I think you forgot to the most important part of the "story"... the part that establishes credibility.
Jim Dicken
Headquartered at Funny Moose Lodge
www.funnymoose.com Now the real skinny.
Yes 1987 was one of the better runs on record... BUT....
The only reason 1987 showed no fish until June 4 was because the sonar project was in its infancy and the crew did not have it fully operational until June 4. The front-end counts were simply truncated from the database. A similar thing happened twenty years later in 2007.... missed the first four days of counting due to technical difficulties of deploying the sonar gear in suboptimal water conditions.
And to characterize a daily count of 165 on June 4 as some kind of exceptional day for what has been an otherwise dismal season might give folks hope... BUT....
The historic average for June 4 passage is 370 fish... more than twice as many kings!
And finally the biggest reason the counts "spike" between June 4 and 10 is because that's typically when large numbers of sockeye bound for the Russian River pass thru the lower Kenai, thus inflating the chinook sonar estimate. This has been particularly pronounced in the past decade due to VERY strong returns of early run Russian River reds.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed like every one else, but that author was clearly making mountains out of mole hills purely out of desperate optimism.
_________________________
"Let every angler who loves to fish think what it would mean to him to find the fish were gone." (Zane Grey)
"If you don't kill them, they will spawn." (Carcassman)
The Keen Eye MDLong Live the Kings!