Jack great to hear from ya. We're all routing for you!!!

Jack
Sorry you couldn't make it  this year.
I'll have to fish with you next year.
 
As for standing on my shoulders.
I never met up with Fichy or Tuna.
I was in my usual spot #18.
Walked the loop on my way to the bathroom and never saw Vermont plates.

Get well soon Jack!

Ditto on the fishing- More hype than fish- one of those times where ya really really gotta be in just the right lucky spot at the right time to even see a  few moving along.
Think its startin  to get a bit questionable  for an old fashioned 'run' =perhaps some pods or a bit of a push or two but a strong run of days on end or repeated big pushes would be a real nice surprise right about now.
Whats being grasped by folks as a run beginning last week is no more than a couple of pods moving along and spreading in the river IMHO.
 Good luck Jack--

So Thursday evening Douglaston had a push, and then Friday AM there was nothing, those fish just evaporated?  I think a lot of them are making it from the estuary to 2a at least in one push in the dark.  And from what I saw last year once they hit the middle to upper river, they disappear for the guys used to watching for backs and fins in the clam shack stretch, pods of 15-20 just slightly change the standing wave patterns of the runs with deeper slots in the center.  Anybody walk into Sportsman's or downstream?  Or, it's just late again, or they're on the bottom of the lake.  But they have fish for egg take, so something is sliding through when the gauntlet is closed for the night.
 
Still another week to Columbus Day, and my recollection is that was always the peak of the run in the old days, although I do remember a lot of great fishing in September.  Listening to these reports, I'm glad I didn't burn any vacation, I'm going to need that paycheck as a cushion after I hang up the yoke and before the first pasture check comes.  But I'm also questioning whether I should have bought a hunting license, as if the Salmon run is this dismal this year, I'm worried that we'll see round ii of the Vitamin deficiency chromers.  May end up doing my late fall in Ithaca!

Looking at the thread, it sounds like the bunch of reprobates that raped Sandy Creek a few years ago.  They should be aware that folks out in that neck of the woods can get really "reactive" to out of state plates lately.  Having seen the pix of the crowds on the Elk, and knowing the price of an out of state Pennslytucky license, I'll pass. Of course, I may not be able  to fish NYS either, as after another try at JV, I still have been unable to buy a license.  I think if they can't get it fixed soon, they should declare free fishing until it is working properly!
 
 

Had several on the River say they are likely finished with SR.
Too much effort and vacation and money for little return right now.
Andy hit that one just right.
IMHO if this is the Thiamine issue-IF- it has certainly affected several upcoming year classes of fish.
IF that's true we are in for a few more like last and this.
Heck- even if they stock the same numbers, the 48% of returning kings from 'natural repro isn't happening.
Even with the help of softer Winter icing  it may be a while before things are again 'normal'.
At 68 aint even sure if I will see it.
A crashed system takes a few fish life cycles to come back.
HOPE to be proven wrong.

Well at least i missed nothing but Company. Up here it is marginal at Best with a few crappies every Day and night. The Wind has been downright brutal keeping us Close to Home and Onkyo in Places out og The Wind

A couple of other points:
 
Lake trout have been documented to be reproducing in Lake Ontario, but in extremely small numbers, another by-product of the Thiaminase in the alewife.  If they were ever successful at getting enough successful spawning to maintain the population, they would reduce or even end stocking.  Ditto for Atlantic Salmon.  Because these are the only native cold water top level predators, restoration of them is an indicator that restoration of the lake is working, maintenance of exotic species introduced originally primarily for alewife control only tells the scientist that the lake will support fish, not that the problems that caused the fishery to collapse in the 50's are fixed.  And who is the special interest group here, there are a lot of people who have interests in the lake other then the charter community, or even the larger angler community.  
 
The folks who are in charge of the fishery for NYSDEC, and in partnership with USGS Biological Resources Division, OMNR (remember, this is not just a NYS Lake) are not some sneaky bunch out there tweaking the knobs on their control panel for a Frankenstein monster they can use to advance some hidden agenda for  "special interests".  These men and women are hard working dedicated scientists, extremely devoted to their work.  I am privileged to have gotten to know many of them over the years, and they are not "wacko environmentalists" with some "hidden agenda."  They want to see maximum "return on investment,"  but they also don't want to see the kind of collapse that happened a few years back in the upper lakes, although we may be witnessing that now.  And they warned the angling community back as far as the Fisheries Congress that maintenance of the kind of high stocking numbers (of Kings especially) that the true "special interest," the charter industry," demanded, could lead to a situation where the alewife populations collapsed or were greatly reduced, which in turn could lead to a collapse of the cold water pelagic fishery.  The indicator that this could be happening was predicted to be the perch populations , which increase in proportion to reduction in alewife predation on the perch fry when the alewife populations are down, and the perch are back along the north coast.  This is also the point behind the cisco and bloater experiments, attempts to reestablish native prey populations that could either supplement of substitute for the alewife, and are hoped to grow into viable alternative prey populations if the alewife crashes catastrophically. It would be great if they could turn a knob or open a valve, and more magic fish food entered the system and everything got good again, but as RG notes, these things take time to work though a system this large.  It may be that the way to get the fishery back to where it was is to cut the king stocking significantly for a few years, see if the wild fish fill some of that gap, and see if the prey numbers go back up.  But I can hear the hue and cry from the charter industry now, most of them would double the stocking even if it meant 10 lb kings were monsters, as happened in Lake Michigan.
 
I know I have said it before, but they lay all their cards on the table, they are required to by the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission, and you can see the hand at  http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/fish_marine_pdf/lopublic2012.pdf.  AND I know they are long and dense, but the 2014 report is up on the biologists report tab under Lake Ontario reports, has all the stocking numbers, prey results, the only thing that didn't make the report was the investigation into the steelhead mortality, and that is ongoing work.
 
L13

Lake Michigan biologists are saying that the declining alewife population is causing a dramatic decline in the the salmon in the lake.

Glad to hear you got home safe and got at least a few fish. Clint.
 
As to the effects of a declining bait population, it is only simple arithmetic.  If the food supply drops, numbers of predators has to drop, and if fishermen clamor for more and more stocking, they invariably get smaller and/or less if the chow ain't there.  Huron collapsed completely, and the NYS biologists monitor the prey populations with an eye toward maintaining the predator/prey balance so this fishery does not collapse on that basis.  But the condition of the prey is also important and the thiaminase created in the alewife as a result of stresses makes it impossible for the fish to get the Vitamin B necessary for lots of different metabolic processes, and, as we saw last year, the deficiency can even result in mortality.  If we have another bad winter, and another dismal season, it would seem pretty clear, and it was my sense that that was they way the DEC toxicologist and USGS's Brian Weidel were leaning when queried at the SOL in Rochester last year.   If we have a good winter, and the season bounces back next year, same correlation.
 
As to Alewife numbers, they are about half of what they were at the peak.  Look at the charts in the section on prey species in http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/fish_marine_pdf/lorpt14.pdf   Section 12.  Alewife abundance and weight indices have reduced greatly since the 80's.  And  a large rise in yearling numbers, as in 2013, is meaningless if the yearlings don't make it through the winter, or they are so loaded with thiaminase that they knock down the predators eating them.  The king, because it is almost totally focused on herring as food, and the alewife is currently the only significant herring population in the lake, is the natural control mechanism for the alewife population; if numbers of prey are down, reduce numbers of kings stocked, if they are up, increase king stocking.  I'm not sure they actually have been able to do that because of the pressure to put more fish in, or at least maintain levels at what they ended up at after this debate first surfaced in the 90's after Tom Joliff's paper, and the natural reproduction of kings may be a monkey wrench in the machine, a more influential variable than it was projected to be. 
 
It would be interesting to hear what a diver would find out off the mouth of the river, or in the deeper holes of the estuary.  Reports of plentiful marks on the fish finders, and no run, the bottom might be littered with carcasses that were too B deficient to complete the metamorphosis from eating machines to spawning machines, or didn't have enough energy to even try ascending those first easy riffles. 
 
 
 
 

The Alewife is a pelagic fish, it is not oriented toward any structure except when it comes in to spawn, the schools disperse out over deep water based on desired temperature and feed on plankton.  The trawl methods have been run through quality assurance procedures to gauge representativeness and uncertainty of the measurements, and they are also doing hydroacoustics and modifying that to pick up alewife schools near the surface that they could have been missing and therefore undercounting.  But the indices done by every method say the alewives were down in 2014, and they are also way down by the long term picture.
 
The "huge" early runs of a few years ago were at similar numbers of everything stocked with the exception of the lake trout redux, and the glitches with some steelhead and cohos.  Increasing salmon stocking without a surer sense of how much bait is out there, and based on what some one with a nest to feather reports they see on a graph screen would be reckless at best, and could lead to the entire system collapsing as happened in Huron.  If it is an additional 500K kings needed to make everybody happy, happy, happy, they put in 1.9 million in 2014, so that went up significantly (making  up for losing so many cohos, and a big chunk of chrome as well.)
 
I'm only explaining what I think is logical, and I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty sure DEC doesn't for sure either, but they are using the best science available to try to find out.  But if there is a ton of food out there, and they stocked a million and a half kings in 2012, and there is another  mess produced in the SR by natural reproduction, where are they?  Or, maybe I should think like last year, and just say they're just late.  And as I reported yesterday, there are fish showing up down here on the western part of the lake, which also correlates to the distribution of prey that they find on the trawls, and the severity of the ice formation.  So I'm all ears for anything else based on some kind of data.

Allo this is well and good but the real question is, I thought with all fichy's mention of Orvis Manchester and the Battenkill he was a VT resident.
Also is he still going to be camping when I get back up this Wed?

Saw a pic of one taken in a trib a bit north of SR that was claimed to be 22 recently.
Would have taken near a dozen of the ones I saw to weigh that much.

He is leaving I believe Wedneday morning. Weren't too far from VT but in NY. He has no access to the board while out there that's why I'm answering for him.