Actually, the first move should be the complete elimination of all marine mixed stock fisheries on Chinook. Allow the fish to grow to adulthood, achieving full age and size. That would immediately provide the whales with food. Habitat restoration will take many years to provide relief.

Doing so will cost some harvest. Only those fish that are actually eaten by the predators are lost. The rest will be available in the terminal fisheries. They will also be larger and they will require less fuel per pound harvested to capture.

If we actually want to recover the whales, that is likely the only way to do it as habitat recovery will take too long and more will starve/abort.

With the tribes increasingly owning there own hatcheries, at what point can they claim ownership of the fish. While some incidental catch should be expected, at what point can they demand an end to target fisheries or reimbursement for the cost of these fish? Just throwing a wish out there to stop some of the taking of our returning fish. For years we allowed open range practices, but still considered the cattle, if branded, to be in private ownership. I see no reason why the oceans should be that different.

Talk to Alaska and BC about that one. There were efforts in the 70s for "Ocean Ranching" and the free-range harvesters shut it down.

For whatever reason, the commercials have never been open to any changes to the way they fish. I personally believe the mixed stock fisheries protect all harvesters from any accountability when overfishing occurs, and that's why they like that paradigm so much. If they agree to go to terminal fisheries, how much a given group of harvesters can take will be limited by how much actually shows up in their terminal area (as it SHOULD be, but...). In the open ocean, everyone just fishes until quotas are met, and we can't tell how distinct runs are weathering fisheries until it's too late to make corrections. I think they like it that way and will fight to keep it that way until they fish themselves out of work.

That's the Business Model alright. Then, the Gubmint will bail them out with disaster relief because the lack of fish must be caused by some "Act of Gawd" in the black box known as the ocean.

I am adding a link to a just published paper that examines chinook mortality tradeoffs between fisheries harvest and marine mammal predation along the west coast of North America.. Chinook recovery may be going as well as it can, it is supporting an ever increasing number of mammal predators of all sorts. This paper didn't account for bycatch mortality in trawl fisheries and didn't look at the Bering Sea.

Marine Mammals and Chinook

The marine mammals and birds don't have a choice as to what they eat. Most humans do. If we are unwilling to eliminate the marine mixed stock harvest, and this probably should include trawl based on what it appears to do the Yukon and other northern rivers, then we will have to kill the predators until their level balances with food supply and fishery removals.

Some sort of action is necessary if we want to avoid extinction of various animal species.

RG calls it dumpster diving, but I simply call it "data acquisition."

To quote a favorite Disney character, "It's what I do... it's what I live for."

So here's some historic evidence that the 100K GH 2012 fall chinook number I cited earlier is NOT a science fiction fantasy.

50-100K adult production from current habitat? Seriously?

Yah... you betcha! Look at what escapements in the 20-25K range could historically produce.



Except back then, they were virtually ALL caught in the terminal by locals instead of getting low-holed by AK/BC like they are today.

One of the really big holes in the above analysis is that the escapement for the teens is expected to be the same as the 80s.

There is no justification for that other than it can be used to support the current management.

Caught that footnote AFTER I posted the pic, CM

So yeah... the 22650 escapement number was "made up" for the 1910's dataset.

But ya gotta remember, they fished long and hard back then... 7 days a week for months at a time. It's certainly possible they were capable of fishing the runs down to escapements of 20-25K or even less.

Escapements of 23K producing runs of 70K is a recruit per spawner ratio that's barely over 3:1.... definitely in the realm of believable.

If true escapement was actually greater than 23K, it probably wasn't by much.

Perhaps. It will be used to justify high harvest rates. Also, the fish back then were older and larger. A female had more eggs. 20K in 1910 was radically different than 20K in 1980. Lots fewer eggs from the smaller fish, eggs buried shallower so more could be scoured on a given freshet.

Just disappoints me that rather made-up numbers will be used to justify current management.

Run size is an interesting term that may lead the reader to think it represents the number of fish in the run. The data eyeFISH shows clearly states that it is the harvest plus escapement. The older data is only the non tribal gill net harvest plus escapement. In this case it is shown as 78,901 in the late 1980's and 70,670 in the teen years.

There are a lot of fish that are not considered to be part of the run size. In the 1980's data there is no release mortality, no net drop out, no drop off, no pinniped harvest, and no ocean harvest. The data for the teen years also ignores tribal and recreational harvest. These missing fish could easily amount to another 30,000 actual fish produced by the 22,650 fish escapement.

A couple of years ago when 2-3% net drop out was added to the model, all the historic run sizes had to be increased.

When I was managing, the PS data bases we used were escapement plus PS net catch. Canadian, all hook and line, Alaskan were all excluded.

There are actually very few "data bases" that I am aware of that have the complete catch and fishery induced mortality included. Plus, even fewer have an annual analysis of the catch by stock so that broad assumptions are used for stock distribution.

While on the subject of catch accounting, I have been unable to find any coastal creel reports for GH this year.

Typically the creel crew reports on Westport, Johns River, 28th St, Cosmopolis, South Montesano, and Fuller ramps. This year? No report!

http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/reports_plants.html

Mebbe one of you knows where else to look, or perhaps there was a staff oversight in posting to the WDFW website?

Or mebbe they simply didn't do it?

I had occasion to launch at WP, Johns, 28th, S Monte, and Fuller.... ZERO checkers encountered outside of WP.

eyeFish, I have also been unsuccessful at finding creel count data this year. In my opinion the reason is that there were no creel counters. At least I never encountered one in my 17 trips to Monte, Cosi, and 28th street. Several others who fish often also noted the absence.

With apologies to Dr Emmett Brown " Data? We don't need no stinking data".

This whole fish accounting thing is interesting. When Managers only work with estimates of harvest plus escapement as a measure of run size they are assuming all other uncounted fish losses are a constant percentage of the run from year to year. Over the long term this must be a bad assumption relative to Canadian and Alaskan harvest of Washington fish.

In the short term, pinniped harvest seems to have escalated. This year in the Chehalis there were more animals that were smarter and more aggressive than I have ever seen before. I observed a number of chinook being taken by pinnipeds while being played. I also noticed that seals and sea lions appeared out of no where to chase and often successfully grab a released fish. Once I tried to recover a natural origin coho prior to release and had it taken out of my hand by a large seal. I am starting to think that released fish have a substantial pinniped mortality possibly greater than 50%.

Pinnipeds are certainly a problem for gill nets as well. A tribal fisherman fishing above Cosi claimed that he boated six fish out of 47 net encounters. Sea lions took the missing fish. My own observations suggest that 20% of drift net encounters are taken by pinnipeds and perhaps 50% of set net encounters meet the same fate.

If pinniped harvest is increasing, then run size estimates based on harvest plus escapement should be expected to overestimate the predicted run size. They would also be expected to overestimate escapement. Since WDFW will not consider modeling a conservative run size estimate reduction and plans to harvest every theoretically available fish, one would expect regular failures to meet escapement goals. How can this be good management?

WDFW answer will be.....NO MONEY.......but it tells me that whomever does budget for Region 6, this is not a very important item.

Soft Bite and others....

QIN netters have a netting schedule right now:

11/26, 27, 28, 29 and then 12/3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

I went to town yesterday, just to watch the "only net I saw", one on South side of river, by Swanson's.

1 young person was watching net ????? but he was also chatting with person sitting in vehicle.....cork line started bobbing, he continued to chat for a while....then went down to shove boat off.....WELL in that short period of time....sea lion came over, rolled over cork line, grabbed fish, went back over cork line, put on quite a show on "killing the salmon".....barked a few times, as if to say, "thanks for lunch, can I have another"???

Never saw any seals, yesterday, but there were 2 sea lions......

Assuming constant interceptions, even back then, was wrong from a biological sense but "worked" from an allocation and even conservation.

Escapement should be measured independently so removals by predators (pre spawn) has no effect on the escapement estimate. There are enough problems with how they do escapements anyway, but that's another whole thread.

Net dropout and release mortality should be included. They should be more or less real and not just "agreed-to".

Seals have increased and have learned to fish. In the 80s there were some I knew of in Dungeness Bay that actively fished gillnets.

IF achievement of the escapement target is the primary goal then fished planning starts with a run size, subtracts ALL mortalities, and when the harvestable number is accounted for the fishery is closed. We used to have net dropout as a number. That came off harvest. It can be done, but the short term would mean reductions in fisheries.

Just ask Rivrfshr what would happen to some gill net fisheries if the actual release mortality was accounted for as it occurred.