Right now, throwing more money at producing yearling fish in southern Puget Sound, is not going to do anything. When these fisheries that everybody talks about were successful, the contribution to harvest from release of chinook yearlings in Puget Sound was ~1.5%. The latest CWT information that I have seen shows the current contribution rate at less than 10% of that, or ~0.11%. Some of the hatchery programs that were closed by WDFW because of poor survival (e.g. Chambers Cr., Samish, Whatcom Cr.) had survivals even lower than that - something like ~ 0.05%.

At these current rates, having fisheries as good as the 70's would take releasing > 30 million fall Chinook yearlings now rather than 3 million then (unless of course that 30M yearlings completely overwhelmed the existing food supply, which doesn't appear to be able to support the current production). Good luck trying to find hatcheries that could produce 6 million more pounds of fish (30M yearlings @ 5 fpp).Even the legend, Harry Senn (a friend of mine as well) couldn't come up with the pond space or get the same results under the current conditions.

As for the good survival from Nisqually and Deschutes Chinook - those are from fingerling releases not yearlings. Current marine survival of yearlings across both Chinook and coho in South Sound are in the crapper (you can throw in steelhead as well). They have been since the late 80's - early 90's. IMO, mismanagement as others have called this situation would be continuing to try to produce 3 million fish that don't survive.

Another thing to note is that when contribution was very high in the late 70's and early 80's, the size limit was lower than it currently is. My recollection is that to address the catch imbalance that someone referred to above, size limits were increased twice from an 18" minimum to a 20" minimum, and finally to a 22" minimum (For the record, this is the recollection of another old guy and might not be exactly correct, but I KNOW it was increased at least once). Hal, Curt, Steve - do you guys remember? Also, for the record, that catch imbalance did not lead to smaller yearling programs, but increases in fall Chinook fingerling releases in some places in South Sound (the region of origin for the imbalance) and these increased size limits to reduce the sport harvest.

A couple more quick examples. Under current conditions, the Nisqually Tribe can barely sustain their coho (yearling release) program even though fall Chinook fingerlings survive very well. The Squaxin Island net-pen program is currently getting back a few thousand fish compared to returns to their terminal area of 70,000 - over 100,000 fish during periods of good survival. To show how bad the current survival is from these net pen releases, they are releasing somewhere in the vicinity of 200,000 pounds of juvenile fish and returning something less than 20,000 pounds of adult fish ~ 10% of the biomass that they release. REVERSE OCEAN RANCHING AT IT'S FINEST!

That is not the way it is supposed to work.