I have gotten a several calls from folks questioning the hatchery return numbers. Couple of things, first the harvest model goes from Jan 1 to Dec 31 of any given year. ALL hatchery Coho are in the model but all Coho are not the same run timing. With out looking everything up Bingham & the Springs are at around 700K smolt of NORMAL timed Coho which are the fish you see in the river to around the end of Oct but do not make it to the hatchery until Nov are when rains & flows move them up. Bingham does another 300K of late timed Coho that do not get to the hatchery before Dec 1 and the Skookumchuck Mitigation Coho are a late timed stock also. Normal timed Coho have a higher smolt to returning adults ratio than do later returning adults.

So when one sees the forecast of returning Coho adults be it hatchery or wild it does not just include those that we fish on in Sept through Oct but all the way to Dec 31.

This is getting to be an issue because that Satsop has only made wild Coho escapement 7 of the last 20 years and not in the last 5. The Hoquiam, Wishkah, and Wynoochee are performing similar with the Nooch being an absolute basket case. The Nooch Coho returns are so bad that if they did the mitigation Coho ( that WDFW has not done as required ) that we still could not fish that river itself because the wild Coho are so weak that a release wild hooking mortality would bring the numbers way down.

The simple fact is that the Chehalis Basin Wild Coho production that enables harvest is being propped up by the streams ABOVE the Satsop. Why is the question and frankly I think it is a nature thing. The upper basin tend to come back more toward Nov. ( increased rains / flows ) which results in less harvest pressure, the rain thing.

I try to not put things up on this thread that I cannot verify but I will now. We keep this up and as a good friend said to me "we are going to screw the pooch one to many times and take ourselves right off the water". We are really close to doing real damage to wild Coho tide water streams Satsop down.

Now that is a fact not opinion.