Glad about being able to get a room at least during the week! It is getting CO-O-O-O-O-OLD at night, the brace is due to come off this week, Selkirk closes soon, and Stony's has always been a little, eh, aromatic for my tastes. Time to move indoors.
hot tuna
This is what your river views mean to me...
The lake fishing has been absolutely fantastic the last 2-3 years. This my friends is firsthand information.
Now if you believe that there is more predators than forage, blah.
The predator base, besides lake trout is lower than it has been . Some want you to believe that natural reproduction is increasing the predator population , poopy, chock.. this is a ploy..
The fishery was created for the lake charters and they are having their day. With fewer fish, the trib angler are getting the short stick and if L-13 is correct with bigger cuts, the river guys will take a much bigger hit
What is your science, and evidence, other than a few internet and cellphone calls from guys out on the Lake?
The general "rule" with fish has always been that the better they are biting, the hungrier they are.( Maybe not for BTDT, even hungry fish seem to avoid him (and me!)) The last few years you can deploy junk lines, side planners, downriggers, almost anything, with virtually any lure and catch salmon. Back when the lake was majorly overpopulated with bait, even the top charter guys were not catching a lot of salmon in the Lake, many of the captains generally relied on Lake Trout for saving them from the "no fish free trip". And the staging areas were loaded with fish in the fall, and the runs were "epic." Now I'm hearing whining from the west end that there are no staging fish, they all went to the Salmon River, and whining from the Salmon River (and I have this first hand, too) that there are few fish. I think I last saw a minor alewife die off in 2000, they were annual major events, even after the kings went in, for many years. Smelt and emeralds are nearly unheard of. If a farmer puts too many cows in a field for the available forage, exceeds the carrying capacity, the sickly and marginal cows do not necessarily suffer disproportionally and die, leaving the remainder of the forage for healthy cows, who remain healthy and prosper. Rather, the whole population suffers, and while the weakest and most marginal may die first, the condition of all the cows suffers. Salmon size and condition has been reported to be on a decline for a number of years now. Yellow Perch are generally inversely correlated to alewife populations; if there are lots of alewife, perch are grazed down as fry, and the perch population suffers. Bays like Sodus have been having world class perch fishing the last few winters. These are all in addition to data provided by a long running and "well vetted in many waterbodies around the world" trawling program that showed a massive reduction in the Alewife population from what it was early in the program, so massive that the biologists now divide the data set into pre mussel and post mussel periods, and that recently shows what many of us see as a dangerous indication of exceedance of carrying capacity, namely the large reductions in year class sizes between the first and second year, and the extremely low numbers of large adults. In this year's trawls, this is compounded by what looks like a pretty poor hatch in 2018. One hypothesis that I jokingly offered on another website is that the Salmon all died of gluttony. Steelhead a few years back were eating many more alewife to get a meal, and they disappeared, according to the toxicologists, because of too much thiaminase. While not as susceptible as steelhead or Atlantics, Pacific salmon are also susceptible to Vitamin B deficiency. I also pointed out what seems obvious to me, it is still warm, it was 91 in Rochester on Monday. I'm happy to hear what pafisher says about lots of fish in the hatchery, but when I was up there last year around this time, it was loaded too, but they were all green cohos, not the ripe kings that they are looking for first. But like I said I think it is still early.
How quickly we seem to forget that for three years in a four years period, all kings stocked into the lake were fin clipped, and when the returns were analyzed, it was approximately 50% of the returning fish had no fin clip. MAGIC, they regenerated their fins! This study is so thoroughly mistrusted by the "you stock 'em, we box 'em" crowd out on the Lake that it will be repeated when the Coho study is done. But I seem to recall a lot of chatter here about how many adipose fins were showing up, and they continue to document massive numbers of fry in the SR every spring.
I've heard nothing from my friends at NYSDEC about what they are contemplating, and we have not seen if there is any positive impact from the first round of cuts yet, and until they take eggs, they will not have the data on condition. The fishery was created for alewife control, with the Lake fishery as a secondary benefit, and it has certainly cleaned up the dead alewife free beaches. The trib fishery may never have existed except that the fish were too contaminated to sell for cat food. Be aware, however, that there are elements of the "deep lake boxers" that would curtail the trib fishery again so that there is no threat to their fishery, and maybe just because they don't like proposals that would cut their limits on trout. So it would be good to pay attention both to the data, and the different voices supporting or rejecting it.
Finally, I have no clue on what would motivate a fisheries biologist to "cob" the data in any direction. And if you take the time to read the Fish Community Objectives, they are pretty much right on them. Of course, that kind of planning effort also recognizes that the Canadians and the Feds have a say in the management of this International waterbody, and those partners are as interested in native species as introduced ones in the overall mix. However, if everyone keeps rejecting any data that does not support what they want to see, I'm with Andy Todd of OMNRF, just throw in a bunch of stockies and see what comes back, and lets not spend all this money doing science that noone will listen to anyway in between. And if it goes to hell in a handbag, oh, well!