From my perspective / personal experience it was as crowded and chaotic as I have ever seen it, at least MA10. Kind of like bumper cars, boat edition. First time I have seen the most popular MA10 underwater land mass/fishing bank as hectic as it typically gets on the most popular underwater land mass/fishing bank in MA9. Just from what I saw: 3 boats with crossed downrigger lines, multiple instances of trollers snagging moochers / jiggers gear, multiple close calls to the point of people screaming/cussing at each other either cause their boats were about to crash or a hot fish was about to get into someone's oblivious trolling path or any other reasons. See picture below for example: you can see 2 boats next to each other trying to disentangle their downrigger lines/gear, another boat about to net a king, trollers going in between drifting/static jiggers / moochers. I for one fish for the experience, not a good one at this level of combat fishing.
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I don't think is that easy as going from 6 days to 3 days if we do away with staggered openers, we would agree that is a very dismall opportunity at this point, either way. The issue is low abundance of chinook stocks that act as a weak link for the rest of the fisheries (even if other runs are in a beter state, but can't be selectively fished in the ocean) and the fact that there is just too many people fishing! Compounding those issues, concentrating hundreds of boats/fisherman in relatively small areas and for short windows of opportunity inevitably leads to well know problems as seeing in other struggling fisheries.
Derby fisheries are ugly and dangerous, concentrate fishing effort and provide incentives for bad things to happen: misreporting, highgrading and discard mortality, accidents, in-season management issues; bad for the fish and bad for the fishermen. Back to the 6 days or 3 days, when we had concurrent openers the fishing effort was spread accross different areas, which meant that we often got either an open ended season that would end when quota was reached, or fixed say 3-day openers followed by re-evaluation of potential further opportunities and additional openers. This staggered approach all but guarantees there won't be additional opportunities as each area gets sequentially hammered and overharvested given the madness of a derby fishery and inability to have in season adjustments in such a short time. This year MA9 went 31% over the quota, based on
@Stonedfish post MA10 went 21% over the quota, those are not small overharvests for the adult quotas, but actually the largest ones by far since COVID for either area, closest one was a 9% over the quota for in MA10 in 2024, when MA10 had 10 days of king retention (3 days at first then many emergency openers of 3, 1, 2, 1 days respectively) whereas MA9 had a total of 7 days in 3 openers. I focused on MA9 and MA10 since those are the areas I mainly fish for salmon, probably simmilar issues for some of the other Marine Areas, at least from a quick look at them.
The writing is on the wall and we seem to be approaching the end of king salmon retention in several areas of Puget Sound, at least it would be nice to not have to fight for the last opportunities with all of us moving between sequential areas at the same time, probably better for the fish and for the fisherman.
