Very encouraging.

Hope a few of the faithful can make it to the final Grays Harbor and Willapa discussion in Olympia this Friday.

Yeah.... sorry, I know.... all day meeting in Oly on a workday. Yes, a HUGE personal sacrifice for those gainfully employed in a tough economy, or for those who would rather spend the day chasing a fat tasty springer on the Columbia.

Hope to see you there.

I was pleased to see a VERY SOLID showing from the sportfishing community!
There were not too many empty chairs and I believe WDFW got the message regarding the Skagit/Baker river sockeyes.

In fairness, the WDFW is pushing for more sportfishing opportunity in the Sound and on the Skagit.

However, the in-river recreational fishery for Baker sockeye will be a flop if the Swinomish net the seven days per week that they are requesting.

There are more meetings this week. We're far, far from done.

Nelly do you know how many Swinomish netters will likely be on the water.

I am not sure which tribe fishes at the Highway 9 bridge, but they effectively
cork the river by staggering nets to effectively close the width of the river.

My observations have been on Pink runs, so I do not know about Sockeye, but I would expect to see the same techniques?

The Swins have a small number of fishermen who net in the river, and they traditionally have not been real effective at intercepting sockeye. That may be why they are requesting more days. The Upper Skagits net around Hwy 9 and upstream. Their combination set net and drift net fishing is very effective on all species as far as I know. They could probably fish half as many days as Swinomish and still outfish them in total numbers.

The sad fact is that they fish the river for sockeye. It's totally unnecessary. All those sockeye will head to the Baker where they enter a fish ladder leading to new state of the art fish sorting facilities that can be used to measure how many fish are sent up to the spawning beaches, the hatchery, the lake, and totes for the tribes to come pick up with their sockeye. No ESA chinook bycatch this way. The only thing it can't do is process the fish for them. Of course it always comes back to who gets the fish and who gets the proceeds from selling them. That should be considered a fortunate dilemma.

Sg

This was discussed and the issues were what you mentioned.

One thing I forgot to ask was how did they come up with the figure of 8000+ fish being caught by sportsman in the lake. We fished the first three weeks and caught 60 sockeye, we were never checked and saw no one checking fish at the launch….not even once.

While some boats did well, most had 1 or 2 fish at best.

Ondavr-
While I don't know what the experimental design is for the creel census and only fished the lake a handful of times over the past two seasons I was checked at the take out the majority of the times I fished.

The creel numbers seemed to back up your observation that while the Baker sockeye fishery is a nice salmon fishery many folks did not do very well. One of the slides from Saturday showed that it took over 12,000 angler trips to catch 8,600 sockeye. That is only a little better than 2/3 of a fish per angler/day - that seems to match with what many folks saw.

Tight lines
Curt

I didn't know WDFW had a sport catch estimate, but since they do it must be from a creel census. I fished two days last summer, and people seemed to be doing well. I have no idea how well the average boat did tho. I went in after limiting each day and didn't see a creel checker.

As far as when the recreational opening should be, I didn't want to rush. I figured my chances were better after there were 10,000 sockeye in the lake instead of 2,000. It's a fun fishery on safe and scenic water, well safe except for a couple boats flying up the lake when it was still pitch dark.

Sg

8,600 fish caught by sporties up at Baker this year? The state has no accurate idea how many were caught in Baker from last summer based my observations from fishing the lake as much as I did. Ondarvr and I were up there quite a few times and never once saw a single fish checker...saw the game warden's...talked to the truck drivers who were trucking fish...but never ever saw or heard of a fish checker. How could they possibly have a clue of how many were caught besides counting the boats and taking a wild stab at a number?

The State did not do a creel census which is an attempt to interview every angler and check every fish caught. This as you can be an expensive under taking

Rather the State conducted a creel survey where estimates were made of total effort and the catch. This requires an estimate of the effort and the catch rate of those fishing. Without getting into too much detailed the survey probably looked something like the following.

In a situation like Baker Lake the State likely checked the fishery 3 week days (dawn to dark) and 1 or 2 weekend days per week (with many folks camping on the lake may have only needed to check one week end day each week). The effort for those days could easily be estimated by counting the boat trailers at each access several times a sample day (3 or 4 times) and then from the access interviews the average number of anglers per boat. In many cases getting that effort estimate is the most difficult/expensive however on Baker it should be straight forward.

Once the effort estiamte is developed from the same exit interviews an estimate of the catch rates for each sample period is determined. Since virutally all the fleet regardless of where they launched fishing roughly the same area it may not have been necessary to randomly check each access point. Typcially to develp an adequate estimate only 10 to 20% of the anglers leaving the lake need to be interviewed/checked.

That would mean on the average we each should expect to be checked every 5th to 10th time we leave the lake. Some will be checked more often and others less frequently. The details on how State actually conducted its creel survey may vary some from the above but I think you get the idea.

If more precision is needed either the numbers of days checked or the portion of anglers interview or both can be increased (at a cost of course).

Tight lines
Curt

I was under the impression they rely on the spawning beaches to produce smolts. The beaches were created to mitigate for the original beaches that the native sockeye spawned in that are now too deep due to the dam.

Does it really matter how many the sports get? The ones they count on to spawn are fenced in at the new spawning beaches.

Slab,

That was true. Now in addition to the spawning beaches, with a capacity of 3,000 spawners, is the new Baker Lake hatchery, which has a capacity to take and incubate up to 10 million sockeye eggs.

The new juvenile fishway (called an FSC) goes into service in Lake Shannon next year, so some of the hatchery sockeye fry will be stocked there beginning this spring. The expected effect is another significant bump in Baker sockeye salmon production.

The fish that go in the lake that are not harvested provide supplemental natural production. They spawn in Channel Creek and the lower (of the upper part) of the Baker River. How many the sport fishermen catch only matters in terms of treaty:non-treaty harvest sharing.

Sg

Slab

The issue on counting how many the sportsman catch can (may) be critical to the 50/50 split.

We need to show we caught a significant number of our share or the tribes can petition to catch the portion of our share we didn't harvest. They haven't said they would do this, but it could happen, this is why WDFW wants to lengthen the season, open a new section of the river, possibly increase limits, etc. We need to show we can catch more than 8,600 of our 15,000 fish share.

Last year there a was disagreement between the tribes and WDFW on what the escapement in the lake should be, the tribes said 1,500 and WDFW said over 3,000, this was never resolved, so the number was set at zero.

The idea was there was no way we would catch all 15,000 put in the lake, so whatever we didn't catch would be the escapement. This turned out to be about 7,000 fish, well over what they figured was needed.

If the number had been set at 1,500 like the tribes wanted we would have had that many more fish put in the lake, which may have helped (probably not a great deal, but every little bit helps) us encounter more fish on rod and reel.