Like a "Plant more fish!" mandate?

Fish on...

Todd

Make it mandatory that steelhead return to all rivers.
Not just the Chehalis.

Federal mandates will have this under control within a year.

Let's go Brandon!!!

Your level of intelligence is really illuminated in your last comment.

Congrats

I have never understood why the tribes have not taken the lead in predator removal. There are some issues with federal mandates vs. state, but that has not stopped the tribes from finding a way around issues in the past. My only thought is that they do not want to be the lead in killing seals. But for cormorants should not be an issue. I know one tribal member that said any seal in the reservation rivers is dead on arrival. They also can get a permit for salt water taking, but they are expected to eat it. Since they taste horrible, very few, if any, are taken for subsistence.

Ever notice that those with the least to complain about seem to complain the most...?

I have.

how is one to truly protect wild fish when the tribes are dumping hatchery fish in the upper river systems...

as well as WDFW?

The ones with the least to complain about are surely the minority.
If only the majority that had the most to complain about got on-board perhaps we would have fish.

Go Joe go!!

Truth be told, will none of you move to the Gulf of Mexico? Cause your toxicity might ruin that too, 20 years of grab assing while the fishing I grew up with went to hell. Just finger pointing and no results. Not sad just mad.


Yeah yeah, tribes, ocean, escapement, predation, boldt, science, we got it! [Bleeeeep!] or get off of the toilet.

12/30/2021


What is the current WDFW wild steelhead 2021-2022 plan?

1. Has anyone seen a WDFW comprehensive plan???

2. I've listened, video conferencing, read all the comments here and WDFW Web site. I can't even find if the closure 2020-2021 resulted in any change in the water sheds. Did it do any good????? Was there any documentation done during or after the season was over?????

3. Again, have lived in Grays Harbor since 1968......lot's of Wild steelhead, lot's of hatchery steelhead, everywhere. I know people on here worked, either still do or are retired, for WDW or WDF, it was on your "watch" that the declines started, why wasn't more done at those times?

At one time they wanted hatchery steelhead to be removed so there was limited chance for hatchery/wild spawning.

If we use the Wynoochee River as an example...reason, in my time here, a Dam was built, Bolt Decision, NT had 100% of the netting until after Bolt, they netted July - December, there were springers, there were seasons in the Wynoochee for Coho, Chinook, Chum, winter Wild and hatchery steelhead, and the 1977-78 summer run steelhead plants.

Spring chinook are gone, there is no legal chinook fishery, wild steelhead numbers are down. If wild and hatchery steelhead spawn together, you'd think there might be an increase of "un-marked" steelhead.....I'm not seeing any big numbers from the trap reports. Do hatchery steelhead spawn????? Well if we use the 60,000 smolt plants on the summer run steelhead, since 1977-2021, you'd think lots of unmarked summer run would show in the summer fishery......thats more than 40 years of plants....many of those summers fishing experiences far exceeded any winter steelhead season.

Lets see......seasons closed to protect Wild Steelhead, what the heck is the plan for all the hatchery steelhead coming back.......Wynoochee has the trap, some go to Lake Aberdeen hatchery for brood, all the rest are, Wild and hatchery, are trucked above the dam.......that includes all H/W steelhead and all Coho.

No answer here, all above my pay grade, but I'm not sure WDFW, QIN, has any answers.........pissed lots of great chances to have hatchery close to dam....I point finger at DWF and DWL back when dam was built..... grrrrrrrrrrrr

Nets, well we all know the results.....

To get up on my soapbox, I think the problem (at least one of the major ones) is nobody is will to explicitly say what they want, fish-wise. We use warm and fuzzy platitudes like "fishable numbers", "sustainable runs", and the like.

I believe that we know, in a general if not specific sense, what needs to be done. For example (ALL MADE UP), the Chehalis system needs X wild Chinook, Chum, and Coho spawners to produce the following quantified fisheries. Here, you list fishery and catch such as 200 Skookumchuck Springers in a Skookumchuck River sport fishery that runs from May 1 to July 31. That requires certain spawning and reading flows, water temperatures, clean gravels; all of which we know how to do. Just work all this out to the mouth of the Harbor. You need Q fish entering and we have the fishery. You need W habitat protections/zoning.

I believe that we don't want to quantify goals because it will require saying NO to somebody, whether it be open angler, BC Lodge, AK troller, Lewis County logger, or whatever.

How do yo have that in PS with the Puyallup and Green? River banks man made diked for flood control with the damns built. Freeway raceway flow habitat...habitat gone since 1930's. Green diked and damned in the 50's. Both lower river habitat is and has been gone for 70-90 yrs.. And yet both rivers still provided a viable steelhead recreational fishery into the 90's with wild and hatchery fish plentiful. The Steelhead adapted to that disruption until the predators numbers began to increase with there protections. IMO if you kill 10,000 cormorants and seals in PS. You will see an increase in all fish returns. The trouble is no one has the stomach or political will for it! Tribes time to answer with immunity!

Drifter,

1. WDFW produced a Wild Steelhead Management Plan in 2008. I don't think it has been updated since. In a nutshell, it says, among other things, when wild run sizes are less than established spawning escapement goals, there will be no fishing seasons on wild steelhead. Well, here we are. Wild run sizes are less than the escapement goals, so the rivers are closed to fishing. Just like the plan says.

2. I haven't seen any data or other results from 2020-2021 either. What likely resulted is that a few more wild steelhead survived to spawn because they didn't suffer incidental mortality from angling. If WDFW knows more than that, they likely aren't saying.

3. Do you seriously believe that the decline in wild steelhead abundance didn't begin before your arrival in 1968? Declining salmonid populations most likely began shortly after of white settlers and began commercial fishing, road and railroad development, logging, mills, farms, and towns - all the usual things that degrade fish habitat and reduce their populations. You appear to be another example of the "shifting baseline paradigm." As if the fish populations were never larger than when you arrived on the scene.

It would be more accurate to say that the declines continued under the watch of managers recently retired. And the declines continued for all those same reasons that have been mentioned over and over. WDFW and its predecessor agencies don't have and never have had the legal authority to protect fish habitat. Adequate habitat protection would require socially unacceptable restrictions on road building, logging, agriculture, flood protection, commercial fishing, and more. Heck, it took the threat of a federal lawsuit by treaty tribes just to get DNR to follow its own guidelines for culvert sizing on small streams just because larger culverts cost more money.

Spring Chinook are gone because all the suitable habitat for springers is gone. Gone due to clear-cutting and road building to the mountain tops of the Chehalis, Wynoochee, and Skookumchuck. All due to land use activities that WDFW has never had any control over. Do you think the USFS, DNR, and private timber owners were going to leave all that old growth timber in those upper watersheds to protect stream flows and water temperatures for a few thousand Spring Chinook (and a few other salmon and steelhead) so that a couple dozen Harbor gillnetters could kill most of them every spring and summer? Of course not. And they didn't. And the habitat was and remains trashed. It might recover somewhat in one or two hundred years, but we won't live to see it.

Now why do you think if wild and hatchery steelhead spawned together their might be an increase in unmarked steelhead? After everything that has been posted in this forum about why hatchery steelhead don't survive well in the natural environment, you should know a hell of a lot better. The utter lack of unmarked summer runs in the Wynoochee is about as clear of evidence as you can get that hatchery steelhead, even though they spawn in the natural envionment, utterly fail to produce subsequent returning wild adult fish. (There are a few cases of Skamania summer runs producing subsequent wild fish where there is suitable habitat; Chambers Ck spawners are statistically zero in that regard.)

I've said it before, if it's good steelhead fishing you want, buy a time machine and set it for 1968.

RunnGun,

The answer is that you don't get it in the Puyallup and Green with all that diking and flood control. Even before the recent nose dive in ocean survival these were marginal populations just barely making escapement (or slightly less, which is why they've been closed to fishing since the 90s). Those numbers weren't plentiful. They were just enough to allow CNR fishing, and have since become too low even for that.

SG you missed on the Nooch. Region 6 staff determined that they did not need protection or mitigation when the dam was built, just strays I believe was the rational. Thing is Nooch springers spawned mostly in the gorge which is now the lake. Never were a very large population but the old Grisdale guys hiked down to fish them and called them the " speckle backs ".

The original EIS for Wynoochee DAM can be downloaded from this site. Interesting reading about "benefits" and replacement of anadromous fish loss with hatchery trout.


https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16021coll7/id/10939/

The Puget Sound historical data base from WDFW's "Oncorhynchus mykiss: Assessment of Washington State's Steelhead Populations and Programs" provides some interesting information regarding Green River steelhead (the DOW escapement goal for the basin was 2,000).

In the early 1980s (1980 to 1984) the average wild steelhead escapement was estimated to have been 1,710. Average wild steelhead run during the late 1980s (1985 to 1989 -the next generation) was 3,154 or about 1.8 recruits/spawner.

In the early 1990s the average escapement was 1,695. The average return in the late 1990s was 2,602 or about 1.5 recruits/spawners.

In early 2000s (2000 TO 2004) the average escapement was 1,674. The average return in the latter part of that decade (2005 to 2009) was 1,168 or about 0.80 recruits/spawner.

While the above is not a prefect run reconstruction, I think it is adequate to provide insight into the productivity trends of that population over time.

Take home message - In site of the degraded habitats in the Green as suggested by SG that reduced capacity was consistently able to produce harvestable steelhead until the marine (smolt to adult) survivals fell to current levels.

Curt

“ I've said it before, if it's good steelhead fishing you want, buy a time machine and set it for 1968. “

Yuppers, back when the true wild fish were at their peak returns allowing full up rec fishing for wilds from mid Jan, thru March in most PS rivers, and we had plenty of F&G hatchery support providing good fishable numbers of steelhead to catch from mid November thru the end of January.

So, now we have no early timed hatchery plants, or any plants for that matter, so no returns, and the wild fish are still here in our local PS rivers like they always were in February and March , but you cannot angle for them. Just take your float boats out in March and April, and please be careful of the spawning redds when you beach the boat....

Save the wild steel, mission completed....

One of the things that has happened in the Green, until at least 2010, was that the Green was significantly declining in tributary spawners. I think a lot of this was due to tributary development and habitat degradation. So, the EG set in earlier, which included tribs, may be too high. One of the few times when I can see a biological reason to lower a goal; if you aren't going to put fish in a habitat that shouldn't count against goal.

Also, in looking at R/S, in those very few places where you know the actual escapement (you count them through a trap) and have 100% age analysis I have yet to see any steelhead run with an R/S to first return that even reached 1.0. Need repeat spawners. Further, as shown by Keogh and supported by some WA streams, a stream produces (from the same habitat) more smolts if they are age-1 and the age-2 smolts are more abundant than age-3 (if that was all that was produced in a year). The R/S (theoretical) to get 1.0 was at an average smolt age of 1.5.

Another thing about the tributary spawners was a theory of Jeff Cederholm's, based on his long-time work in the Clearwater watershed. He believed that the earliest returning steelhead spawned primarily in the tributaries while the later retaining fish were more mainstream spawners. So, hammering the early returns that co-returned with the hatchery fish, turning off the nutrient delivery to make for older smolts leads to less productive runs. Steelhead are damn complex. And then, they switch to being resident when being anadromous doesn't work.

Lots of science talk and obvious excuses. Still no comments on predator control which Is over half of the current problem. All the best habitat, repeat spawners and best ocean conditions are not going to produce any more fish unless the predators that are eating them up are also managed appropriately. Happy New Year of very little Winter Steelhead opportunity!

And all of the predator control in the world is gonna do nothing with poor habitat, chang9ng oceans conditions, lack of food, and over harvest.