Final WB comm report distributed today shows baywide coho catch was 23% of expected. Some of this was clearly driven by effort (lack thereof when folks KNOW fishing sucks!) but the catch shortfall still speaks volumes about runsize, regardless.

Final chinook comm catch report shows total baywide harvest at 50% of expected.

There's still fish to catch. let's open it 24/7.

Isn't that what they do when there are fish still "to be caught" in the ocean?

Thought I'd share this graphic of historic aggregate GH chinook escapement performance relative to goal.



Emphasis on AGGREGATE basin wide goal (Hump plus Chehalis combined). Note that the goal has only been met once in the past 5 years... even with the CTC-approved e-goal reduction approved in 2014.

Of particular significance is year 2012... which was the first year of the modern-day MEGA wave of big regional returns from north-migrating chinook stocks. Yet GH somehow still failed to make goal. Why? Because the exploitation rate on GH chinook that year was 86%.

You heard it right.... 86% mortality directly attributable to fishing. Enough to finally put GH on the radar at PFMC as a stock subjected to overfishing (ER > 78%).

So putting this into bigger perspective, the escapement of just under 14K that year represented only 14% of the adult return (excluding any allowances for natural predation by marine mammals). Extrapolate that number and you get a run-size of 100K wild GH chinook!

100K!

The available chinook habitat in this basin is WAY MORE than capable of producing healthy returns of fall kings. It's just a matter of finding a fairer way of getting a few of them back for the home team.

Here's another example...

The graph shows the 2013 escapement at roughly 12K. PFMC showed an ER of 0.76 that year... meaning the 12K escapement represented 24% of the adult return. Do the proportionate math and you get an unfished adult run-size of 50K.

Wrap your mind around that for a second. A 50K adult return fails to meet the e-goal of 14.6K.

The horribly disjointed management of this stock permits over 3/4 of the adult return to be intentionally killed thru fisheries and ultimately fails to meet the basinwide MSY e-goal. More astounding yet is that GH is subsequently REMOVED from the official list of stocks subjected to "overfishing".... YGTBFK, right?

So it begs the question, "What level of exploitation would it actually take to consistently produce MSY escapements?"

I contend that it's gonna have to be a LOT less than 78%. How much less? Who knows.... but let's look at 2014 to get a better idea.

According to the graph, 2014 escapement was roughly 11.2K. ER that year was posted as 47%... meaning that the 11.2K represented 53% escapement. Total unfished run-size works out to 21K.

So at run sizes that small, getting down to a 50% exploitation isn't even enough to meet the e-goal.

..

In the setting of this stock chronically failing to meet the e-goal, having a fixed ER-benchmark of 78% before making an "overfishing" designation is utterly preposterous!

The allowable exploitation rate MUST be adjusted downward SIGNIFICANTLY. Moreover, it must be adjusted downward in PROGRESSIVE fashion at smaller run sizes.

How is the exploitation rate documented? Maybe the “expected “ fish where a miscalculation. Not challenging the validity,just clarification.

Chinook Technical Team is the number-crunching body for the Pacific Salmon Commission/Treaty.

Their analysis is the result of inputs from local fish managers up and down the entire West Coast from Alaska down to California. They produce an annual report documenting exploitation and escapements for most of the major salmon-producing arteries contributing to PST fisheries. While many others are available, here's their 2017 documentation....

http://www.psc.org/download/35/chinook-technical-committee/7949/tcchinook-17-1.pdf

http://www.psc.org/download/35/chinook-technical-committee/8195/tcchinook-17-2.pdf

What makes anybody think that 14-15K is anywhere near adequate for GH???

There is so much available spawning area that goes unused.

Thanks for the links. Kind of sickening to see the actual numbers.

Here’s an interesting tidbit

Although Puget Sound indicator stocks have largely met their agency management objectives (i.e., exploitation rate ceilings) for the time period under consideration, none of them have CTC-approved escapement goals against which trends can be considered.

The current CTC-sanctioned goal ( an MSY goal derived by WDFW/QIN) actually has NOTHING to do with what the habitat can realistically support. It just happens to be the one that can sustain the MAXIMUM harvest possible.

But as we can all see from the data posted above, the PSC/PFMC/QIN/WDFW management structure lacks the discipline to stay within the level of exploitation necessary to achieve even that paltry MSY goal.

If I were Fish Czar Supreme for the day, and the management paradigm was somehow able to be conveniently switched from MSY to MSA (maximum sustainable abundance), we would likely see escapements in GH triple overnight.

Hey... if a guy's gonna dream, he might as well dream BIG!

Triple??? [Bleeeeep!], we're at 5-10% of pre-rape and pillage. Might not even be able to see much effect from tripling.

I bet that most folks think, as I did, that MSY management is somehow based on the biology and ecology of the fish. It is really nothing more than applying economics to fish. What is the MINIMUM investment I am forced to make in order to Maximize my returns. Kinda Wall Street view.

We were in "Fish Managers" training once and the instructor showed that by making a modest increase in escapement that harvest would be more consistent because managing to MSY (or anything) as a point should be missed low half the time. Most there argued against putting in the cushion since those were "harvestable" fish.

Another time, a group of us was trying to define OSG (Optimum EG) with optimum including a cushion, some ecological bennies, and so on. We just, at that time, couldn't come up with strong enough arguments as all the Stakeholders wanted every one of "their" fish.

Damn Doc we need more holidays so you can dumpster dive for facts! Good job guy. In this whole mess we have one saving grace. The Alaska & BC marine fisheries are mostly mixed stock and most is lower 48 bound fish which includes PS bound. Now this is soooooo bad in so many ways but the the saving grace part? Killer whales in PS as they have become dependent on PS Chinook to survive and the data is piling up as numbers spiral down. Sooner or later a judge is going to drop the hammer to stop the whale losses from nutrition then all hell breaks loose. PS your going to take the 10 count but for the coast of WA & OR it is the only thing that will force a change as noway nohow the managers stones to do so be it tribal, state, or Fed. It will take a decade or more to just undo the mess Mr. Anderson left and he still in the mix making a mess out of things. Again it will only stop when things get bad enough to force the courts hand. Sad but true.

Hey CM the changes in whales diet cause & effect?

Love the chinook discussion...

BUT...

Switching gears a sec to draw attention to chum. This piece from the 2014 policy... which is now close to its 4th Anniversary.... beyond initial lip-service seems to have been all but forgotten.

To promote improved management of chum salmon, the Department shall include in the 2015 annual review an evaluation of options to improve chum salmon stock assessments. The Department shall subsequently initiate in 2015 a review of the spawner goal for chum salmon.

With the advent of ObamaCare, Medicare reform, and the loss of a local eye surgeon colleague in recent years, my real job has become something far bigger than full-time. The unfortunate casualty is less time to be fully engaged in fish management.

Recent works shows that the Pinnipeds (Yay Larry) are really chowing down on juvenile salmon. When the whales and pinnipeds are added together, they take more than humans. According to da Feds.

Apparently the SRKW's rely heavily on Chinook because , evolutionarily, they were big and abundant. Down here, we don't Have Chinook, and are working hard to eliminate the other species. The whales are rather fixed in their diets. We have also gotten rid of rockfish, cod, and who knows what else. Further north, the overall abundance of fish allows the whales access to food. Should be noted that Japanese whaling in the 50s resulted in the transient Killer Whales shifting to Sea Otter for a short time. That ended fast as there aren't enough otters to support many whales.

IF Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd get involved then maybe we will see some relief for fish down here. Too much money involved in the fisheries to actually restrict them meaningfully. Plus, those fish have to eat something and we are trying to harvest every little beastie we can find.

We know how many chum to at least start with as a goal. Since they are probably the foundation of the GH and WB ecosystems.

But, economic mamagement says their only value is ex-vessel so lets kill more.

Boy, we are a jaded bunch these days... And rightly so!

Yeah when the GHMP was adopted I and others had been all over there asses about the systematic elimination of Chum in the upper basin by fishing to MSY. As I recall they were going to study it and get back. I doubt if much was done with all the usual excuses. Now the one you will not hear is that staff at the policy level really and I mean really do not want to do that. I mean document and publish your failures? Not the WDF&W way. They are more rope a dope and wait for you to die or give up. Does not effect their pay in the least. Failure that is..

Just trying to get some of this stuff back up on the front-burner and fresh in our advisors' minds as the Policy comes up for another annual review... BEFORE the NOF process starts in earnest.

We worked very hard to secure all of the elements of that Policy. It's just too easy to let the details fall by the wayside.

Anyone else see any critical issues that have been left behind?

Always nice to be recognized!

Seriously, it is important to recognize ALL of the factors impacting recovery and that the loss to a wide variety of predators (not just pinnipeds) is having the most adverse impact. Conversely, it is also important to recognize that fishing is having a comparatively much smaller impact all factors considered.

That reality becomes even more critical when looking at how to significantly improve the availability of food for ESA listed Southern Resident orca.

Sure, many (non-fishers) will say to just further reduce or even eliminate harvest of Chinook; the low hanging fruit. Well, that fruit has been pretty well picked over and the predation problem persists or has become even more pronounced. The law of unintended consequences looms large; additional reductions of particularly recreational fisheries will further reduce license sales and the dollars necessary to operate hatcheries producing Orca food. I can hear the toilet flushing now.....

In its November 2017 edition The Reel News published an article entitled "Seven Keys to Unlocking our Fisheries" over Ron Garner's byline. In that article stats were provided showing that the Chinook output of Washington State hatcheries dropped from 23,302,293 in 1989 to 9,308,019 in 2016. That represents a drop of just over 60% in output in the face of increased predation.

Now, back to marine mammal predation in Puget Sound. Here is a link to a recent scientific article addressing the impact of four marine mammal predators: https://www.researchgate.net/publication...om_1970_-_2015.

Draw your own conclusions as to what needs to be done.