When were the “good old days” of salmon fishing

[speedbird]

https://wdfw.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/01093/wdfw01093.pdf

For fun I decided to look at the oldest hatchery escapement report I could find. The total hatchery escapement was around 470,000 anadromous fish. The total escapement in 2020-2021 was around 500,000 fish. Looking at the oldest reg books I can find which date back to the 90s, the seasons for ocean going salmon seem to be more restrictive rather than less, with ocean chinook seasons in puget sound being essentially non existent until 2002 from 1995.

I’ve wanted to gain perspective and understand what salmon fishing used to be before my time, to better understand how it may change in the future. But from the limited data I’ve been able to find, I truthfully can’t find when that is

 

[Stonedfish]

I don't think you can just rely on escapement reports, because they don't paint the full picture of things back in the day.
Lots of places got stocked that didn't have hatchery facilities on them, so there were a lot of uncounted fish coming back. Those same places aren't stocked any longer.
You also had programs that produced excellent fishing in my opinion that are no longer around, like the resident blackmouth pen program.
I remember fishing the sound for years in the 60's and 70's without getting skunked. We always brought home at least one salmon plus all the other stuff you could retain and fish for back then that you can't now. I'm sure some others that are older than myself will chime in.
SF

 

[DimeBrite]

In recent times, 2001 was the banner year for silvers, chinook, and pinks in Puget Sound. Not just good numbers, but big salmon. Any year with >900,000 wild+hatchery silver salmon forecast is a very good year. Chum runs were ridiculously good in the 2000s until commercials pounded it to death in 2008. Salmon hatchery production was severely slashed during the Great Recession budget cuts and continues downward due to wild fish litigation and killer whale love. Netting at mouths of sensitive wild populations in small streams and rivers has been a killer.

In the past, you could catch salmon every month of the year throughout Puget Sound. Chinook and blackmouth in south Puget Sound were abundant. Winter blackmouth was a big deal. Big native coho returning late season to smaller streams and rivers put out 10-20 pounders. Much better quality of fish compared to today's average rezzie. Hell, you could catch steelhead off the beach Nov-March on certain beaches! So much has been lost.

 

[Stonedfish]

 

[VMP]

"If we do not change direction, we may end up where we are heading"

Fully realizing this has the potential to be derailed by our often lesser human polarizing tendencies, here some quick thoughts:

Our opinions and beliefs are likely to be biased towards our own individual experiences based on a relative short lifetime, we are prone to have issues with shifting baselines, so what was great for us may have been pretty bad for someone else a generation before, or even in our timeframe but in a different social/cultural/economic context. This affects not only our opinions and beliefs but also interpretation of actual data, if not put in the right context as mentioned by @Stonedfish.

It is clear that salmon fishing (and other fishing, gathering, etc) was outstanding for pre-Columbian native Americans, just take as part of the evidence the amazing art they had time to produce instead of using that time for calories procurement. Those probably were the good old days for some.

When Captain Cook and other early Europeans visited the PNW, they had tales of walking on top of fish backs in estuaries, rivers, etc. Those probably were the good old days for some.

People that fished the area decades ago but in more contemporaneous times also have amazing to our ears stories of salmon fishing "back in the day", friends of mine sold their boats when fishing for king salmon became more curtailed in recent decades.

It is clear that we are in a downwards decline for salmonids in the PNW, depending on the species/stock/area we have some years that are outliers on both directions of better/worse than average, but that average is a long-term declining trend. In the future, 2023 might be sort of a banner year for me, at least in some areas/species I fish, but that would pale in comparison to older times. And then again, I am fishing mostly out of my boat, while in years prior it was beach + kayak or with friends with boats and earlier just from the beach, so it is hard to compare even my own experience over time.

I personally don't think there is a good answer to the OP question on "when were the good old days", just a long-term decline in stocks and fishing opportunities, where just in my short PNW salmonid fishing I have seen Steelhead gone (mostly), chinook becoming the "new steelhead", coho becoming the "new king salmon" (look at MA10 regulations in years past and in 2023), maybe pinks becoming "the new coho" and so on.

I try to have hope, but do worry about what may be left for our kids and future generations.

There is quite a bit of scientific literature on shifting baselines on natural systems and their relationship with humans, some specific to PNW salmon, see example below, which could be summarized by this sentence in the Abstract: "Current salmon populations average 3% of 1950s–1960s abundances, which may have been 30% of precommercial fishery (1880s) populations.

Wild salmon and the shifting baseline syndrome: applicationof archival and contemporary redd counts to estimatehistorical Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) production potential in the central Idaho wilderness

 

[Jacob Watrous]

I think its relative.

1980s, for me. You could count on limiting in just a couple of hours, and sea runcutthroat were a plentiful and absolutely delicious food.

1930s-1960s to listen to my grandpa, with a short break between 1942-1945.

But, in 1889 there were no dams on any OP rivers, and the explorers on multiple expeditions complained about the number of salmon in the river keeping them awake with all the splashing, and how the average fish was only 30 lbs.

 

[wmelton]

I would recommend the book, "Heart of the Raincoast." It isn't about the puget sound, but not too far off.

 

[Smalma]

I agree that 2001 was an exceptional year for both numbers and size; especially pinks and coho. State-wide the total recreational salmon harvest was just under 1.1 million. The pinks were larger I had ever seen; personal my best fly caught pink was 32 inches (maybe 12#) with lots of fish 8 to 10# range. Several pinks in the 14 # range caught in north Sound rivers were brought to WDFW as potential state records. The coho were equally large with many fish in the teens, one of the checkers that year checked 5 coho over 20# (including 3 hatchery fish). That year the pink escapement in the Snohomish was over 1 million and the wild coho escapement was 1/4 million.

In my lifetime the best consistent fishing was probably the 1970s. Between 1971 to 1979 the statewide catches exceeded 1 million all 9 years. That catch was driven by ocean catches. In that period the west coast of Vancouver Island troll fishery was catching 1 to 1.6 million Puget Sound coho otherwise the Puget Sound catches would have likely topped the ocean catches.

The 2000s have been the era of PS pinks with run sizes exceeding those seen in any of the previous 40 years.

Something to keep in mind is in recent decades there were lot more anglers who were better equipped and with more time to fish

Curt

 

[Merle]

I don't have any facts or data to add to what others have already provided. But the "Good Old Days" phrase in the post title immediately made me think of this photo. Brown Point Salmon Derby in 1954. I love the small wooden boats they used to use in the sound.

 

[CRO]

In 1967 we boated 66 silvers for 20 people mooching out of Westport in under 3hrs. We proceeded to do this for days. Fish were 2 1/2 hr run north at 13knots.

 

[CRO]

Westport had about 150 charter boats with a 3 salmon season from mid April till the end of September.

 

[Nick Clayton]

I started Salmon fishing sometime in the 80s, and had a lot of great fishing growing up, but 2001 was the best I've ever seen personally. More focused on coho, but man they were big that year. Caught my personal best, 17.5 lbs, out of Sekiu that year and I personally put eyes on two coho over 20 lbs at the docks. Only time I've ever seen 20 lb saltwater coho. Man that was a fun year.

But as mentioned It's all relative. Growing up my step dad had all these photo albums full of black and white fishing pics from the 60s and 70s. He was steelhead obsessed, and many of those pics came from the Toutle before the mountain blew. Plenty of salmon as well. I spent countless hours staring at all those pictures and listening to the same stories over and over, always thinking how I had been born too late and wished I had seen it back in the good old days. Now I think back to that time when I was a kid and think "Man, we had it damn good back then".

2 summers ago in Westport I was talking to a big boat captain who had been chartering for 53 years. He told me that summer was the best coho fishing he had EVER seen. He said lots of guys liked to talk about certain years in the 60s or 70s where they thought it was better, but in his opinion they weren't factoring in the fact that today they have to release wild fish. He said they were coming back just as quickly with boat limits of fish that year, but were also releasing a hundred wild fish while doing it.

I'll never leave Washington, and as long as there are fish that will eat a fly I will continue to fish. I complain about our seasons and more and more opportunities being taken away as much as anyone, but I still fish an awful lot and catch plenty of fish. I can't complain too much, but it certainly doesn't stop me from dreaming about "the good old days".

 

[Stonedfish]

In 1967 we boated 66 silvers for 20 people mooching out of Westport in under 3hrs. We proceeded to do this for days. Fish were 2 1/2 hr run north at 13knots.

Always enjoyed seeing the “Salmon fishing capital of the world” sign while driving into town with my folks back in the 60’s.
SF

 

[Shad]

I don't know exactly when the good ol' days were, but I can confidently say they were long over by the time I landed here in 1999. Heck, even in the time I've been here I've witnessed much better fishing than what we get now. Since I arrived, we have lost at least half of what were my favorite fisheries then. I'd say the decline (at least in terms of recreational opportunity) has accelerated significantly since I arrived. I'd love to say that's because I caught them all, but yeah... that's just not the case LOL.

There are more things besides fishing I love about living around here, and my kids are all still here, so I'm probably not going anywhere. That said, I'm doing A LOT more of my fishing out of state these days, because the loss of all types of opportunity here due to salmon decline has been (and will most likely continue to be) nothing short of astronomical. I can easily imagine the day when all Washington freshwater that ever hosted a single salmon is permanently closed, and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if ocean fisheries were still open after that happened.

Salmon are incredible adapters given chance, but until we change the dynamics of how we harvest them, they simply won't get that chance.

 

[Dave Westburg]

My Grandpa was a Seattle dentist who took every Wed off to go salmon fishing. From the stories he told me I think the good old days for salmon were the 50's. My Ben Paris 1954-55 Northwest Hunting and Fishing Guide lists 155 boat houses on hoodcanal and Puget Sound. Remember Haines boathouse in Edmonds? In the good old days it day-rented 100 kicker boats for salmon fishing.

 

[SurfnFish]

https://wdfw.wa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/01093/wdfw01093.pdf

For fun I decided to look at the oldest hatchery escapement report I could find. The total hatchery escapement was around 470,000 anadromous fish. The total escapement in 2020-2021 was around 500,000 fish.

per my last conversation with #2 in Oregon Fish and Wildlife, what has really changed is the escapement return percentage. Warmer ocean currents = dispersed bait schools = lower survivability and smaller fish.
Whereas the return numbers do fluctuate, the size of the returning fish does seem to be in steady decline.
A fave river, the Nestucca, got absolutely hammered by guides and big sleds a number of years ago when it had the best returns on the coast going, outraging the locals who had never seen it before...convoys of 24' sleds trolling from tidewater to the upstream limit where the river literally only 20 yards wide. six to a boat pulling flashers and plugs, herring, etc, just hoovering the river, taking everything of a legal size including the prime broodstock. There was a definite marked decline in numbers and sizes of returns afterwards.

 

[IHFISH]

This book is one of the few things of my Dad's that I still keep around. I've enjoyed flipping through it since I was a kid. This thread had me leafing through it again after work and I didn't get much farther than the introduction, which touches on many of themes expressed here. Found it pretty interesting that it closes with some encouragement to check out bass fishing....

 

[HauntedByWaters]

My grandpa who died in 1997 talked about catching salmon year round. He knew places to get salmon fishing year round in a small boat just off the shore. My grandparents had an excellent beach house they sold way back before I was born. He worked at Boeing so knew some guys who were dialed. He wasn’t a great fisherman in his opinion, just had the gear and setups and guidance. Didn’t take it serious at all and caught a ton of fish. It was like crabbing today, you just get some gear in the water and you should get something.

 

[CRO]

My Grandpa was a Seattle dentist who took every Wed off to go salmon fishing. From the stories he told me I think the good old days for salmon were the 50's. My Ben Paris 1954-55 Northwest Hunting and Fishing Guide lists 155 boat houses on hoodcanal and Puget Sound. Remember Haines boathouse in Edmonds? In the good old days it day-rented 100 kicker boats for salmon fishing.

In the 70’s my friend and I would cart a 25hp outboard down to the Edmonds boat house. The boat was put on a rail car and we climb in and ride down the railway to the water. Mukelteo also had a boathouse that we used.

 

[SurfnFish]

"The largest commercial landings observed in California occurred in 1988 when more than
1.3 million chinook (14.4 million pounds) and 51,000 coho (319,000 pounds) were landed. The lowest landings occurred in 1992, an El Niño year, when only 163,400 chinook (1.6 million pounds) and 2,500 coho (11,300 pounds) were taken in the commercial shery."
The total commercial harvest of 177,334 fish in 2020 dropped by nearly 35% from the previous year (271,697), but was still the second highest total since 2013 and represented a 59% increase over the previous five-year average of 111,626"

Salish Sea returns..



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