wildmanyeah
Crew Member
Pretty ****** news, seen this posted on FB.
here was a Barkley Sound Roundtable meeting held today.
This was an extra meeting on top of the usual meeting schedule, it was not intended to be the official pre-season meeting - rather the purpose of this meeting was to discuss the challenges we have been having lately with too much of the harvest happening in June.
The low productivity from both lakes lately, but especially from Great Central Lake means that our June fishing plans have been harvesting more of the run that we had originally planned when we formulated the original June plan. Also, the in-river fishery has become much more efficient at catching fish, so its impact on the June fishery has grown. When the run size is large enough, this impact isn't as severe, as the escapement can catch up in July, and the other fishing groups can also catch up with their allocation in July.
With the smaller run sizes and reduced productivity we have seen lately, there isn't enough fish available in July and August to cover off the over fishing in June. We have come up with a number of options for fixing this problem, and the May/June fisheries are going to be reduced to protect the escapement until we can see that productivity has improved.
As you can imagine, the meeting gradually because a pre-season meeting, even though that wasn't the intention. The forecast for next year is very poor. The sibling forecast for next year is only 168,000 total return, and it has typically been the most accurate forecast model out of all the options. The pre-season run size we use for management purposes hasn't been finalized this year yet, but it will be below 200,000 adults.
With a forecast of under 200,000 there is no fishing. No commercial, no recreational, and although there is a small FSC allocation reserved even at that low run size, the indication so far is that the bands will not take any FSC this year either.
We were horrified at the forecast. The DFO has agreed that there should be enough early indicators to have a rough look at the in-season run size on June 18th - in the hopes that something positive could be happening.
Might as well get all the bad news out of the way, the preliminary Fraser Forecast is under a million adults, and historically this cycle year is the lowest abundance of the four, so don't expect anything positive to happen on sockeye at all this year.
here was a Barkley Sound Roundtable meeting held today.
This was an extra meeting on top of the usual meeting schedule, it was not intended to be the official pre-season meeting - rather the purpose of this meeting was to discuss the challenges we have been having lately with too much of the harvest happening in June.
The low productivity from both lakes lately, but especially from Great Central Lake means that our June fishing plans have been harvesting more of the run that we had originally planned when we formulated the original June plan. Also, the in-river fishery has become much more efficient at catching fish, so its impact on the June fishery has grown. When the run size is large enough, this impact isn't as severe, as the escapement can catch up in July, and the other fishing groups can also catch up with their allocation in July.
With the smaller run sizes and reduced productivity we have seen lately, there isn't enough fish available in July and August to cover off the over fishing in June. We have come up with a number of options for fixing this problem, and the May/June fisheries are going to be reduced to protect the escapement until we can see that productivity has improved.
As you can imagine, the meeting gradually because a pre-season meeting, even though that wasn't the intention. The forecast for next year is very poor. The sibling forecast for next year is only 168,000 total return, and it has typically been the most accurate forecast model out of all the options. The pre-season run size we use for management purposes hasn't been finalized this year yet, but it will be below 200,000 adults.
With a forecast of under 200,000 there is no fishing. No commercial, no recreational, and although there is a small FSC allocation reserved even at that low run size, the indication so far is that the bands will not take any FSC this year either.
We were horrified at the forecast. The DFO has agreed that there should be enough early indicators to have a rough look at the in-season run size on June 18th - in the hopes that something positive could be happening.
Might as well get all the bad news out of the way, the preliminary Fraser Forecast is under a million adults, and historically this cycle year is the lowest abundance of the four, so don't expect anything positive to happen on sockeye at all this year.
