phone up maynard and the salmon commission and get the numbers yourself. Seriously you have 275,000+ participants that is less than 2 fish per person. Why so unbelievable. I am a poor at best sports fisherman and took 4 last year.
The Chinook angler average catch for 2011 will come out to be less than 1%, and actually probably will be closer to .053% per fishing trip. There really is no need to contact Jeremy Maynard, if one would just read what was actually written by him? Here let me help you out once and for all and maybe stop with that 500,000 BS number and this is the actual article written:
The Ardent Angler : 2011 chinook numbers are impressive
Jeremy Maynard , Campbell River Courier-Islander
Published: Tuesday, January 17, 2012
With the arrival of the new year the finalized accounting of the 2011 fishing season catches is finished and the results published. There may be small adjustments to come but these will be minor and in no way substantially alter the current understanding of what was caught where or when and by which separate fishing group.
Many recreational fishermen, me included, thought 2011 was one of the best years overall for chinook salmon in southern British Columbia for some time and now the finished catch data supports that impression. In this vast area, which in DFO accounting is the area between Cape Caution and the border with Washington State and includes the Fraser River, the
aggregate recreational chinook salmon harvest last year was approximately 195,000 fish, an impressive total to my way of thinking.
Of this over 138,000 were caught along the west coast of Vancouver Island. Because part of this broad area falls under management provisions arising from the Pacific Salmon Treaty (PST) the chinook harvest,
by all user groups, is divided into two categories: aggregate abundance-based management (AABM) and individual stock-based management (ISBM). Although there are seasonal exceptions, as a generalization these can be considered respectively as outside and inside the surfline.
I don't have the historic catch data but I'm thinking the 2011 WCVI recreational chinook catch might be a record, or close to it. At 78,000 fish certainly the AABM or offshore catch was, with especially strong results from the southwest area between Nitinat and Tofino. In addition to abundance, weather conditions were generally more favourable last summer, without the relentless westerly winds that so characterized the previous season, allowing anglers to more consistently head out into open water.
As the word aggregate would imply in this context, the stock composition in the offshore area is highly mixed and in fact on average, across the years and by all gear-types, about three-quarters of the chinook caught there are US origin fish hence the overarching PST management provisions.
Inshore the strong ISBM catch of approximately 60,000 chinook salmon was driven by higher than forecast returns to the terminal areas adjacent to the three main WCVI hatcheries - Robertson Creek (Stamp River), Conuma River (Nootka Sound) and the Nitinat River. Good news as this was, it contrasts with another low chinook return to the more numerous smaller and frequently unenhanced WCVI rivers. Why there should be such a disparity in their relative performance is something of a puzzle but until a sustained rebuilding trend with these smaller chinook stocks becomes evident the complex suite of time and area recreational fishery regulations along and inside the surfline will remain.
With some local exceptions, overall chinook fishing in Johnstone Strait and the Strait of Georgia was good last year, totaling about 40,600 fish between Port Hardy and this side of Victoria. The catch in Juan de Fuca Strait at 16,700 chinook was a little below the recent five-year average, in part caused by the suite of regulations designed to lower the harvest of passing Fraser River stocks of concern in the spring and early summer.
In 2011 anglers in the Fraser River lost the first two and a half months of their traditional salmon season once again and for the second year in a row salmon fishing in-river was prohibited until July 15. However, thanks largely to another very strong return of summer-run chinook to the Thompson River, anglers in the Fraser watershed caught just over 16,000 fish.
Switching to coho salmon, the contrast in fishing success between the west coast of Vancouver Island and the inner south coast in 2011 was even greater than with chinook. In the stretch from Victoria to Quatsino Sound anglers retained approximately 65,000 coho, mostly adipose fin-clipped fish but also some wild coho from some areas inside the surfline. In addition another 111,000 coho were released. If to those who only wet a line in the Strait of Georgia these numbers seem almost like those from yesteryear, I can vouch from personal experience the kind of fishing that lead to their creation.
Conversely, in the stretch from the east side of Victoria clear up to Kelsey Bay, including the mainland side of the Strait of Georgia, the assessed retained catch of coho last summer totaled about 1,200 fish, all adipose fin-clipped, with a little more than twice as many released. Thinking back to the 1970's and '80's and recreational harvests that sometimes reached a million coho, with a substantial commercial troll catch in addition, it is hard to believe we're talking about the same area. More than a dozen years after the coho harvest was all but ended around the inner south coast this stock complex stubbornly refuses to bounce back to anything like its former level of abundance.
Along the upper part of Johnstone Strait and the associated mainland shore (areas 11 & 12) the coho catch was somewhere in between the two previously described areas; at about 6,000 fish it was a little higher than the recent five-year average.
Switching briefly to Fraser River sockeye and having previously described the disaster that befell the Early Stuart run in 2011, in total the Fraser sockeye return was quite a bit larger than the mid-point pre-season forecast 3.17 million fish. As well, once the freshet subsided somewhat all the other sockeye stocks had good in-river migration and spawning conditions.
Bearing in mind the usual four-year cycle of these fish it is worth noting that, in the 80 plus years of consistent assessment for Fraser sockeye, the early summer stock return in 2011 was the second largest on this cycle line and the summer stock was the fourth largest in the time series. Something to celebrate and hopefully laying the foundation of a productive season in 2015!
In finishing, it was disappointing to see DFO Minister Ashfield was in BC last week and yet not a word regarding halibut allocation. For the west coast marine recreational fishery no decision is more important and it can't come soon enough.
© Campbell River Courier-Islander 2012
