Tug

Start with the food base. The fish won't stay somewhere there is no food. Try water quality; it keeps getting worse. Predators, such as seals and sea lions have increased; they gotta eat something.

Even the increases in such things as lincod, searuns, and native char may play some role, as they need to eat too and small chinook fills the tummy nicely.

Tug... Just a thought on why the program was so successful in the "good ol days." With a near collapse of fishing within the Sound in the late 50's into the 60's something had to be done. When Frank Haw introduced the delayed release program, and the shear numbers of fish, the effect was something akin to the Lake Washington sockeye fishery of today! So naturally, the fishing was good. Of course we have no where near the amount of numbers being released today.

Here's another point: How many people are out fishing MA13 these days? I rarely see another boat. So my competition is nearly non-existent. When August rolls around- that's another story. Folks only want to chase/catch summer fish, but they miss some of the best fishing in the winter and spring.

One of the biggest secrets of MA13 is the sheer amount of large fish in April and May... How many other marine areas are open? Plus we get a 2-fish limit starting in May... In the summer I simply set up my fishing timing-wise and in the migatory paths or choke points to intercept the fish. Guess what... "I gotta go fish Point Defiance with 1000 other knuckleheads" is the furtherest thing from my mind. In the winter I fish in and around the herring spawning areas and the beaches with the greatest amount of sand lance... Piece of cake!

Carcassman,

See my previous post those are all my assertions.

Sorry to have come in so late but am compelled to ask some questions and reinforce some information.

First, Carcassman asserts that water quality is worse than at the high point of the winter blackmouth program. Is that really true given the development of better sanitary sewer treatment systems as well as efforts to reduce the amount of surface water runoff? And even if true exactly how might this account for the decrease? We are talking about salt water here.

Obviously these fish need food or they will not hang around. If the assertion is that a lack of feed caused them to move out of the intended (and historical) areas is there any data that supports these fish being caught elsewhere? If not, where did they go?

Which leads me to Tug having raised the specter of predation by marine mammals. I am not going to research the absolutes again but in general terms information presented during the rockfish recovery plan review process revealed that in the early 70s there were somewhere around 200 seals in all of Puget Sound - in large part because they had had a bounty on them for years and they were generally shot on sight by commercial fishermen and others.

That minimal seal population grew from several hundred to 14,000 in 2007 and 15,000 at the time the initial rockfish plan was put out for review and comment. In the plan the writers opined that the seal population growth rate appeared to be slowing - that is, still growing but at a decreasing rate. Based upon consumption data in the plan those 14,000 seals would have been consuming 28 million pounds of food a year; 15,000 over 30 million. And we do know for sure that seals love salmon and also have herring as a major food source (as well as rockfish; something the writers of the rockfish plan tried to minimize during the hearings).

I suggest it doesn't take a rocket scientist to plot the curves over time and recognize a correlation - and not much of a leap of faith to see the cause and effect. (I am NOT a rocket scientist but I do know one....) And by increasing the legal minimum size the chances of these fish surviving the predators and reaching that minimum became smaller which surely caused a decrease in the contribution rate.

While I don't believe the State Auditor's Office has sufficient technical capability to satisfactorily accomplish performance audits on WDFW programs (they admitted as much by trying to outsource them) they did generate an audit of the blackmouth program. That audit addresses the contribution rates and escalating costs per fish caught over time of the program. If interested the title is Department of Fish and Wildlife Delayed-Release Chinook Salmon dated April 9, 2010 and is assigned report number 1003365.

Lots of experts on this board who offer their opinions as if they have a sound basis in science. Would be very helpful if we separate the opinion and speculation from the science. So far, we have foodbase, seals, water quality, logging, population growth, hatchery/wild interactions, hatchery practices, fish management techniques, predator fish abundance, size limits, ocean productivity, and tribal harvest mentioned. I probably missed a few, dozens of others on other threads though. Not much science offered to support the vast majority of those opinions. Yet they are usually presented with conviction as if there is some technical basis for the strong contentions.

Is it any wonder our experts have failed to identify and (if possible) address what the real problems are?

The question of water quality relates to freshwater. Chinook reared to yearling in FW have a greater tendency to residualize in the Sound than those that go to saltwater as fingerlings. Even if they are held in net pens in saltwater.

WDFW hatcheries have lost freshwater at a many facilities, the water id=s warming, etc.

Carcassman - thank you for that clarification and additional information pertaining to fresh versus saltwater rearing residualization rates.

Milt - You are correct that there are lots of probable causative factors and little research having been done. That is certainly a part of the problem. Note that I did not attribute all of the decrease to only seal predation. But I do believe that if seals eat salmon (as well as what salmon feed upon) and if seals in P.S. consume some 30 million pounds of food per year it is reasonable to assume there is a much greater adverse impact than when there were 200 seals eating roughly 400,000 pounds. Even if only 1% (pure speculation and for math purposes) is from the delayed release blackmouth program that would be 300,000 pounds per year which equates to a lot of sub-22 inch fish. We can't simply ignore the 800# gorilla at the table when looking at the future of this program.