Rating 2010-2011 Steelhead Season

[TedR]

Been an OK year for me, three fish in the freezer for a handful of trips. Never hit any one river when it was hot but managed to scratch out a few. I'd like to bank a few more brats before moving on to the Nats!

[mitch184]

Maybe so Danny. There were quite a few big brats that didn't make it into the reiter crack pipe around christmas Skagit were dinks for sure though. We were catching dollies that fought better and were bigger than them. Some real nice rainbows though in the mix, something I've noticed over the past 2 years.

[Canyon Man]

Best steelhead year I have seen in the last 10 or so and for me this is just the beginning. End of Jan. , Feb., and March are PRIME TIME.....ready Robbo?!

CM

[Robbo]

It's been a phenomenal year indeed. As soon as I get this house remodeled I'm ready to roll...just in time for March madness

[Canyon Man]

C'mon...if Nelly is letting the grass grow I am sure we can get you out for a midweek therapy session

[Robbo]

LOL..."letting the grass grow" was a good one. I'm not going to listen to my messages until early March. I don't even want to know what's going on

[Dan Carney]

I was wondering how they actually measure the river runs. Do they rely on hatchery reports, or is there another verifiable meathod to measure returns to specific rivers? I got interested in the Columbia river returns several years ago when some "!***#'s started talking about taking out the dams. The corps of engineers site for Bonneville dam has historic run data going back to 1938. I had been using it to decide when to go down to the mouth of the Deschutes. One day I had some spare time and turned the run data into this chart updated through 31 Dec 2010. There is some variation in the counting methodology over the years, but this represents good data on the runs.
The quality degraded a little when I converted it from excel to a jpg, but it is readable. I can email the excel file to anyone who would like it.
What do you think?
L8R
Dan

Salmon runs.jpg (25.67 KiB) Viewed 8880 times

[Robbo]

They use a combination of out-migrating smolt counts, adult spawner surveys, harvest/catch data from the recs and tribes, and habitat conditions (floods, flow data, etc.) to determine the wild steelhead run forecast.

Hopefully Smalma the "House Biologist" will weigh in on this, as he spent the better part of 40 years forecasting steelhead runs in the North Sound.

[Dan Carney]

That is kind of my point. How do they actually get the number of Out-migrating smolt, adult spawners, etc... Is someone out there watching or is it just someone's best SWAG? BTW what do you think of hte chart?

[Robbo]

The charts nice! Hard to believe there's an upward trend with all the bad news we always here. Definitely an upward trend on that chart though. Maybe we're getting slowly but surely getting somewhere.

They use big traps to catch the out-migrating smolts on their way downstream. Spawner surveys consist of hiking the tributaries and counting redds, jet boating and drift boating the rivers and counting redds, and when water clarity allows for it they use a helicopter to survey for redds in the late spring. Lots of boots on the ground and field work goes into spawner surveys. Less staff=less people to do this work.

Here's what a smolt trap looks like

smolt trap.jpg (40.37 KiB) Viewed 8874 times