Sunday, August 10, 2008

Tyee Steelhead numbers lately

Reviewing the Tyee Index Steelhead numbers lately has been a bit of a disappointment.
With commercial fishing winding down over the last couple of days there has not been a resurgence or any strength in the steelhead numbers.

Then you begin to wonder why...until you look at a calendar and realize the commercial guys have fished 8 of the past 11 days. Even with seines fishing with slightly more potential selectivity than gillnetters, there is still negative impacts for non-target fish. And I guess after taking a pounding for 8/11 days the steelhead numbers should be down.
Interesting to note some days of commercial fishing the Index was actually higher than days they didnt fish....I'm sure a fisher union rep would make hay with this fact....but as we all know, for the Index to be high when they fish it must mean ALOT of steelhead going by that day. Because we know over 50% of incoming steelhead are likely to encounter a gillnet....and of that number 60-70% will die from that encounter.
Let's hope for a rebound and some stronger numbers in the coming days.

Comm. Opening..........Tyee Index
July 30-seine...............4.29
July 31-gillnet/seine.....4.69
Aug.1-seine................1.68
Aug.2-seine............... .71
Aug.3-none................1.67
Aug.4-gillnet..............3.64
Aug.5-seine...............2.16
Aug.6-seine...............2.81
Aug.7-gillnet..............4.03
Aug.8-none...............3.05
Aug.9-none...............1.54
Aug.10-none.............

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why isn't the Google Gadget updating? The DFO Tyee site is current?

North Coast Steelhead Alliance said...

we'll check it out and see.

when DFO had their problem last week we had some work done on the gadget to try and enable manula updates...but it turned out too difficult.
this delay may be tied to some of that code work.