Puget Sound Blackmouth closed again!?! What's the future of this fishery? 

Good call on the bigger spoons! Great question on whether to open or not. Maybe just a late February opener to keep the boats active. (I don't really fish blackmouth no more, so personally I'd be fine with no fishery to save the quota... but I know a lot of people look forward to it). Thanks for your service on the committee! I agree with your closing point.

Back in the late 80's Blackmouth fishing was open from October thru February. During that time I became aware of how many small fish were caught before a legal was landed. Many did not survive the hook. Iwrote to Fisheries managers and asked that they Close the fishery . They did for for a number of years, but it was reopened due to recreation dependent fishing business pressures.

You present some interesting information. The graph depicting fishing days vs years is very telling and points toward the much larger issue, with this black mouth fishing issue the most recent attack on public fishing. The graph is rather confusing and/or misleading. First, my assumption is the Y-axis is a sum of the fishing days for all areas in Puget Sound. Second, it is All salmon fishing and not only chinook, which has taken the biggest hit. Third, it does not include the data for 2022, which would be near, if not below the bottom line. Fourth, I assume it includes MA-13, which is open 365 days a year (well almost) because the numbers of salmon in that area is relatively very low. Bottom line, once something is lost or taken, it is never regained. This graph clearly shows this. And fifth, is there a similar graph for the non public angler?

Area 11 was closed after mid-July. We never even fished our local fall stocks which don’t even show up until the end of July. All of this was because of too many early summer sub-legal encounters. We gave up our percentage of fall chinook and pinks to the tribe and the Puyallup snag fishery. It’s ridiculous.

Wow those recreational costs per fish caught is insane.

good points ! agree! hopefully the season callers take up ur suggestion

WDFW need to add encounters to the Puget Sound creel reports so folks can see what's really going on..... They need to put all the cards on the table...... Area 10 opening to fishing Thursday thru Saturday...... There's lots of things they can do......

I am a strong proponent that the state should look into creating more runs of Spring Chinook. Enough stocks still exist of Puget Sound Springers to sustain a hatchery population I believe. These fish are generally bigger than blackmouth, were historically critical prey for the SRKW, and just might offer better bang for buck

How do they count the smaller fish against the quota?

Great video with explanation. Do you think you can do a video on halibut fishing and how to fish for them ? Or you do not fish for halibut

Maybe this is a dumb question, if there are so many Shakers, why do they need to be counted into the quota in the first place? The point of quota is to protect a limited resource, it seems right now the small ones are quite abundant and it does not seem the sport fisherman will make a dent on them.

Estimates of landed catch to date indicate that we have reached 54% of the total encounters (7,152), 55% of sublegal encounters (6,295) and 77% of unmarked encounters (1,089) agreed to in this year’s List of Agreed Fisheries (LOAF). Feedback from Puget Sound recreational anglers indicated a priority for preserving fishing opportunity for the month of March. Therefore, WDFW will suspend the fishery now to preserve opportunity for later in the winter season. In the meantime, WDFW Staff will continue analyzing the fishery data collected via test fishing.

2018 all areas had a Winter Chinook fishery. What do we have now?

There have been some good size blackmouth this year! I love blackmouth. We need this winter fishery.

I like your video, but find the overall premise to be disturbing. So, let’s say I have 50 marbles in a basket. 20 are blue and 30 are red. I have a 40% chance to pull a blue marble out. Now, let’s add 50 more marbles, but they are all red. I now have only a 20% chance of pulling out a blue marble, because I have added more red marbles and no more blue marbles. Then I will assign an arbitrary number of red marbles that can be drawn before I have to stop pulling marbles, let’s say 3. After pulling my 3 red marbles I must stop, even though I only pulled one blue marble. My point is this: The more sublegal size and unmarked fish we add to the Puget Sound (let’s say for the Orca), the larger the percentage of sublegal and unmarked there are in Puget Sound. Thus a much larger percentage of those will be caught as compared with the legal size fish. To compound the issue, we are assigned an unreasonably and arbitrarily low unmarked encounter number. There wouldn’t be such a high percentage of unmarked encounters if the fish weren’t there in large numbers in the first place. If I wanted to close fishing for the public angler, I would certainly come up with limits such as those and convince everyone it was the right thing to do.

This is a created fish, When I was a kid many years ago the state was trying to get people out to fish them for more revenue during the winter months of the year. Either create more for the fisherman or stop raising them and let them all migrate out of Puget sound like they used to before the state had the idea to keep some fish here for the fisherman. Stop the program and save the money and have no salmon in the sound from Nov to June or raise more fish. They are a put and take fish anyway. They used to call them BBQ fish when I was a kid and begged people to go catch them..They are all hatchery no wilds so what does it matter...

I keep hearing the fishing pundits on the Saturday radio show, use the term OPPURTUNITY all the time. Sounds more like EQUITY.

Area 10 to remain closed for Winter Chinook in 2023! Only 10 days open out of 2 months, half the days the weather was not good for smaller craft to get out. Guaranteed, we lose Winter Chinook fishing, it will never come back and summer Chinook will be next to be closed for good, never to return!

The future is this: 1) Let the natives gill net everything they want 2) Complain about low numbers 3) Close seasons to non-natives 4) Continue to charge us for seasons we can't fish 5) Slowly phase out all fishing in Puget Sound (except for the tribes) VOTE REPUBLICAN!