Salmon Fishing Seasons In the Pacific Northwest

Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome to another addicted fishing podcast, man. We are cranking these things out because we're trying to get some studio time in because we know come August, we ain't going to get much studio time. It's going to be go time. August. We're going to be doing live fishing. We are sitting here. Like, I feel like it's like the eve of buoy 10, but it's still like a week out. Kind of feels like that. Actually, I feel like I still have time to get stuff done. Like there's, there's, there's, there's plenty of stuff I need to do. I know I've been moving everything over. It's been like a week now that unfamiliar voice will from or familiar voice is mr. Bill Monroe jr. He's joining us today. I got Eric Swanson in the house. Join us for the live feed. But last week we had, uh, Ryan Lothrop and Quentin Doherty from the WDFW and we had a really great discussion on like what kind of goes into a run forecast and what, but we're going to break down another, that was fantastic. By the way, it was really cool. Those guys coming in. I got some really cool plans for them. We don't quite have that yet, but we need to figure something out. Because if Washington is going to like totally support this, Tucker would probably be, if you're listening and if he's, which we know he's not, but if he's not sending it to him, like we want to get to one of the easiest approachable dudes out there. So he's well-spoken. We need to get him on here. The more, the more the anglers know what's going on. And the idea of this, the whole thing with them was to bring them in, put down some like groundwork and get some basic like foundation to where like people kind of understand where like forecasts and runs and stuff kind of come through and then how start, like how much really goes into it. They don't just pull these numbers out of their who has and fricking figure it out. You know what I mean? Like they got a formula behind it, right? Right. There is actually a method to this. And there's a lot that these guys do in the background that they don't. Well, the in-depth like numbers crunching and like studies, like it was a lot, all those different stocks, all the catches and everything up and down the coast before they even get here, everything is taken into account on these mixed stock fisheries are ultra hard to manage. I don't want their job. I hope you guys know that. I actually always commend them on every meeting where everything is like, dude, you guys are flipping amazing. Thank you. It was really cool listening to how I was just not getting it right. But like we were talking, we talked a lot about the sock guy and like how humble they were. And they were like even making jokes like, you know, if, if we knew better, our, our seasons would be for our numbers. They'd be closer. Yeah. The numbers will be a little closer. And he was kind of laughing. I mean, cause cause after all it is. Yeah. I mean, you're predicting fish coming back from the great Pacific ocean, right? It's hard to, it's hard to predict, but I want to get, do you want to talk about the weird fish in the room? The one Oh, oh yeah. But I was gonna say, and we should probably discuss that is the toolie conversation. And he, we touched on it a little bit. Like I didn't want to make, even though they're Columbia river manager, didn't want to make the conversation Columbia centric. And by the way, just real fast. If you guys don't watch our live feeds and don't check out our YouTube channel, shame on you. But if you go back to our YouTube channel, you can actually see the discussion we had with these guys from the WFW should be there on the, if you just search WDFW discussion on our YouTube channel, addictive fishing, you will see it. But within that, they talked about toolies and talked about like release mortality and like why we have a hatchery only like one of the tools, you know, that they can use to, you know, with a constraining stock fishery, they can kind of like keep fisheries going. We're seeing this up and down the coast. Last week we talked about the Marine area foreclosure. And since we were in here just this week, we had a restriction in Marine area one and a restriction in Marine area too, because we're catching too many shut up. So pretty, pretty crazy watching this season unfold and watching what's going on. And then I also know last week we talked about a little bit like with buoy 10 and kind of like our thoughts and ideas going into it where we had, we have a colder Columbia river and they're going to move in and then maybe shoot up the river and that we weren't going to spend much time. And of course, then, you know, then, then, and then God said, you know, we're going to give you guys some heat. Now here's a hundred degrees for 10 days, right? What's that? Yeah, that's going to, you know what you were just talking about? This parking lot talk a block, you know, forming somewhere between tongue point in St. Helens. You know, I can totally see some, some tides not able to kind of make that water work. So you know what that means? Oh, better fishing in the estuary. Right. We thought we were maybe going to have a river fishery early, but now the way it's shaping it, because we know from last June that, uh, you know, a week of, you know, a hundred degree weather will crank that temperature right up to 72 73. We had one 16 last June and it was hot when it was miserable. It was, it was miserable. Well, efficient was pretty, but then it paid, then it paid off. But I've, I've seen the Columbia come up four degrees in the last week. It's up to 67 now. So that's a good, well, so I mean that's a good sign. Now, when we look at things that aren't a good sign, the later seasons when temperatures hit 70, 72 sub matrices, we've got problems in survival. We've got cold water repairing zones, shut down, you know, they'll shut down the Sandy, the, the, the, the Washougal shoots, it all like could really suck. If, if it gets, if it gets too hot. And really what happens is those areas guys is they just get, they draw too many fish and the fishing gets too good. And the same thing that's happening in Marine areas right now, they were, if you catch too many of them and you start to put those numbers at us out of whack, they have to curtail the catch or else they have to shut everything down. And so in Oregon they have the cold water sanctuary things. But so going back to Tully's. So we're Tully, the Tully conversation guys with, with buoy 10, that's our constraining stock this year. And what we were kind of thinking was last week was like, Oh good. You know, without the thermal barrier, the Tully's tend to move through the buoy 10 fishery in the first two weeks. And really for those that don't know what a Tully is, is a Tully is a fall Chinook salmon, just as good as every other fall Chinook salmon out in the ocean. But the problem with the Tully, not the problem, but the difference with the Tully is that when it comes into the river, it's just closer to its spawning phase. It deteriorates very quickly. Yeah. Their fat in their body doesn't hold. It doesn't hold. They use it up very quickly. And that's why a Tully will kick your butt if you catch it because they'll expend energy like crazy. Now a Tully is a Canadian based waters Chinook. It's a fall Chinook. And we have this agreement with Canada. It's called the US V Canada, right? That's an actual treaty that we have with them. The Canadians have every power to go in and absolutely destroy our spring Chinook stocks, right? Because our springers are coming through their waters when they're returning to us, right? Those, we covet our springers. Oh yeah. So when those, so it's like a mediation, like we don't, so Canada says, okay, we won't mess with your springers. You guarantee that you will survive a certain amount of Tully Chinook propagation. And that's where we come up with exploitation marks. Some years at 6%, some years it's 10. This year it's 38% and that's really difficult to work around. What it is is like, like the spring Creek hatchery, like we've actually put hatcheries in and we actually supplement huge amounts of these fish. But within that there also is lower Columbia river wild stream Tully and going back to like the meat difference and whatnot. Like when they change physiologically, they are showing up into the river and spawning two weeks later. I don't care. I keep seeing all these pictures and everything from the east side. Like these, these fish cut great. These fish, I don't care what the color of the fish is. I don't care if it's dark or red or best fish that you can get is a fish that as far as the furthest removed from its spawning time or spawning place. Yes. So like that's why summer steelhead are so much better than winter steel because they'll kind of spawn around the same time. But in the summer show up six months earlier, Tully's when they're up in those Canadian waters are fantastic fish. They are amazing. They eat amazing. They fight amazing. They cut amazing. So people always want to put their nose up at Tully's, but it's like, okay, you're putting at your only reason why you're doing that is because it's almost like you're, you're, you're trying to catch a fish like on the spawning ground versus like out in the ocean is like kind of like with the Tully. Cause when they get here, they're just so close to spawning. Yeah. So that's where the, the, the, not the negativity, but where the difference really draws right now are upriver brights are, and some of our other hatchery stocks of above or some of our wild stocks up in the snake or our wild stocks of snake. Those fish still have hundreds of miles and maybe even a couple, two to three months before they spawn. So that's why when we, when we see them in the booty 10 fishery, they're such a quality fish. They're that far removed from that. And they're actually called upriver brights, not because the outside of the fish, but because the inside of the fish, the meat's good. Tully's get a bad name, but Tully's, if we catch too many of them, we kill too many of them. They shut our fishery down. And like I said, when they show up those first two weeks of August, they, if we whack on those too hard, when our brights and our upper river stocks start showing up about the second, third, fourth week of August, if we don't have Chinook, okay. Remember all those little tiny constraining stocks that were within the whole run that they had to break down. If one of those LRH, BPH, there's upriver brights, there's lower river Tully. You have a ton of different fish. This is river, mid river stocks. This is that Nick stock fishery manager I was just talking about. I mean, I don't, it's ridiculous. There's like 14. Yeah. It's a 14 stocks. I was going to say, I know it's got to be around a dozen, if not more. The middle river holds like five, the lower for hold six or five. We catch too many of a percentage of one of those stocks. They could potentially shut it down. Especially if it's an ESA stock. Even though we're catching all these hatchery, all these hatcheries Tully's, what happens is, is those hatchery Tully's do represent a percentage of wild Tully's that we are catching and releasing. And by catching and releasing a few, even though it's a hatchery only fishery at the start of the season counts as a mortality, still apply mortality. So let's break this down real quick. You have all these hatchery fish that are, it's hatchery only fishing for the first 24 days. And this is why it's important to let them go when you can, even the hatchery fish because those hatchery fish, when they come in, let's say, let's say that they are understanding, well, I don't even know how to really explain it, but let's say you bring in a percent. Let's say you bring a bunch of hatchery Tully's in and it's a ton of them. That was hatchery Tully's represent. And then you're not only, not only does the hatchery Tully's count as a mortality for each fish, right? But the wild, it counts. That's right. So it has within the sports surveying and not, and they also know that all you guys lie out there. So there is a number, but they do, they actually have a calculated number and they have indicated you have an actual understand what the unclipped rate is. Now every fish that gets released is not a wild Tully too. So like, but out of all those unclipped stocks that are present in the river, then there's a percentage of those that are actually the true wild Tully's. Well, those hatchery Tully's that you're bringing in to the Marina are representing those wild fish and inadvertently representing that one out of every five of those constrained stocks that we're actually killing. That's why the fishery is hatchery only because if it was, you know, 100% mortality, basically right now, if you don't kill wild Tully's for every wild Tully you catch or exceed for every five, you catch one die. If it's a wild Tully fishery, or if it's a wild fishery and you bring one in, well, that's a hundred percent. So you get this, you get this buffer against those wild Tully's and that's now what the season, what happened last year was they made it hatchery only till the 10th and it wasn't long enough. And so when we went in on the 11th to start bonking wilds, a whole bunch of them fricking wild Tully's showed up and then it actually limited the fishery because the fishery was supposed to go to labor day. Cause that's how they try to make, they always try to manage the buoy 10 August 27th and shut it down a week early again. So this year now it's the 24th. Yeah. The States have came in and they said, whoa, we're not doing that again. No. And I'm glad they're not. Because I am too actually, because actually this is, this is actually going to help us get through what we have actually planned. We're going to get through the end of labor day. What happened last year is they shut down buoy 10 while everyone bumped up to the next section. Cause that's what we do. And smacked him in the mouth of the cowlitz. And then that whole ball of Tully's we were beating on out of buoy 10, just moved up. And then we had a huge effort shift. And that effort shift is very unpredictable, but it absolutely is detrimental to like how many fish are trying to avoid catching when you put the whole fleet. And they shut us down. They shut us down early up there too. So they had to go up to Bonneville and then back to home. They shut us down up there too? Yes. Remember that? So it sends a ripple effect up the river. Yeah. We're going to be talking, you guys are going to see tons of Tully talk in the discussions and in what we're talking about. And the bottom line is, is that if you're at buoy 10, and this is, this is like what I, and this is what I tell my clients, I don't really have a problem with you killing hatchery Tully's. Fishing's tough. It's a hatchery fish. It's a legal fish to kill. It really is. But if you're down there like, and you are trying and you're down there for a few days and fishing's great, which I'm hoping it's going to be with what's going on with the ocean phenomenal. So, but fishing's great. And you're seeing fish caught, just be selective. If you catch a fish, that's a little bit darker, a little more Brown on the outside. He does have a spotting mid ocean, short tail, beak, jaw, leopard, leopard print. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or a big old hook job. Very pronounced lower teeth. He very, very prominent. Have fun with it. Catch it. But if you have the option, let's just, you know what? We've tried for years. We've Bill and I have screened their character. We've all screened about till we're blue in the face on the wild. I won't, I draw the line on the wilds. Like when it's wild season, like LRW is one thing, but I don't care. That fish has to be LRW is a protector, but LRH is now coming into effect, which is lower river hatchery. That is just one of those things. We just got to curtail. We got to curtail it. Yeah. If you have the option to be selective, but one thing with this year, it's kind of funny. We're going to tell you all to be selective, but I guarantee you like the BPH number, like the spring creaker number is huge, big, big. Their numbers were actually, so we're going to see a lot of hatchery fish in the, in the, in the fishery. But you know, be selective, be smart. And then when it goes to wild only, and just, you know, if you're fishing all you guys, I'm going to call you out. All you guys up at the mouth of the couch, y'all screwed it up for us last year. You all did. There was more wild tag recoveries out of seven out of the pallets. All you rainier boys. I'm just teasing. Actually, I'm not kidding. That was the actual thing. You really have to be selective in the middle river. Cause that's what's going to hurt us because that fishery is actually open for wild all the way up. So we really, I almost want to put a, have a Dickie signs at the ramps or something about it this year. I don't know, but so, but, but, Oh, that's a big one. Right. Killing it. I don't even think they fall back limits. Let alone they're not getting checked is what you're saying. Keep it that way, boys. Just kidding. Don't do that. Oh boy. Let's, uh, let's try to be a little more selective this year. You're going to hear us talk a lot about it. Something to think about, something to think about, because I think just like the Marine areas, there's going to be a ton of fish this year. Oh yeah. So go easy, go easy on shaping up to be that way, but enjoy it. Enjoy it. Thanks for tuning in guys. If you guys real fast, if this is still July and you guys have heard this podcast, don't forget every dollar you spend on our addictive dot fishing website is enters you into a contest for 10 great giveaways, Kong coolers, gift certificates, uh, packages, uh, price packages from our manufacturers. So be sure to check that out. I'm hoping Clint has this out in July and if not, well then just wait for the next drop. You'll have to do it then. So thanks for tuning in guys. We'll see you next. Later.