and congress members can exert some pressure to benefit their states. AuntyM is correct that Slade Gorton had more than his share of influence and Ted Stevens from Alaska had even more.

Dr. Koenings is the Washington representative on the commission and as far as I can tell he may be the only US representative with a fisheries science background. That is a positive maybe. Shortly after he came to WDFW he gave a talk at UW and at the reception after the talk I had the opportunity to ask him a question. My question was what would he do to limit Alaska's catch of Washington chinook. His answer was that during his time in Alaska he saw no evidence that there was any catch of Washington chinook in Alaska fisheries. One can hope that he has learned otherwise since then.



If, like eyeFish, you are comfortable looking at numbers and reading long reports look at the Web site below. This is the ADF&G CWT lab online report page, using the various reports you can find out when and where a CWT fish was caught and when and where it was tagged for all fisheries and regions. It would take some time to learn how to generate the reports but it is the best way to get some idea of the catch in SEAK.

Alaska CWT Lab



That is probably true for sockeye, chum, and pinks, but it is not the case for chinook. Acquaintances who are fish bios, who are dedicated chinook sports fishermen and have lived and worked in Alaska for 30 years, say that ADF&G doesn't have a clue about how to manage chinook. The chinook problems in the AYK region underscore the poor management. The Yukon Panel of the Pacific Salmon Commission doesn't seem to think Alaska's management of chinook fisheries is that good. I think there is at least one chinook population outside of the AYK region that is being considered for ESA listing. ESA listing will force ADF&G to manage saltwater chinook fisheries in a manner where stock composition is a strong consideration. In that respect WDFG knows a lot more about what is going on than ADF&G. Ultimately I suspect that interception of ESA listed fish in Alaskan waters, in directed fisheries and bycatch in other fisheries will lead to a reduction in Washington fish being caught in Alaska. Because ESA listed fish are seldom tagged it will require more genetic data to arrive at that point. I know that Alaska did some genetic studies of the catch composition in the Copper River Delta fishery but I haven't seen any reports on the results of the study. Not all kings labeled as Copper River kings come from the Copper River.

Sorry, I should have clarified, I based that opinion on what I see happening in S.E not the entire state. My opinion was based on the annual king limits which are decided by pre-season AI predictions which in most cases seem to be very accurate, 2008 for example they announced the extremely low AI (in April) and set the lowest king limits I've seen in 20 years, that season ended up being by far the worst king fishing I've experienced. Their predictions for run size/strength are generally very close, IMO, can't say that about a number of Wa. run predictions, Columbia river springers for example, where do they pull those numbers from? I've got a guess

How comforting....

If a tree falls in the woods....

I don't believe we can reconcile harvest at any cost management.

Time for the agencies to step up and protect our public resource from the current mindset.

Look back at yelloweye's post, both of you guys need to educate yourselves a bit more. 1) It’s spelled Fraser not Frazier and 2) the trade that occurred last time they negotiated a sockeye annex (1999 or thereabouts) was for a $30 million chunk of change from Canada that went towards a buy back of a bunch of our Puget Sound commercial purse seine and gillnet permits and the US also gave away about 30% of the sockeye share in exchange for Canada reducing its catch on US bound coho and Chinook. So the US gave up a bunch of commercial share to get a bunch of sport share. Once again like yelloweye usually says, please know what you are talking about before spouting something off.

The guys on the panels work hard for Southern fisheries, and the names are probably familiar to all. Straight off the PSC website it states John Long is on the Southern Panel for WDFW, looks like Ron Warren is his alternate. The fellow who if I remember right who usually did the modeling breakdowns at NOF (Larry Lavoy) is on the Chinook Panel. So we do have guys working hard for getting fish back to us.