Anyone who wonders why fishing is so cruddy should look at the planting numbers. The Green gets 16000 winter runs and the Puyallup gets none, but the White, which is basically off limits, gets 32,000. The Quillayute system gets 179000 while the sooez (on Makah Reservation) gets 204000. I am not sure why the tribe finds it possible to put out as many as they want but the state keeps finding ways to limit the production. Seems a bit off. I mean really, more fish planted in the Sooez than the Snohomish system, Green, and Puyallup rivers combined. With the die offs in the Cowlitz program, they probably even get more winter runs platted than that system. Getting pretty ridiculous.
This came up because I was wondering about the lack of fish at the barrier dam when I stopped by yesterday. Well, looks like last year on the 7th they had a bout 1200 back and this year on the 3rd they had about 320, with about 89 for the past 5 days. They also have just about half the springers of last years return. Pretty dismal.

I would love to find some fish but I guess I have to settle the almost non-existent opportunity.

1st June, since 1980, in my fishing a local river for summer run......not a punch on my card, not a take down, so I feel your pain !!!!!!

It can only get better???????

That White River plant is probably a wild broodstock program being used to aid in recovery of the wild stock there. It was started, if memory serves, in the late 90s.

In addition to its spring Chinook program, the Muckleshoot Tribe has been doing a wild steelhead broodstock program at the White River hatchery for a number of years now. Returns haven't been especially good, consistent with the survivals we observed with the acoustically tagged steelhead smolts from the Nisqually and Skokomish systems this spring.

The Puyallups are, or were, heavily involved in the White River Steelhead.

The acoustic tagging data I have seen across species seems to show little difference in downstream survival between hatchery and wild fish of the same species. In fact, hatchery fish will occasionally show higher survivals when they are mass released rather than the volitional migration of wild fish. This would suggest that the losses are predator-based and probably based on (rather) small predator population taking a constant number of fish per day.

Some losses we saw on downstream migration between two traps could be explained energetically by one Great Blue Heron.

All i know is I can walk into cook creek or salmon river with my Quinault buddy any day of the week from late November to March and catch steelhead. Why? Because they absolutely stuff them with fish. Cook creek alone gets nearly 400,000 fish planted a year. Thats the answer, not protecting a couple of fish. Stock baby stock. Imagine if the Humptulips, Wynoochee, Satsop and skookumchuck had 300,000+ winter run plants each? It would be a world class destination. 500,000 in the skagit? Sure! Why not? That river could sustain it. The Quinault and Salmon river hatcheries should be the models for our state hatcheries not the envy of the states tributary fisherman.

We need to plug more than one or two rivers. Plain and simple. Spread out the pressure. Soon, everyone will be fishing the OlyPenn. Those rivers are on the way to being just like the "S" I-5 rivers...

There does appear to be a correlation between number of smolts planted and resultant fishery. That's really obvious, plant more get more back.

But, it does seem, coastwide, that you need to put out a couple hundred thousand to have hopes for a reasonable fishery.

May be a number of reasons for this. Overwhelm smelt predators is one. Second is genetic. Plant, say 10,000 smolts (as WDG/WDW/WDF used to do, and you may have the progeny of three females. Poor genetics, few genetic resources maybe.

Look at the successful salmon programs. Who runs one with a plant of 10-20-30K?

This may mean that hatchery steelhead programs will need to be confined to areas where half a million can be planted after collecting the eggs from returning adults there. Take a good-sized facility to accomplish that. And bird netting so the smolts don't "vanish".

Have asked this question of program size to various Pacific Coast Steelhead managers but have gotten no response.

This.....

Before long someone will point out that the Skagit did plant 400+k and got didly back, however I do agree with plant more fish to get fish back. Idaho plants millions and gets tens of thousands back. If they only stocked 500k springer smolts, nobody would be fishing the Big C in spring. Since preserving native winter steelhead genetics is important, I don't know why all these puget sound rivers can't get alot more summer plants and then be selective on where to stock winters.

All boils down to budgets and management.....

People make their living coming up with reasons and studies identifying why we can plant a chit ton of steelhead.
If I had my way they would be broke and we would have fishing like Washington once did.

Plant fish morons.

Water pollution is killing Puget sound steelhead at a alarming rate. The sound is toxic to steelhead, its a simple fact that few seem to know.

And where pray tell do you expect these millions of eggs to magically materialize from?

Pennies from Heaven?

Kind of a circular problem. In order to release a lot of fish you need a shitload of eggs. That requires a lot of adults. To get a lot of adults you need to not kill them in fisheries so you need to manage in-season or have good forecasts. You'll need a large hatchery with clean, cold water to produce the huge yearlings.

It can be done but would take money and commitment. And at the cost of the wild stock in those rivers. But, do you want a reasonable annual fishery or continuous closures??

FishDoctor -
The thing that confuses me is if Puget Sound is toxic to steelhead why is that fish like sea-run cutthroat who smolt at the same size and time as the steelhead are doing relatively well through out Puget Sound?


Are the two living in the same water?

If folks are ever to understand what is happening with the steelhead somehow they will need to parse out how various factors are differently affecting other species that are doing better.

Curt

It's pretty obvious rivers like the Cowlitz, Quinault, Cook Crk and others that receive massive plants get the huge returns. With that comes the crowds of anglers of course. I do agree it would be nice to designate certain rivers to stock motherloads of smolts in. Spread these locations out evenly throughout the state and thus spread the crowds. Question is, at what rivers expense? Also the point Doc brings up is a good one. One factor with coastal rivers that's glaring is the percentage of return adults is much higher than that of the Puget Sound Rivers.

I know this.... I'm tired of watching rivers shut down everywhere with zip opportunities anywhere within a hundred miles. Central and southern Puget sound are toast and seem to have no chance in Hades with our Microsoft Amazon population explosion. Pollution of the sound and tributaries and estuaries don't seem to be helping and groups like WFC just reap the rewards. When most steelbeaders in the state (and outside, even guides) flock to the Olympic peninsula and love those fish to death, we will soon have nothing and baby huey will stomp his way to the next location effectively ruining it too.

So what's the point? To fish or not to fish? What's important to us and our conscience from an environmental sense? Where do we draw the line of do we just give up and stop fishing so our grandchildren may or may not have an opportunity? Can the Puget Sound recover enough to sustain wild fish popluations? Not looking likely and ya cant bring up how well the Skagits doing because it's north of the healthy demarcation line.

I certainly don't have the answers but I hate watching the the last piece of the pie on the OP get decimated because there is no where else to catch a steelhead in the Puget Sound.

Id start with any river with a dam on it, 400,000 winters right off the bat. I mean really...what are you protecting there.

Pressure isn't a huge deal when there is the fish to sustain it. I guess I'm forgetting one point, the tribes. If we plant more, they get more right? Isn't that how it works?

Planting more smolts is only part of the equation!

Just for fun I found 3 rivers (the Quinault on the coast, the Cowlitz on the lower Columbia and the Skagit on Puget Sound) that all received smolt plants of at least 500,000 winter smolts the same year. Just looking at the returns (sport catch plus tribal plus hatchery rack return) two years later (2000/2001)I found the smolt to return survival variety quite a bit.

On the Quinault return rate was 1.9%
On the Cowlitz it was 1.0%
On the Skagit it was 0.4%

Or based on the limited sample at a smolt plant of 500,000 the Cowlitz would get 2.5 times as many fish back as the Skagit and the Quinault would get 4.75 times as many fish back as the Skagit.

Curt

The disparity in smolt to adult return rate illustrated in Smalma's post above is critical in making any decisions about stocking hatchery steelhead. The next logical question is "how much are you willing to pay" for that hatchery steelhead? I haven't looked at costs/smolt in a long time, but it was around $6/pound for many hatcheries in 1992. I don't think it's a stretch to say that cost would be about $10/pound these days. At 6 smolts/pound and a smolt to adult return to the Skagit of 0.4%, it would take 240 pounds, at a cost of $2,400 to return a single adult hatchery steelhead to the Skagit. And of course, the Skagit treaty tribes would be entitled to half the harvestable number. That would increase the cost to well north of $5,000 to put one hatchery steelhead in the recreational angler's creel, since sport fishing is less than 100% efficient.

How much will you pay to catch one hatchery steelhead in Puget Sound?

Salmo,
Do you have any idea how that number was derived. I would assume that a budget for a hatchery would be split into items like maintenance, operating equipment, water testing and purification, electricity, staff and feed. In non-government setting, all things would be aimed at the most productive output. Sometime capacity can allow for a double or triple output for a minimum cost of just perhaps feed, while at the same time adding just one more can double the cost. With all the reductions in plantings it would seem that we could be paying more and more per smolt. Knowing the department, they would just lump total out put with total production, and then get an average cost, not separating out expensive or non-productive programs. With all the factors playing into the numbers that can be planted, it is highly unlikely that many are actually functioning at the best and most productive number. A complete audit may be in order to see what best can be done. My gut feeling is that one reason the tribal hatcheries can pump out production like they do is that they are able to isolate costs to the one hatchery and produce output at the most productive number, not one determined by many different factors.

There is so much to consider. Finding out what the major limiting factors to returns is vital. It is possible that the Quinault and Salmon get the higher returns partially by overwhelming the predators. The Makah hatchery is right at the top of the tide water influence, about a mile or two from the ocean. Are the Skagit fish being overwhelmed by predators. Are they finding a lack of feed and not surviving. Or, perhaps the plant size as compared to the river size encourages them to stay in the river longer, exposing them to more predation or pollution. If we don't understand the limiting factors, all else becomes a guessing game that we will likely never be able to solve.

If you guys are going to use QIN production to compare with WDF&W you need to look into the history of that program Manny put together. It is not at all like WDF&W from brood to rearing. Steelhead are not a good match for hatchery rearing do to it's natural life cycle and habitat use.

Now as to cost benefit ratio it varies so I will not argue with the numbers up but again it varies. Take GH and the best hatchery cost benefit ratio is Summerrun Steelhead by a mile. Additionally with no natural runs zero genetic conflict & high value fishery. WDF&W did here and will oppose / object / stonewall any effort to rearrange the hatchery complex around game fish as they ARE the Department of Fisheries that got saddled with old game ( or ate them alive as a WDG employee described ) and want to do nothing but reduce game fish programs. The one exception is lake plants whose licenses pay a monster portions of their income. WDF&W's has two focuses the ocean fishery and commercial but Rec fishers have terminal, are, and will be a giant pain in the ass to them. Add to that if describing parts of the male anatomy as a agency they have stones the size of a grain of sand when addressing over harvest.

SG-
Think something is amiss with your math. AT 6 smolts/pound and a cost of $10/pound it would cost $1.67 per smolt. At a 0.4% smolt to adult survival it would take 250 smolts to produce a single adult steelhead. 250 times $1.67 equals a cost of $417.50 per adult.

That may still make economic sense. I see that the 2017 WDFW Hoh river steelhead creel survey it took over 5 angler days to catch a single steelhead.

Curt