New Decade
Our guests often wonder how in the world our regulations get set, so we’ll start with step one. Abundance based management is a means of establishing harvest levels based on the current abundance of each species. The abundance of stocks of fish, particularly salmon, can vary significantly from year to year. So, when stocks are low, we get tighter restrictions on harvest to conserve the stocks. When abundance is high, we get more liberal regulations to take advantage of the harvest opportunity. From a business perspective and clearly from the point of view of the traveling angler, it would be nice to have the regulations predictable and set in stone from year to year. Unfortunately, that doesn’t take into account the swings in abundance and the need to protect stocks in years of low abundance. This year, king abundance was forecast to be low coastwide so we had very low catch limits, aka quotas. Based on our catch rate, we were forecast to hit our quota on August 1, thus we were closed to retaining kings by emergency order on that date. While this is painful to those hoping to catch and keep a king this August, the hope is to conserve spawners and make the future is bright for king salmon. Short term pain for long term gain is the name of the game.
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