Just so everyone knows….

WDFW cannot develop a creel census program on the “back of an envelope”, and implement it for the purposes of making an in-season adjustment, based on perceived angling success. Or lack thereof.

Creel census programs are designed to be statically valid. The experimental design has to be scientifically validated with specific design criteria such as time, date, location, sample size, and effort. The data collected has to be processed, compiled, and analyzed. Once this is done, management decisions, such as an in-season adjustment, can be considered. Again, this cannot be done quickly or easily. And it cannot be designed, funded, and implemented based on anecdotal reports of really great fishing. Or really bad fishing.

Creel census programs currently in place are the result of considerable thought and preparation, years of implementation, some bouts of trial and error, continual refinement (i.e., adaptive management) and specific funding mechanisms.
Those are already in place at the appropriate locations to make whatever adjustments need to be made. So even though lots of folks are catching lots of fish in some areas, WDFW is not in a position to make in-season adjustments based on this information.

That’s not to say they cannot be agile enough to make changes on-the-fly, but those circumstances are unusual and infrequent.