David Murphy and Marilyn Scanlan
Many of the various Salmon stocks make up the mixed stock fishery on Vancouver Island's west coast and when we look at the annual forecast we take a number of elements into consideration.
Southern Chinook Index
Alaskan Commercial Fishing Plans
Northern BC Commercial Fishing Plans
Abundant US bound Sacramento and Klamath River Chinook.
All of these play a big part in our success in Kyuquot and it's not always as simple as "abundant" stocks.
Southern Chinook Index:
The US and Canada have a treaty and joint technical wizards who put together pre season analysis, so the countries can plan to fish their defined allocations. The output of this work is called the Chinook Index. It's a baseline of a series of years that represent an average over time. All of the individual stocks that make up the mixed stock ocean fisheries are added up as a sum, then compared to the baseline as an index. So simply put 1 is the index and above 1 is higher than index and below 1 is lower than index. The Columbia River, Olympic Penninsula, Pugeot Sound, West Coast Vancouver Island, Fraser River and other Cdn stocks make up the "Southern Chinook Index".
This year the index is at 0.77 and while as a whole to Southern BC this means less "treaty" fish overall, but when it comes down to specifics this is where things can get magical.
Bonneville Dam Fish Cam - note that camera goes offline from time to time so check back.
The very abundant Columbia River remains today the most significant portion of the Southern Chinook index. Those fish migrate just outside our doorstep at Kyuquot, close to the continental shelf, which funnels these great migrations South. Our location will feel this benefit again this year.
We also have to look to the North of us to see what to expect for interceptions of Southern migrating Chinook, in the South East Alaskan and Northern BC Commercial Troll Fisheries.
Northern Interception Fisheries:
Alaskan Chinook are not included in the Southern Chinook Index. They are part of a different set of Chinook accounting books, as these fish stay in the North. Alaskan fisheries do have access to passing Canadian stocks and in particular West Coast Vancouver Island Chinook in the Alaskan fisheries. In years where Alaskan Chinook abundances are high, the impact on our WCVI Chinook can be substantial. This year Alaskan Chinook fisheries are being curtailed dramatically because of problems emerging with their own Chinook. In some places the fisheries have been cut by as much as 30%. This could mean significant relief to our Canadian Chinook which are traditionally heavily impacted by these fisheries.
Canadian Fisheries in Northern BC also intercept abundant southern migrating Chinook stocks, but the commercial fisheries are managed to catch ceilings, so the same principle applies to pass through.
South Migrating California Chinook:
Finally the real hidden gem in all of this is the "free" Klamath and Sacramento Chinook that are heading home to California. The reason I call them free is because they are not part of the US/Canada Chinook sharing plan because they just marginally come up into Canada and do not benefit Canada significantly. In our case they do benefit us and we know this by the coded wire tag data we collect and the simple large abundances of Chinook Salmon we frequent in years when those stocks are known to be large. This is another one of those high end years for both of these systems.
So all in all, based on our own in house projected "Kyuquot Index" this year our experience will be much like the past three successful years.
Murphy Sportfishing
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