x many tens of thousands.

Fish on...

Todd

Well now do not disagree with many of the thoughts in the thread except the willingness to not look at the complete picture. Just about all of what is written is true but I will add this bit. In 2020 the Grays Harbor Wild Chinook run forecast at the bar is 11144 and allowable harvestable impacts to meet escapement are 1391. I realize this sounds bad and it is but let me add this little gem. Off the option two PFMC ocean model 7719 wild Grays Harbor Chinook will be taken in AK & BC with the addition of our marine the number of ocean caught wild Chinook is forecast at 8004. Oh and Washington state AGREED to this.

That habitat has been degraded is an absolute and to ignore that fact is absurd but to totally ignore the impacts of harvest is just as great absurdity. Look at the Grays Harbor numbers and get this. Your bloody Puget Sound stocks that are collapsing are suffering the same massive harvest impacts in the ocean. The willingness of some folks to only view the world through the PC environmental world and deny the other half the equation is not short sided but rather allowing themselves to be blinded by their own prejudices.

Off the soap box but it needed to be said.

I think those things are all coexistant...yes, we are way overharvesting in SEAK with regard to our local Chinook.

That being said, the pie that they are taking too big of a piece of isn't a pie, it isn't even a piece of pie...it's the tiniest of crumbs of the tiniest piece of the crust of the tiniest pie in the world.

We are fighting over almost no fish because we have destroyed the other 99.9% of them.

I'm not saying that divvying up that .1% isn't worthwhile, because it is, but it's still everyone fighting over almost no fish compared to what we've actually lost.

Fish on...

Todd

AGREED!

http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/997319.html#Post997319

http://www.piscatorialpursuits.com/forum...html#Post877033

I dont bank fish or do any hike in fishing, which there is alot of, i have a large sled and small sled a fish all different species of fish and never have a shortage of places to go or fish to catch. Try something new for once you might be surprised at whats out there. Lets just get past this closure and get back to fishing.

Now that is somewhat of an odd response. In very simple terms for Grays Harbor the fundamental change has been the hatchery reductions . Depending on the point in time you choose to use Grays Harbor has about 100k to 130k less hatchery Coho each year than in the past. The decline was over about 20 years give or take.

Now with Chinook it is about Boldt and the tribal share removing about 50% terminal which was a big change. Then came the AK and BC ramp up post Boldt in the marine and pretty much did things under not just for NT but also the tribes.

So if you have the means , skill, time ( which it appears you do DL ) and do not mind traveling you can find fish. Now if you a working stiff with family & job limiting your access to the water it is another thing. So yes we have fishing but the quantity and quality have been so degraded that they do not resemble anything available 15 years ago let alone 20 or 30.

It really depends on the fishery we're talking about.

For some its habitat, some its over fishing, some its mismanagement of existing opportunity. For many its all of the above.

Prime examples of pure gross mismanagement include:

Willapa Chinook
Lake Washington spiny rays
Lowland trout
W. Wa. Hatchery Steelhead
Lake Wa Sockeye
Searun Cutthroat

There are many others, but many of those involve a complex mixture of habitat issues and overfishing

WDFW has earned this license boycott based on their ineptitude and embrace of the status quo in the face of obvious management crisis.

Placing blame on coronavirus aside, it will likely eventualy cost the current director his job. . .

No argument but this. Willapa Chinook are an odd one. Other than maybe some remnants numbers the native Willapa Chinook where pretty much gone by the start of the depression and for sure by the late 1930's. The Willapa estuary was never a Chinook region but rather Coho and a massive Chum producer. What natural Chinook that remain are the descendants of large scale hatchery straying of a true mix of about everything genetics. So it becomes a philosophical argument as to just what a Chinook spawning in the gravel is. It takes about five generations minus human interference for a population such as the Willapa Chinook to begin to evolve with site specific genetics, which is 50 years in this case. Human intervention includes habitat and harvest which includes marine. We as a people have working on the habitat problem since the 1970's with modest success. Harvest on the other hand is just the opposite as the emergence of massive marine harvest has negated any gains from habitat reform and actually accelerated the Chinook decline. Pick your poison.

Take any year you like, with any combination of prior escapements, redd scour, and quality of ocean conditions you like; it's how many fish get harvested off SE AK, BC, and then our own coast that determines what we'll have to fish for each year in our local streams. Management does their damnedest to ensure that number is as close to the same as possible, every single year. If they hit their ocean harvest goals every year, the in-river fishing would be like what we see in a slow year every year. Let that sink in for a second. If WDFW were capable of planning fisheries perfectly, every year would be slow for in-river fisheries. BY DESIGN.

Habitat absolutely limits the number of fish that can potentially be produced (if we forget hatcheries for a minute, though, to Rivrguy's point, they are another factor in today's reality). Until such time as production can no longer support harvest, fisheries management is what will determine how many salmon we get back each year. This is where NMFS and WDFW are absolutely accountable for the current state of our (in-state) fisheries.

At least until we reach the point of no return, habitat dictates abundance; harvest management dictates what survives to spawn.

As regards boycots, I can blow as much smoke as I want to; I'm still going to fish if there's an opportunity. I've resigned myself to the fact that these are the good old days, so I'd better just keep fishing. Ghost fish are even harder to catch from the couch....

Low land trout, Searun cutts and Lake WA spiny rays? How are they mismanaged? WDFW puts thousands of trout in the lakes. Searun cutts have been catch and release (in the salt) for many many years. Great fishing. Lake WA spiny rays fishing is great. Some of the best smallmouth bass and yellow perch fishing anywhere.

I’m also interested in the mismanagement of searun cutts.

The one thing I can think of is why have no retention in the salt then allow them to get harvested once they hit freshwater.
That never made any sense to me.
SF

Lowland trout that rival endangered Cowlitz smelt for taste and texture, cutthroats you can't keep, and Lake Washington spiny rays you're advised not to eat. Musta been oversight that caused you to leave out Lake Washington's peamouth chubs and northern pikeminnows.

Comparing the past with the present, we "oldtimers" had Marilyn Monroe, today's "young 'uns" have Marilyn Manson. But, "Don't worry; Be happy!"

I'm talking about mismanagement of opportunity in defiance of all logic.

For instance lowland trout is the premier fishery supporting WDFW budget. It definitely pays most of the bills for the dept in terms of license sales. Take a look at the plant trend on that program. Stupid management.

Also WDFW closes things for no good reason for the sake of salmon management.
For example how does searun cut closure, or lake wa closure, protect salmon? It doesn't. However spiny ray fisheries and searun cut fisheries get closed routinely to protect salmon. Never mind the lack of measurable impact. Why should other fisheries be shut to protect salmon. Close salmon fishing and be done. Again, stupid management.

Steelhead management. More than enough said on that on this board. Google hatchery steelhead and you can spend the rest of the corona shutdown reading. My contention is this is bad managment.

Sockeye? Scientifically unsupported escapment goal is maybe between 5-10 fold higher than reality. WDFW cannot see the writing on the wall here. Maybe the tibes are driving this one but whoever is driving, its not good managment.

Willapa bay is the king of stupid managment by WDFW and they own it all on this one. They've taken a fully integrated hatchery chinook population and tried manage it for wild Chinook recovery on a stream system that has no real chinook habitat. On top of that they've instituted a C&R gillnet fishery and eliminated the best performing hatchery in the complex for the sake of non-existent wild chinook. Stupid is as stupid does.

I agree that lowland trout is a major fishery supporting the WDFW budget. WDFW puts a lot of effort into it because , yes it is a money maker, and WDFW does not have to deal with the tribes demanding their share as with salmon and steelhead. A no brainer for WDFW.
A major reason that searun cutt retention is not allowed in the salt is because whenever the WDFW has had a meeting to consider retention of cutts in saltwater, the only rec anglers who show up are flyfishermen who want to keep it at catch and release. I argued for many years with a friend of mine who is an avid flyfisherman of searun cutts who wanted to keep it catch release. I argued with him for retention. He had plenty of 20-50 cutt days in the salt in the South Sound. Most of the rivers and streams allow for the retention of 2 trout/day over 14 inches (cutts included). The Cowlitz has had a cutthroat planting program for many years. You are allowed 5 hatchery cutthroat/day.
We all know that WDFW wants to get out of the steelhead business altogether.

Geoduck, thanks for the expanded explanation. I'm still not understanding the mismanagement issue regarding lowland lake trout. My understanding is that the Dept. switched from planting fingerling releases with some opening day legals to all legal and larger sized trout due to intense cormorant predation on fingerling plants.

You're dead on accurate with the rest of them based on what I know. However, the reason for closing game fish seasons on Lk WA, the Stilly, and others has nothing to do with gamefish species management and everything to do with treaty tribal demands on the Dept. If WDFW doesn't cave to those demands, they don't get to piggyback the tribal permit for PS fisheries.

And the Willapa Bay debacle is wholly owned by WDFW. As an outsider looking in, it appears that the goal was to screw over every possible interest. In which case it's been a smashing success.

While the cormorants do eat trout, the primary reason for going to legals instead of fingerlings was spiny-rays. WDFW lost the ability to rehab lakes as they had in the past. Having competitive species in the lake gets the fingerlings eaten. Also, as I said while the corms eat trout, they tend to be on the lakes with spiny rays and then switch to easier to swallow fish when they get stocked.

I know that at least some of WDFW area bios worked really hard to get good lowland lake fisheries and put a lot of effort into what to stock and when. This is probably not an agency wide view, but some were/are working hard at it.

As to searuns, you could have a harvest in salt with about a 16" minimum as this is the size that allows all the fish to spawn once. Because of the two groups of cutts (early-primarily river and late-primarily creek) you need to protect the creek fish in salt as they are spawners to 16". The river fish, since they enter earlier, spawn successfully with a 14" minimum.
It should be noted that about the only anadromous salmonids in WA that have shown strong recovery are the cutts and char. And we don't kill them. Even with the **cked up fw and marine habitat, they increase when we don't kill them.

It's not, to my knowledge, WDFW's fault that Lake WA spiny rays accumulate toxins. That's DOE's bailiwick; talk to them.

FYI - As of yesterday ID is closing to nonresidents for fishing/hunting:

https://idfg.idaho.gov/press/nonresident...d-fg-commission

WDFW does allow harvest of char on a couple systems, which I don’t agree with.
SF

What he said. While I'm certainly not happy with the NOF process, I think WDFW gets WAY too much blame for the state of fishing in our state. 70-80% of our WA bound fish don't make it past Vancouver Island. Not buying a WA fishing license will have little impact on that and in fact may make things worse. Of all the things I spend money on, my fishing license is small potatoes. I spend way more than that in fuel, bait, gear, travel, etc. And even with the severely limited fisheries we have had, I still enjoy myself and catch plenty for the freezer.

Not buying a license isn't about saving money, it is about trying to send a message. I gladly spend over $300 a year on licenses and drive almost 2,000 miles to fish for steelhead in BC. I get more value out of one trip to BC than I do out of an entire year in Washington. My problem is WDFW doesn't keep fisheries open that should be.

I live 5 minutes from the Stilly and can't even go cutthroat fishing after work in the summer. Why? To protect chinook? Yet they leave the Tulalip Bubble open to keep 2 wild chinook. Clip all the bubble fish and close it for wild chinook retention you morons! Keep the Stilly open for trout and steelhead fishing like it should already be. Then there is the Skagit C&R season.

In the end I will buy a license when it opens because my nephews ask me to go fishing. Spending time with them is far more important to me than giving WDFW the finger. Karma is always out there though just waiting for her opportunity...