Snohomish System to Close 10/3

[JayB]

Sounds like returns are way below previous years and expectations for this year, and from what I've heard the marine sport catch went way over the quota.

Hopefully the fish are just late and there'll be news about a re-opening soon.

 

[Smalma]

I less concern about whether there will be a re-opening and more concern that given the great catches in the salt (the number of unmarked coho estimated to have been caught in MA 8-2 is more than 250% of the expected catch) will limit the Snohomish wild coho to levels below that which would trigger an "over-fished" status. That over-fished status is trigger if the 3-year Geometric mean of wild coho escapement falls below 50,000. A quick check it looks like if the 2026 Snohomish wild coho escapement is less than 43,000 (pre-season forecast was 75,800) that over-fished status would be declared.

I think most can remember the difficulty the recent over-fished status for Snohomish coho caused in attempting to schedule coho fisheries in MA 9 and/or MA 8-2.

Curt

 

[skyrise]

What BS. Total Incompetence. So mismanaged the salt fishery and now the river fishery suffers. Way to go. Another failure by WDFW. And is the salt fishery still open ? And they say under escapement last 2 years ? So why was salt fishery open with liberal limits ?

 

[JayB]

I less concern about whether there will be a re-opening and more concern that given the great catches in the salt (the number of unmarked coho estimated to have been caught in MA 8-2 is more than 250% of the expected catch) will limit the Snohomish wild coho to levels below that which would trigger an "over-fished" status. That over-fished status is trigger if the 3-year Geometric mean of wild coho escapement falls below 50,000. A quick check it looks like if the 2026 Snohomish wild coho escapement is less than 43,000 (pre-season forecast was 75,800) that over-fished status would be declared.

I think most can remember the difficulty the recent over-fished status for Snohomish coho caused in attempting to schedule coho fisheries in MA 9 and/or MA 8-2.

Curt

Bit puzzling to me that the WDFW wasn't able to compile the catch data in a more timely manner and make 8-2 mark selective like area 9 when there were clear signs that the unclipped catch was going over the quota given that they had access to the fish-counter data from the ramps and electronic catch-card data.

Seems like so long as they took the appropriate precautions to avoid double-counting fish reported on the app that were subsequently counted at the ramp they'd have a fairly good real-time estimate of how many fish of what type were being retained in which Marine area and could change the regs accordingly. Must some reason why they aren't that isn't apparent to civilians.