A fair-to-middling number of salmon fishermen will head for our backyard saltwater on Sunday morning, looking for blackmouth, as marine areas 8-1, 8-2 and 9 (Deception Pass to Edmonds) reopen to chinook retention.
Or maybe they won’t.
The winter blackmouth season may open Nov. 1 as scheduled, or not, depending on what Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife personnel heard Wednesday at a meeting of the department’s citizen salmon advisory council. A WDFW decision may have been reached as you read this or, if not, it will likely be posted by the end of the week.
Or maybe not.
State biologist Aaron Dufault in Olympia said that if state salmon managers decide to let the season open on Sunday as published in the current fishing regulations pamphlet, there will probably be no public announcement made.
So, about the only way to follow the situation is to monitor the department’s website, www.wdfw.wa.gov/fishing, or to call the Mill Creek office (business hours only) at 425-775-1311. No news means “let’s go fishing.”
The problem developed, Dufault said, when an unusually high number of sub-legal, 16- to 19-inch chinook showed up in parts of Puget Sound. Anglers also reported hooking and releasing a lot of chinook “shakers,” as they’re called, during earlier coho-directed fisheries in central Sound. This swarm of juvenile fish is composed of both wild and hatchery (fin-clipped) fish. When these sub-legals are hooked and released, there is a certain percentage of mortality, used by WDFW to calculate the “take” of wild chinook, just as if they were adult fish, caught and kept.
Hooking and releasing a sub-legal fish is called, in bio-speak, an “encounter,” and these encounters are “budgeted” when managers are setting quotas or guidelines for specific fisheries. Generally, the more encounters, the fewer adult fish allowed.
Dufault said the problem became apparent earlier this fall, when Marine Area 10 (Seattle-Bremerton) went to a fishery similar to those scheduled to open Sunday in our area. It took less than two weeks for anglers to use up 60 or 70 percent of the encounters budgeted for Area 10, and the fishery was closed.
“We don’t want that to happen again, so we’re trying to get out front of the issue in 8-1, 8-2 and 9,” Dufault said. “But if the season is opened in 9, given our current information, it’s unlikely that it would remain open in its entirety.”
Marine areas 8-1 and 8-2 are “on our radar,” he said, but Area 9 is the major issue right now.
There’s a wide range of methods to help deal with the problem, said Mike Chamberlain, longtime local angler and owner of Ted’s Sports Center in Lynnwood. Keep the season closed until the shakers disperse or migrate out of the area; set fewer fishing days per week; let it open for a week and see how the impact sets up, then make a longer-term decision; require gear, such as larger plugs, which would tend to hook fewer small fish, and others.
“My personal recommendation would be to keep the season closed until most of the wild fish leave the area,” Chamberlain said. “The danger, of course, is that it could remain closed so long that we wouldn’t get our full opportunity to fish.”
Curt Kraemer, Marysville resident, retired WDFW biologist and a member of the salmon advisory group, said the majority, but certainly not all, of the salmon fishermen he’s talked to seem to favor waiting until later in the winter to open the fishery.
Gary Krein, Everett resident, owner/skipper of All Star Charters, and fishing activist, takes a longer-range view.
“Regardless of how this immediate situation is resolved,” Krein said, “everyone — and that’s everyone — needs to help reduce sub-legal salmon encounters.”
He said that in his opinion, the best way to do that might be to adjust salmon tackle, either voluntarily or made mandatory. “Go to 5-inch plugs with 5/0 or larger hooks, or the bigger spoons with a 5/0 or larger hook,” he said. “If you have to fish a hoochie, tie it with a single 5/0 or larger hook and eliminate the trailing hook, and the same for herring — no tandem hooks.”
He admitted that the system could result in missing or losing a few larger fish also, but on the other hand eliminate a lot of the hassle of dealing with shakers.
Tackle shop owner Chamberlain said that if the season does open as scheduled, Area 9 seems to be holding some nice blackmouth and could offer pretty good fishing. A state test fishery produced a 17-pounder recently, he said.
Chamberlain suggests 4- or 5-inch Tomic or Silver Horde plugs in glow mother of pearl, flasher/hoochie, flasher/spoon or Kingfisher spoon alone, in white lightning, cookies ‘n cream, Irish cream, or one of the relatively new Herring Aid colors.
Drunken birds
State biologist Joe Hymer in the WDFW’s Vancouver office, comes up with the following anecdote: One morning in the summer of 1961, hundreds of crazed birds attacked the seaside town of Capitola, California. The birds “cried like babies” as they dove into street lamps, crashed through glass windows, and attacked people on the ground. Most of the birds were sooty shearwaters, a normally non-aggressive species that feeds on small fish and comes ashore only to breed.
The incident fascinated Alfred Hitchcock, who frequently vacationed in nearby Santa Cruz. He included newspaper clippings about the Capitola attack in his studio proposal for the movie “The Birds,” which appeared in cinemas two years later.
The agent responsible for the attack is now widely thought to have been domoic acid.
Yep — the same marine toxin currently delaying the opening of fall razor clam season on the Washington coast.
Big salmon and good deed
The WDFW solicits help from anglers willing to hook-and-line catch fall chinook brood stock at the Vernita and White Bluffs boat launches on the Hanford Reach portion of the central Columbia River, Friday and Saturday, 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. The normal season closes Oct. 31 on the Reach.
The Grant County PUD, the Coastal Conservation Association, and WDFW will have people and fish trucks at the two launches to collect the fish and transport them to the Priest Rapids Hatchery for use in improving genetics in the fall chinook program.
Fishing should be pretty good, since WDFW estimates some 200,000 fall kings will be spawning in the Reach this year.
The CCA is also running a derby in connection with the event; $25 entry fee; most salmon turned in per boat per day and for the entire event eligible for thousands of dollars in prizes.
For information on the broodstock collection, contact WDFW biologist Paul Hoffarth at 509-545-2284, or by email at paul.hoffarth@dfw.wa.gov. For more information on the event or the derby, go to www.ccawashington.org/kingofthereaach, or CCA Tri-Cities president Don McBride at 509-554-9202, or don.mcbride@live.com.
Chums open
Marine Area 10, Seattle-Bremerton, opened yesterday to chum salmon fishing, through Jan. 31, with a daily limit of two fish
Following the emergency closure of Area 10 to all salmon fishing on Oct. 19 (due to estimated total encounters of chinook salmon reaching the allowable limits for the area), WDFW biologists have continued to assess the most recent monitoring data from the area. Chum runs are predicted to return as forecast, and biologists estimate minimal impacts to chinook by opening to chum retention.
For more outdoor news, read Wayne Kruse’s blog at www.heraldnet.com/huntingandfishing.
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