What a $h!tty spring to be an outbound yearling salmon!

Having beat LONG odds of surviving the horrible in-river sauna/drought of 2015, this is what you have to look forward to in the ocean "pasture"... oh you poor bass turd!

Some of the worst PDO numbers.... EVER.

http://research.jisao.washington.edu/pdo/PDO.latest



Couple that with ZERO coastal upwelling for the year so far.... actually NO, make that a net NEGATIVE upwelling (i.e. predominant DOWNWELLING year-to-date)

http://www.cbr.washington.edu/dart/wrapper?type=php&fname=upwelldaily_1462252103_276.php

Gonna be a mighty hostile warm sterile ocean for the little guys to find any spring/summer feed.

Gonna be a mighty lean 2017 for coho. Whatever few that make it back will truly be the fittest survivors of their species.

Gonna be 3 age-classes of chinook MIA for 2017 as well.

Gonna make 2016 look like a glory year by comparison.

Nobody should be fishing this year. Period. Harvesting to the last paper fish is more dangerous than ever.

Forward-thinking managers would already have 2017 forecasts so that they can get an idea of the pre-season planning train wreck. That data's all there to start.

My thoughts exactly but man is too dumb for that.

Historically the poor returns of Puget Sound have been driven by either strong el Niño events are severe droughts. Unfortunately for wild coho this year's group of coho smolts will have experience both. A big driver for 2017 wild coho will be the numbers of smolts the survived the drought and those numbers will not be known for another couple of months.

Even if ocean conditions improve in 2018 the next generation of Puget Sound wild coho smolts will be coming off historic low escapements

I agree the other shoe from the "blob" will drop in 2017, 2018, and 2019 as the Chinook whose smolts hit the salt in 2014 and 2015 return. While it is not know with certainty if their survival will be as poor as the coho it is hard to be optimistic. UPcoming season forecast for Chinook are possible but the strength or lack of the younger cohorts will help to refine the forecasts as the dominate year of return nears. For the Puget Sound ESA listed Chinook some of the populations are so depressed and their freshwater so compromised it is a very real possibility that some of those populations will become functional extinct (unlikely to recover) by the end of the decade.

The rest of this decade will not be a good time for coho and Chinook salmon or those that fish for them. Or as we are finding out this year potentially those that fish for other species that inhabit the same waters.

Curt

I agree that smolt have a tough go, returning adults could be in short supply, what I don't agree on is all salmon fishing should be curtailed.

There is a Chehalis "jack fishery", had has been there for 40+ years, that I am aware of. During the NOF process NOBODY mentioned "jacks", until the last public speaker......me.

There is a August 1 - September 15, salmon in river fishery...NO ADULTS. If you check past hatchery counts, you'll see most jacks are just killed.

Is a "jack fishery", full blown????? No, but for those that enjoy trying to catch a daily limit, it can be a fun time. Light gear, fast water....18" - 19" silver jacks can be fun, they smoke up just fine........

Meanwhile the springers are pouring over Bonni.

not confirmed firsthand but the tribes are gillnetting

http://www.washingtonflyfishing.com/forum/threads/tribes-gill-netting-today.117488/

The prospects for 2017 just keep getting worse. The April PDO came in at +2.62 or the highest April since record keeping started in 1900. The critical time is when the smolts are leaving and April is the prime month in Grays Harbor.

The outmigrant yearling cohort throughout the Snohomish basin is quite healthy this year. I would say perhaps even higher than what we've seen recently. This is both in the upper watershed as well as the estuary. I am surprised as anyone by these observations but this is what we have been seeing.

Sub-yearlings, on the other hand do NOT look good. Almost NO sub-yearling outmigrants for Chinook and Coho BOTH. Chum seemed to have faired well, but the pinks did not. The numbers I have seen for Pinks, Coho, and Chinook throughout the Snoho are alarming to say the least.

It seems to me that over summering smolt had much better survival in the bath water conditions than we expected, but the fish hitting the gravel suffered just as was predicted. The Chums later spawning time seemed to have helped them achieve higher emergence numbers, but any of the fall spawners got hammered!

Didn't know PS had any coho populations with sub-yearling smolts.

Also quite surprised to find out your Snohomish yearlings did so well. I'd wager that's most likely an anomaly for the region.

My summary of observations is from smolt trap data on the Skykomish and Snoqualmie Rivers. A high proportion of sub-yearlings will emigrate to the lower river and estuary environment to rear (although ocean-type life history cohorts do exist). Those fish leaving the upper river are encountered as the move through the system.

I will be surprised if our "smolt" yearling observations for Coho are isolated to the Snohomish Basin. As Kurt said, we will get a more clear picture in the coming months.

PS has sub-yearlings, Fall smolts (sub-yearling but different from the earlier age-O migrants, and some 2 years old.

I know that when some coho fry were planted in January in a local lake that they smolted in late May/June at about 90 mm FL.

So would now be a good time to step up pressure to allow more culling of predators? I think we all know that seals, porpoises and cormorants are devastating salmon populations, but we're just now getting the science to support that (like from http://www.marinesurvivalproject.com/).

If returns are going to be critically low, seems like the time to start culling is now.

Can one of you old policy salts point me in the right direction on who I need to be badgering (pun intended) about this? I'm imagining it's the feds, though I know the state is allowed to do some degree of culling as well.

"Moreover, approximately one third of the salmon we sampled from Puget Sound, regardless of the degree of development, had contaminant concentrations associated with adverse effects, indicating that a significant proportion of juvenile Puget Sound Chinook salmon are at risk for some type of health impairment due to contaminant exposure, potentially affecting their marine survival."

(O’Neill et al. (2015) Toxic contaminants in juvenile Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) migrating through estuary, nearshore and offshore habitats of Puget Sound. SSMSP Technical Report.)

So would now be a good time to step up pressure to force the cleanup of chemicals released into Puget Sound from human activities?

Nah, Oncy, we can't do that. Nature has to bend to human wants. And desire to pay for.