Tribes and State look at Coho closure.

[Larry3215]

Most of the current problem is ocean conditions, the warm water blob, El Nino, maybe global warming. It is all about Krill, which is the beginning of the food chain. The Krill die off with warmer water, which means a drastic decrease in baitfish... Herring, Pilchard etc. with an obvious bad effect on salmon. Juvenile salmon also feed on Krill. Witness the really puny, underfed Coho we had last year. If this continues there wont be Coho to catch by anybody, nets or not. Chinooks aren't as adversely impacted because their life cycle is further north and more inshore, thus they are further away from the warm water blob. But if this continues, Chinooks will eventually get impacted as well.

JMHO

Thats a good point. However, the more environmental conditions deteriorate, the bigger the impact netting - by anyone - will have on the diminished returns. Bad environmental conditions just reduces the margin for error as far as how well the salmon runs can tolerate over fishing.

[sickbayer]

Thanks to cat food and such we take out over too millions tons of krill.20years ago only 20million tons. We can release a billion smolt every year but if there isn't any food there bait themselves.

[ifightnerdz]

The tribes quota is based off the commercial catches. They take a fraction of their 50% allowance. The method used by the tribes to catch the salmon are different than sport fishing of course. Are they worse than 2 boats dragging a Gill net a mile long? Not really. Are they better than SLV infested farms which devastate non farm salmon stocks?

My point is there are bigger evils to the salmon equation. Both the tribes and sports fishing is comitted to a positive fishery. The commercial industry is not.

[BARCHASER10]

Sounds like everywhere in Puget Sound including Sekiu is a dead duck this year. Once the government takes something away I have my doubts is will ever come back.

http://wdfw.wa.gov/news/apr1516a/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[sickbayer]

Sounds like everywhere in Puget Sound including Sekiu is a dead duck this year. Once the government takes something away I have my doubts is will ever come back.

http://wdfw.wa.gov/news/apr1516a/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I gotta laugh at blaming the government. What else were they to do, should we fish till there isn't a single thing left.

[BARCHASER10]

You trust the govt more than I do.

[Let's_Go_Fishing!]

It's like Curt Smitch revisited. Anyone here remember that fishing and hunting debacle?

[GTeye]

Sounds like everywhere in Puget Sound including Sekiu is a dead duck this year. Once the government takes something away I have my doubts is will ever come back.

http://wdfw.wa.gov/news/apr1516a/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I gotta laugh at blaming the government. What else were they to do, should we fish till there isn't a single thing left.

The stocks will never be replenished enough for them to get their paws out of it.. it's about power, always has been and always will be.

No one is talking about fishing until nothing is left.... just look at how they run their statistics, if you tell the fish trackers at the dock that you released something they mark it down in their little book and it basically gets counted as a dead fish... they have an agenda and how they get there doesn't matter to them and how it impacts us, the people, doesn't matter one bit.

Everyone here is all for keeping the fishery in good condition and thriving but from what I see here in WA area it was much like it was on the east coast before I moved out here, the actual status of the fishery doesn't really matter.

[Mike10gs]

I really wish I would have read first what was going on before buying license package. I just gave them my money, besides that I'm also for closing all fishing if it really means EVERYONE, which I doubt it will. It is frustrating to not be able to go catch atleast 1 salmon having bought the license. They should put a hold on even selling to salt license.

[BARCHASER10]

When all this started, and the Coho run was predicted to be awful, I thought...so what else is new. I moved to Seattle in 1980, owned a boat and immediately started fishing local rivers and the salt. Since I've lived here Coho runs have always been very cyclical and related to El Nino ocean conditions. This is nothing new. But the tribes saw this as an opportunity to get us off the water. They want to look like big conservationists to the general public. Since these days, the general public is dumber than a bag of rocks, the general public prob buys it.

To confirm my thesis I looked around for historical Coho stats. I couldnt find stats so I sent a Email to the WDFW. I've found the WDFW to be very responsive to requests like this. The WDFW guy sent me an Excel spread sheet, 10 columns and broke down into 7 geographic areas along with an analysis (copy below).

Suspicions confirmed. The run this year is typical of an El Nino year. The State and the Feds all know this Indian stuff is baloney but I doubt they can do anything about it given the power of the tribes. I cant reproduce the whole spreadsheet here. But I did copy the right hand column total run size for the Sno system. I chose the Sno because it is the biggest run. Stats for the other geo areas all show the same cycle trends as the Sno system. Take a look, pretty obvious isn't it?

If you want to see the whole spreadsheet send me a PM with your actual Email address on it. The WDFW guy does note that since Jan the ocean is starting to cool off some.


113,965 1981
108,611
204,816
170,765
178,975
256,066
312,280
208,717
223,342
245,492
164,417
171,582
99,397
245,362
195,404
114,743
125,124
202,918
95,405
224,434
394,953
249,161
218,217
358,424
164,566
113,274
159,887
79,347
148,811
55,876
145,018
210,027
197,640 2014
NA


I can definitely help you with that. I’ve attached the Coho run reconstruction dataset which adds harvest from preterminal and terminal fisheries to escapement estimates to produce a total runsize. This dataset runs from 1981-2013 and I’ve added in preliminary data from 2014. Unfortunately we don’t have a full run reconstruction for the 2015 return as of yet. From the data I have seen, it looks as though the return may be in the ballpark of 200k but that’s just a rough estimate at this point. This number will be refined as the run reconstruction is finalized. You can see a graph on the 2nd tab in the spreadsheet which also has some notes for the last couple years since the data is preliminary or not available.

Anyhow, the last strong El Nino’s to take place were in the winters of 82-83 and 97-98. The 1999 return following the 97-98 El Nino was the lowest return prior to our preliminary estimate for 2015. One thing to keep in mind is that the low return we had in 2015 was not necessarily the result of El Nino but instead is thought to have been caused by the ‘warm blob’ which started in 2014. The ‘Warm Blob’ was a large body of warm water caused by a persistent ridge of high pressure over the North Pacific which limited mixing of the surface water. This lack of mixing is what caused the surface waters to warm up since the cool water found at deeper depths did not get mixed with the warm shallow water. The remnant warm water from the warm blob along with the strong El nino conditions have left the pacific quite warm, but those conditions have been cooling off sense January or so but they are still above average in many areas (see attached SST graph). I hope this helps answer your question and if you have any further questions, please let me know.