A friend of mine saw several sports fishing boats off the Clay Banks in MA11 this last Sunday. Any idea what they are targeting?

Blackmouth.

I thought the Blackmouth hatchery program was discontinued several years ago? Are there any blackout in MA11?

Yearling age fish that tend to residulize and hang around in Puget Sound are still released at numerous facilities. Fishing has been good, check the creel.

https://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/creel/puget/

A couple years old, but I always enjoyed reading his ramblings.
SF

http://www.leeroysramblings.com/PS_Blackmouth_history.htm

From what I have been hearing is that there is a ton of fish, but most are just under the legal limit. Most of the guys at the boat house seem to be getting some, but are weeding through quite a few to get a legal fish. They feel it should get better and better as the fish get a little larger over the next few weeks.

Sounds like yet another example of an ill-timed, ill-advised fishery to me. Why not open it when the fish get larger, so we don't kill 10 fish to harvest two? In a time when we're "concerned" about the shrinking size of chinook, should we really be targeting stocks comprised mostly of juveniles?

Of course, I know the answer, which is that we had better fish any time they let us. Hard to argue with that point....

They "let" us fish for them as a winter recreational opportunity targeting hatchery produced Chinook. Furthermore, remember the Puget Sound Salmon Stamp you had to buy? Those funds were used to rear Chinook for delayed release specifically to provide that winter blackmouth fishery (thanks to the late Senator Oke). The WDFW never did meet the production specified in the legislation (both in numbers and size) and tried to get rid of the program. Senator Oke opined that if they pushed for that he would ensure that the stamp and resulting money would go away. Ultimately the stamp went away tied to an increase in license fees and a system that sent a portion of license money to the hatchery program for each returned CRC which indicated that the individual had fished for salmon. WDFW has subsequently shifted its released to smaller fish arguing that they generate a higher contribution than those released at a larger size.

Given recent scientific study data a counter argument might well be that smaller fish at release manage to get out of the pinniped red zone and grow to adult size then return to be caught in the summer recreational fishery whereas the fish released at a larger size probably residualize at a higher rate but by doing so end up trying to survive in that pinniped red zone with a much lower survival rate.

So, the fact that these are hatchery fish means they were produced by the State for harvest so the issue of their being "juveniles" is irrelevant. Furthermore, emergent data reasonably leads one to conclude that disparities in prior contribution rates (by release size) can be directly attributed to increasing populations of harbor seals and their predation on smolt and resident blackmouth. One might argue that reduction of the legal minimize size of winter blackmouth would allow a better opportunity for recreational anglers to harvest a blackmouth before it becomes seal food.

I like your idea of lowering the slot limit to allow anglers to harvest the first two they catch. I'd like to see that regulation applied across all saltwater salmon fisheries. We have too many fisheries where anglers find themselves "sorting" through multiple fish they aren't supposed to catch to get a bite from a keeper. I think we'd do less unintended damage bonking the first two, fin or no fin, and getting off the water.

I'm assuming that fewer fish dying in the blackmouth fishery (while achieving planned harvest rates) might benefit the ecosystem overall, and the SRKWs in particular. Put another way, why not maximize the potential benefits associated with the program?

Might even need to go further, and require the keeping of the first two fish caught. It would suck, but would push everyone to take notice of what they were doing and make efforts to reduce catch of smaller fish.

That might be a hard sell to NOAA/NMFS taking into consideration ESA listed Puget Sound Chinook. And then there are the tribes and NOF.....

Whose idea? Not mine!

Nice analysis Larry B.

I have mixed feelings about this fishery. On the one hand it gives me a reason to run the boat around a bit in the winter, and it gives south sound boaters a fishery in an otherwise bleak time of year (all the nearby river closures). On the other hand should I actually catch legal size fish I'm not going to eat them, and we do kill a disproportionate number of juvenile fish sorting around on them.

So there, I have no strong feelings one way or the other, hows that for a lame post?

fb

Sorry, Larry. I'll claim the "make smaller ones legal" idea as my own. Lets people fish and minimizes handling impacts.

Glad that you are out there on the water! And, yes, thanks for bringing the lack of river opportunities into the equation.

In addition to ownership of that idea which concerned me it was also the part about keeping the first two fish caught which:

1. Did not have any sizes tied to it, and
2. Ignored the issue of unclipped fish

Beyond those observations I tend to lean toward lowering the minimum size limit for retention of winter blackmouth because:

1. There is the perception that pinnipeds are targeting those fish reducing the numbers reaching the current minimum of 22 inches.

2. They are hatchery fish intended for harvest regardless of size.

If you increase the retention rate you will decrease the fishery because of allocation. It won't be 1:1 because of adult equivalency. Back in the mid 70s there was no minimum size on salmon in marine waters and that was changed because of allocation issues.

You just had to remind us of that pesky allocation issue. And before coffee......

I don't doubt this to be true, but I must say, given what we know about how poorly salmon survive fishing encounters in the salt, that it seems a bit misguided, to say the least. Killing more fish to harvest a target component is poor management of dwindling stocks. Selective fishing works much better in terminal areas, because unintended catches tend to survive at a much better rate. Additionally, in terminal areas, the fish are all as big as they're going to get, meaning far fewer encounters with undersize fish.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why so many fish caught in the ocean are undersize. If catching undersize fish is not what we want to do, we ought not fish where the majority of the fish fall into that category.

From 2015, article on reducing Chinook retention min size to 20"