Stillie gamefish opportunities.

[Smalma]

Just got off with the NOF PFMC morning update call.

Current the proposed Stillaguamish game fish season is now the same as last year, that is opening September 16th below Cicero. It is hoped that the monitoring will produce similar results as last year, if so maybe we might be able to look at some sort of season expansion (area and/or time). The main stem opening will still be delayed to September 21, gives better access to coho..

Curt

 

[speedbird]

I’m with you on that
I don’t think we’re going to need to worry about that however.
Maybe chinooks on the Stilly is just not going to happen / ever

Seeing how no one wants to make the necessary habitat changes to allow that stock to recover, I wonder if we should just put the stock on hatchery life support like certain Atlantic salmon stocks are kept and just give up on the wild fish coming back. Preserve the stock for future generations benefits, but acknowledge the reality that they will never reestablish

 

[Dr. Magill]

Seeing how no one wants to make the necessary habitat changes to allow that stock to recover, I wonder if we should just put the stock on hatchery life support like certain Atlantic salmon stocks are kept and just give up on the wild fish coming back. Preserve the stock for future generations benefits, but acknowledge the reality that they will never reestablish

I’ve been thinking along those same lines

 

[Matt B]

Seeing how no one wants to make the necessary habitat changes to allow that stock to recover,

I'm curious, in a perfect world, what are your suggestions for necessary habitat changes that would allow the Stillaguamish Chinook to recover? Are they in any way actually possible? Are they even a choice?

 

[Dr. Magill]

The Stilly has taken its share of hits
The Oso slide was the last of some real stressors as far as my simple mind knows .
Maybe it just isn’t able to rebound - at least as long as humans are around.
Stock the shit out of it and let the people fish!!

 

[Matt B]

The Stilly has taken its share of hits
The Oso slide was the last of some real stressors as far as my simple mind knows .
Maybe it just isn’t able to rebound - at least as long as humans are around.
Stock the shit out of it and let the people fish!!

Right. I don't think there's a lot that can be done for the Oso slide and its habitat impacts, other than wait.
But your other comment, about as long as humans are around, that's the interesting part. What can humans do? Completely abandon the entire Stillaguamish Valley, and stop fishing the Sound, Strait, and Pacific Ocean for salmon? Would even that save the stock?

 

[HauntedByWaters]

Right. I don't think there's a lot that can be done for the Oso slide and its habitat impacts, other than wait.
But your other comment, about as long as humans are around, that's the interesting part. What can humans do? Completely abandon the entire Stillaguamish Valley, and stop fishing the Sound, Strait, and Pacific Ocean for salmon? Would even that save the stock?

I think the Stillaguamish Tribe would be fully supportive of that.

 

[Buzzy]

Right. I don't think there's a lot that can be done for the Oso slide and its habitat impacts, other than wait.
But your other comment, about as long as humans are around, that's the interesting part. What can humans do? Completely abandon the entire Stillaguamish Valley, and stop fishing the Sound, Strait, and Pacific Ocean for salmon? Would even that save the stock?

Cool off the ocean, sayonara "blob", somehow get invasive warmer water species to stay where they're supposed to (mackerel?)..... decent snowpack in the Cascades (Olympics, Rockies) that doesn't come off all at once post spawn, and on and on and on..... I have one other suggestion but got the snot kicked out of it once before so we'll let that one go.

I'd love to see Central Washington's rivers reopen for a chance to swing a fly for steelhead. With hatchery plants almost abandoned in hopes of wild stock repopulating, I don't see the rivers opening anytime soon as I don't see wild fish coming back in big numbers. I hope, I wish. Man, I love the Methow.

 

[Smalma]

According to the 2017 report "Geomorphic Response of the North Fork River to the State Route 530 Landside near Oso, Washington, (US Department of Interior, US Geological Survey - Scientific Report 2017-5055"

"Based on this estimate, landslide material accounted for about 30 percent of the total suspended sediment load in the lower Stillaguamish River between March 2014 and September 2015..." In other words, the 570 thousand metric tons mobilized past Stanwood in suspension in the study interval came from the slide with approximately twice that amount of material came from sources other than the Oso slide. It is hard to imagine that every year landslide failures produce the equivalent sediments as two Oso slides.

Couple that with dramatic increase in the magnitudes of the floods (two related?) it is not too hard to imagine a potential underlying factor in the basin's Chinook difficulty in recovery.

Curt

 

[Matt B]

Perfect! It's just as I suspected. All we have to do is change global climate and change the geology and geomorphology of the Stillaguamish Valley, and we can bring back Stillaguamish Chinook. There must be a Bipartisan Infrastructure Law or a Climate Commitment Act grant for that, right? Maybe Floodplains by Design would support re-routing the Sauk back down the Stillaguamish. Or how about just a little bit, can we break off a piece of that Sauk hydrology for the Stilly?

 

[Tom Butler]

I hate to admit it, but our family was part of the logging industry in the Whitehorse area. The photo's in the old albums are horrifying. I'm surprised anything survived.

 

[skyriver]

I hate to admit it, but our family was part of the logging industry in the Whitehorse area. The photo's in the old albums are horrifying. I'm surprised anything survived.

How old? If it was WAY back then that area got the shit kicked out of it again in the 70s and 80s. I went to college at WWU in Bellingham. 86-91..ish.

I would get so irritated sitting in the Viking commons (overlooks the bay) watching ship after ship of raw logs headed for Japan. I never quite got the math on that one. Like, WTF people? How can shipping raw logs to Japan be more profitable than processing them here?
If there are decent answers, I would suspect they are only decent because of some other economic short-coming on our part. So much for us being the badass capitalistic country.

So now we finally have the logging thing WAY more controlled and river habitat is pretty damn decent (Stilly obvious possible exception), but the ocean is warm, there's tire dust leaching into lower rivers and the sound, terns, seals & sea lions or some other mysterious shit are killing them out where they used to thrive. It's completely flipped. So even if we go back to the hatchery model, they don't come back in numbers to justify it.

Sorry, rant over.

I'm going to go tie some more carp flies....

 

[Tom Butler]

Sorry, rant over.

No, it's OK, we got to learn from the past and can't forget lest we repeat the mistakes. I think the pictures I saw were from the 1910's and 20's probably. Grandma had been the teacher at the Oso school for a number of years, but they moved to and she taught in Ballard during the depression.
Pictures like bank to bank log rafts and jumbles, dynamiting log jams, and barren hillsides.

 

[skyriver]

No, it's OK, we got to learn from the past and can't forget lest we repeat the mistakes. I think the pictures I saw were from the 1910's and 20's probably. Grandma had been the teacher at the Oso school for a number of years, but they moved to and she taught in Ballard during the depression.
Pictures like bank to bank log rafts and jumbles, dynamiting log jams, and barren hillsides.

Oh sorry man, my rant was not directed at you. Just a general state of steelhead rant. Haha!

Despite everything, it's so cool you have those family pics. I wish I had more of my family from that time period. Those people knew what work was!

 

[JohnB]

So now we finally have the logging thing WAY more controlled and river habitat is pretty damn decent (Stilly obvious possible exception), but the ocean is warm, there's tire dust leaching into lower rivers and the sound, terns, seals & sea lions or some other mysterious shit are killing them out where they used to thrive. It's completely flipped. So even if we go back to the hatchery model, they don't come back in numbers to justify it.

Man, as a fish biologist that works in habitat restoration I'd highly dispute that river habitat is anywhere close to damn decent in the PNW. There are some exceptions but not many in the area I work.

 

[Salmo_g]

Right. I don't think there's a lot that can be done for the Oso slide and its habitat impacts, other than wait.
But your other comment, about as long as humans are around, that's the interesting part. What can humans do? Completely abandon the entire Stillaguamish Valley, and stop fishing the Sound, Strait, and Pacific Ocean for salmon? Would even that save the stock?

Closing the Stilly to all fishing (mainly sea run cutthroat and some steelhead) to protect the threatened Stilly Chinook means keeping the river closed for the next 100 to 150 years. It ain't coming back in any appreciable human time scale. I've advocated to anyone who will listen that the most reasonable course of action for Stilly Chinook - assuming no one wants to write them off to exterpation - is for the Tribe and WDFW to continue to propagate Stilly Chinook in hatcheries, as the Stilly Tribe has been doing since 1978, on the off chance that the habitat will recover enough some day for the Chinook to become naturally self sustaining once again. Meanwhile, letting the recreational fishery continue for SRC, steelhead, coho, and pink salmon will have no measurable effect, positively or negatively, on the sustainability or recovery of Stillaguamish Chinook salmon. Foregoing all other human activity for a recovery of Stilly Chinook is a fool's choice.

 

[speedbird]

Closing the Stilly to all fishing (mainly sea run cutthroat and some steelhead) to protect the threatened Stilly Chinook means keeping the river closed for the next 100 to 150 years. It ain't coming back in any appreciable human time scale. I've advocated to anyone who will listen that the most reasonable course of action for Stilly Chinook - assuming no one wants to write them off to exterpation - is for the Tribe and WDFW to continue to propagate Stilly Chinook in hatcheries, as the Stilly Tribe has been doing since 1978, on the off chance that the habitat will recover enough some day for the Chinook to become naturally self sustaining once again. Meanwhile, letting the recreational fishery continue for SRC, steelhead, coho, and pink salmon will have no measurable effect, positively or negatively, on the sustainability or recovery of Stillaguamish Chinook salmon. Foregoing all other human activity for a recovery of Stilly Chinook is a fool's choice.

How do you think saltwater Stilly impacts should be managed? Someone I know on the Puget Sound Sport Fishing Advisory group is of the opinion that we should stop clipping hatchery stilly fish to allow a larger "wild" run, and increase the amount of unmarked impacts we get from that fishery

 

[Matt B]

Closing the Stilly to all fishing (mainly sea run cutthroat and some steelhead) to protect the threatened Stilly Chinook means keeping the river closed for the next 100 to 150 years. It ain't coming back in any appreciable human time scale. I've advocated to anyone who will listen that the most reasonable course of action for Stilly Chinook - assuming no one wants to write them off to exterpation - is for the Tribe and WDFW to continue to propagate Stilly Chinook in hatcheries, as the Stilly Tribe has been doing since 1978, on the off chance that the habitat will recover enough some day for the Chinook to become naturally self sustaining once again. Meanwhile, letting the recreational fishery continue for SRC, steelhead, coho, and pink salmon will have no measurable effect, positively or negatively, on the sustainability or recovery of Stillaguamish Chinook salmon. Foregoing all other human activity for a recovery of Stilly Chinook is a fool's choice.

Thanks for responding to my straw-man argument/discussion question. I think it reinforces my point that there aren't realistic "habitat changes" in the Stilly that anyone "wants to make" or more correctly, has the choice to make, that will save Stillaguamish Chinook. The situation stinks.

 

[charles sullivan]

The current management paradigm does not take into account the actual realistic impacts to the Chinook. it does not account for the whether trout fishing will actually impact chinook. It doesn't look at whether the habitat can support mmore Chinook. It does not look at whether there will be more of less poaching.

The lack of a season is about how the impacts are allocated to each fishery. Reality does not matter.

If the paradigm or process of paper fish alllocation is not changed then the outcome will not change.

 

[Salmo_g]

How do you think saltwater Stilly impacts should be managed?

I'm not sure that any management alternative for marine impacts would have any relevant or meaningful change to the status of Stilly Chinook. Under present environmental conditions, and the conditions that have persisted for the last few decades, Stilly Chinook cannot even replace themselves most years. Absent the Stilly Tribal hatchery, the population likely would have blinked out years ago. PS marine impacts can't begin to matter as long as AK and BC impacts are not as severely restricted as PS impacts are.

The practical question is: since the Stillaguamish watershed cannot support natually self-sustaining Chinook, why are we pretending to manage for an outcome that is impossible? I don't want Stilly Chinook to be extirpated. They are a cool population and genetically very similar to Skagit summer Chinook. So protect them by maintaining a serious hatchery program for as long as it can produce more than one recruit per spawner. There is a chance, albeit an outside one, that one day the Stillaguamish River could once again support natural production of Chinook salmon if harvest rates are controlled. And harvest rates will eventually be controlled, once Chinook are basically a thing of the past up and down the west coast and not worth the commercial investment to exploit.