the_chemist
Life of the Party
Unreal.
Stilliguamish system closure 10/9
- Thread starter the_chemist
- Start date
If I recall correctly, wasn’t the chinook encounter number something like just one recently?
SF
SF
I went to a FF club meeting this year regarding Deer Creek steelhead and the region bio said they didn't have the staffing budget to effectively monitor the S rivers. That could be the main issue we are looking at.
HauntedByWaters
Life of the Party
Where does all the money go? I don’t understand why it’s so expensive to open a river to CnR or fly fishing only.
Exactly. Our state agencies now struggle to conduct basic responsibilities despite hauling in record revenues. WDFW's budget is being sliced to go into social services, but even so the S rivers are not that hard to monitor.
Where to go with this one....
For starters, 10 of the top 12 highest paid state employees are psychiatrists. That's excluding UW and WSU positions.
That's 10 phsychiatrists who are netting an average of over $500K per year.
Our highest paid officials are dominated by social services, a sector that is inherently designed to eliminate itself, but yet keeps expanding and absorbing more and more of our money.
But yeah, we can't find the money to fund basic shit like fishing.
Salaries
fiscal.wa.gov
Creatch’r
Potential Spam
There was a warden parked in his truck on the opener at Haller. I dropped by there to see how many people would be salmon fishing on a weekday within sight of the water that was closed to fly only barbless trout and steelhead fishing because apparently people targeted salmon. I counted about 30 people from the foot bridge down the gravel bar and it looked like most were twitching jigs and I saw some bobbers drifting too. I asked the warden how fishing was and he said he’d checked 3 coho in the last hour. I said right on, when’s the NF opening again? He didn’t know.
I could see the NF from where I stood. Not far up that confluence I should have been able to go catch a cutthroat pretty quickly on a dry fly and would have been no trouble to salmon. Unsurprised kings were caught by people fishing salmon lures in salmon water. That’s kinda how it happens. Unsurprised it’s closed now.
It’s all bullshit.
I could see the NF from where I stood. Not far up that confluence I should have been able to go catch a cutthroat pretty quickly on a dry fly and would have been no trouble to salmon. Unsurprised kings were caught by people fishing salmon lures in salmon water. That’s kinda how it happens. Unsurprised it’s closed now.
It’s all bullshit.
skyrise
Steelhead
Non tribal recreational fishing gets stabbed in the back again and again. No surprise. Heck they dredge up any and every excuse to close the Snohomish system now. Oh but tribal netting is ok even for chum.
I can see this same garbage coming to the Skagit real soon. And check the chinook returns to the Wallace hatchery that we never had any opportunity to fish for.
I can see this same garbage coming to the Skagit real soon. And check the chinook returns to the Wallace hatchery that we never had any opportunity to fish for.
Serious question: why does the wallace hatchery exist at this point?
I've been feeling that way about a lot of salmon hatcheries for some time now. State tax dollars (yours and mine) are spent to raise hatchery salmon to mainly be caught in Canada, with most fish that return to Washington caught in non-treaty and treaty commercial fisheries. I want an audit that identifies how much it costs for each hatchery to put one Chinook or coho into the recreational creel. I think the cost is astronomical. Ergo, why fund WDFW salmon hatcheries?
In the new Washington state politik salmon hatcheries feed starving orcas and supply commercial and tribal fisheries.
Yes, they do supply commercial and treaty tribal fisheries, but they don't actually contribute much forage to Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW). Here's why: the vast preponderance of Puget Sound (PS) hatchery Chinook production consists of Green River origin hatchery Chinook. (Green River was the state's first PS salmon hatchery, so as other state hatcheries were developed, they simply obtained Chinook eggs from Green River, easy and expedient.) As a hatchery Chinook stock, the PS hatchery Chinook share a similar and narrow migration timing band, placing them in the SRKW foraging area during July and August, a time window when there are a lot of salmon present in the area. Further, we are told that SRKW prefer not only Chinook salmon, but large Chinook at that. Unfortunately, PS hatchery Chinook have been shrinking (likely the result of fishing and changes in the ocean food web) in size. Around 1980, PS hatchery Chinook averaged 17 pounds and 4 years of age; today this same stock of Chinook salmon averages 11 pounds and more age 3 than age 4 fish.
It's not that SRKWs don't eat PS hatchery Chinook, it's just that they don't eat very many of them. And a couple of years ago the WA legislature foolishly appropriate more of your and my tax dollars to increase the number of PS hatchery Chinook raised by WDFW, and WDFW disingenuously accepted the money and is raising the fish, and neither the whales nor the recreational anglers benefit much.
The bleeding heart whale sympathizers need to look at the time and locations where the whales are "starving." It's the spring and early summer months before the PS hatchery Chinook show up. (These Chinook may however, be contributing slightly to the northern resident killer whales, but those whales are doing just fine with their population increasing.) What the "starving" SRKWs need are more Harrison River and South Thompson River Chinook (they are wild, natural production fish, not hatchery), both Fraser River tributaries. The Harrison and S. Thompson Chinook are larger (average size = 25 pounds) and occur in the right place and at the right time when SRKWs are foraging there. But hell, should we expect people to think about what it takes to actually solve a perceived problem? Nah, let's just throw our tax money at the issue and go home feeling like we're making a difference, even when we aren't.