Adams R sockeye return

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We go every four years and last year was supposed to be a peak run. I know timing is everything but last fall was a dismal showing. Not sure where to find the numbers but best run we’ve seen was 2014. It was huge.

Correction: we saw more fish 2010-bigger fish 2014. Bigger fish obviously were chinooks mixed in the bunch
 
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We go every four years and last year was supposed to be a peak run. I know timing is everything but last fall was a dismal showing. Not sure where to find the numbers but best run we’ve seen was 2010. It was huge.
I agree-I went with my daughter--we had been many times before--we were really underwhelmed!!!
 
same, but I would have guessed 2014 had more, based on the huge numbers I saw staging in the lake which I didn't remember in 2010.
 
2002 was far bigger than 2010, big numbers from late September through the better part of November in 2002 while 2010 had the standard Oct weeks that were good. This year’s return was good but the viewing wasn’t great due to significant changes in the lower river.

Cheers!

Ukee
 
Adams river came approx 1.3 million below anticipated return. The run like many systems was a few weeks later than the historical average
 
Wife says no, I was correct the first time. Oct 12 weekend 2010 we saw more fish.
Oct 12 weekend 2014 saw a lot of fish bigger than they were in the 2010 run but not as many. Timing Is everything though so that doesn’t mean anything really.
 
Makes sense, Dept of whatever they are, allowed over netting in 2014 and will soon wipe out the last good cycle run, just like they are doing in Alberni. Congratulations on another F Up and caving into the big money. What ever happened to " fish first"?
 
Ukee[/QUOTE]
2002 was far bigger than 2010, big numbers from late September through the better part of November in 2002 while 2010 had the standard Oct weeks that were good. This year’s return was good but the viewing wasn’t great due to significant changes in the lower river.

Cheers!

Ukee
The 2002 run had more than 30 million? Here’s a fun fact, the 1991 run had less than a thousand. And people blame DFO for not being able to predict science.
 

The 2002 run had more than 30 million? Here’s a fun fact, the 1991 run had less than a thousand. And people blame DFO for not being able to predict science.[/QUOTE]

I’m referring to escapement to the river, 2010 wasn’t impressive on the spawning grounds and most folks with familiarity with this stock will tell you DFO and the PSC fudged numbers in 2010 post-season reporting because they’d built up expectations so high. Since 1994, the 2010 escapement to the Adams River wouldn’t be in the top 10 of abundance on the spawning grounds, likely barely in the top 5 since then.

1991 is outside of the dominant/sub-dominant cycle and only a few thousand sockeye back to the river in the two non-peak years of the 4-year cycle isn’t atypical.

Cheers!

Ukee
 
Between two boats working in the lake there was somewhere around 600,000 sockeye removed and sold to Walcan 2018 season. I thought DFO was concerned about the Adams River stock, hence stopping commercial gill netters from their fishing opportunities? Wierd.

They stopped the gill netters because they ran into the Coho window, The allocation was then given to the AREA B seine fleet (who then fished up the reminder of the AREA E/D gillnet quota). The Lake seine allocation i believe is a separate program.

sorry heres the quote

"The Area E allocation shortfall was reallocated by DFO to other user groups. The Economic Opportunity and Treaty fishery (which is meant to have the same harvest guidelines as the general commercial fishery) was allowed to continue fishing until the September 4th even though the last opening for Area E fishery was August 21. The EO fishery caught 112% of its share (253,368 vs. 226,443). The commercial seine net and gulf trollers fished until September 27, mopping up the remainder of all uncaught allocations at the mouth of the Fraser River."
 
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The fishery in Kamloops Lake, and in some years Little Shuswap and Shuswap Lakes, are part of the Fraser River FN FSC fishery (BCI) in the table shared above. While I’m no fan of the lunacy that overcomes DFO every time there is abundance of Fraser sockeye (they screw the comigrating weak stocks of chinook, coho and steelhead every time), the only group that harvested a smaller percentage of their allocation were the demonstration fisheries.

Not sure what your source of info is but harvesting 600,000 fish from any of those lakes is no easy task and couldn’t be done covertly, so no way it wasn’t accounted for. Also begs the question who was harvesting and for what purpose? While the local FN do harvest and use the fish harvested this far upstream I have many friends who are TIB, LSIB and Adams Lake FN and none of them want more than a few for their smoker. These fish have been out of the Ocean for 3+ weeks by the time they are schooling in Shuswap Lake, having swum up through the Fraser Canyon and Hell’s gate and the Black Canyon on the Big T ... they are not a high quality fish. Even the rec snagged fish in the Big-T, while there are fresher fish in the mix, the majority are well past their prime.

Cheers!

Ukee
 
The fishery in Kamloops Lake, and in some years Little Shuswap and Shuswap Lakes, are part of the Fraser River FN FSC fishery (BCI) in the table shared above. While I’m no fan of the lunacy that overcomes DFO every time there is abundance of Fraser sockeye (they screw the comigrating weak stocks of chinook, coho and steelhead every time), the only group that harvested a smaller percentage of their allocation were the demonstration fisheries.

Not sure what your source of info is but harvesting 600,000 fish from any of those lakes is no easy task and couldn’t be done covertly, so no way it wasn’t accounted for. Also begs the question who was harvesting and for what purpose? While the local FN do harvest and use the fish harvested this far upstream I have many friends who are TIB, LSIB and Adams Lake FN and none of them want more than a few for their smoker. These fish have been out of the Ocean for 3+ weeks by the time they are schooling in Shuswap Lake, having swum up through the Fraser Canyon and Hell’s gate and the Black Canyon on the Big T ... they are not a high quality fish. Even the rec snagged fish in the Big-T, while there are fresher fish in the mix, the majority are well past their prime.

Cheers!

Ukee

they already start to color up in the ocean can't image taking one 3-5 weeks later

upload_2019-1-11_9-41-52.png
 
The 2002 run had more than 30 million? Here’s a fun fact, the 1991 run had less than a thousand. And people blame DFO for not being able to predict science.

I’m referring to escapement to the river, 2010 wasn’t impressive on the spawning grounds and most folks with familiarity with this stock will tell you DFO and the PSC fudged numbers in 2010 post-season reporting because they’d built up expectations so high. Since 1994, the 2010 escapement to the Adams River wouldn’t be in the top 10 of abundance on the spawning grounds, likely barely in the top 5 since then.

1991 is outside of the dominant/sub-dominant cycle and only a few thousand sockeye back to the river in the two non-peak years of the 4-year cycle isn’t atypical.

Cheers!

Ukee[/QUOTE]

Were you there in 2010? Or 2002? Or any other dominant return year to have a point of reference to compare against? 2002 was huge, 2010 was bigger, and since then it has been much more modest on the dominant year. The only river I've ever seen in the last 15 years that compares to the Adams 2002/2010 is the Chilko in 2010 or the Lower Shuswap in that same massive 2010 return year. This notion that 2010 was not a big year and numbers were fudged is not factual.

As for the Kamloops Lake fishery, it is the Secwepemc First Nation that harvests under a commercial license. This is allocated catch that would have otherwise occurred down in the lower river or ocean, so it is not targeting co-migrating weak stocks in fact it is avoiding them. The fish are not silver at that point, definitely colouring although nothing like what they look like at the Adams.

http://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/fraser/docs/escapement/2010NearFinals.pdf
 
On the Adams every fall multiple days / week since 1994 and 2010 was an avg year at best in the Adams proper. In 2010 the schools of staging fish off the mouth were modest at best and were gone by last week of October. By comparison, in 2002, there was such a backlog of fish off the mouth from the last week in September until well into November there were masses of fish that at times extended miles out into the lake, literally as far as you could see there were finning and jumping fish. PSC built up the “run of the century” for months and DFO did there part in fishing the f—k out of it, but it didn’t materialize liked they’d hoped but they had dozens of excuses for why the various counts didn’t support the bold predictions. Don’t get me wrong, 2010 was still a pretty decent dominant cycle, just nowhere near The numbers back to spawn In the Adams R compared to 2002.

Cheers!

Ukee
 
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