Trinity River

[frequent_flyer]

Does anyone have any reports on the Trinity river near Lewiston?

[huntindog]

it sucks...there are no fish..and i am being serious....fished hard last week with no success...that was the word up and down the river from everyone i talked to

[mikel]

Last week, Tues/Weds drifted Rush Creek-Bucktail, Evans-Sky Ranch and Sky Ranch-Pigeon Pt, landing 1 hatchery buck (25") and 1 wild hen (29"). Lost one other fish.

Some guides think this is a lull between early and late wild fish, or that the bulk of hatchery fish are late for some reason. More fish may be coming in, but time will tell...

It's turned back into steelheading there. Crowds will be thinning as it gets really cold on the water and hookups per day change into days per hookup.

-Mike

[stevie steelhead]

This season has been challenging for all, or they are not being honest.
One explanation is that the early winter type storm that dropped 9" or rain in October, allowed the fish to rocket up river and go into the tributaries. Good for them and us too, giving the wild population a good chance to make new populations of wild steelhead. The days of big hatchery returns are gone as well.
Bring back the charm and remoteness of one of the last surviving steelhead rivers/streams in California, where swinging a fly for a grab is good enough!

[Bruce Berman]

Yeah, good for the wild fish and I'm hoping that the "restoration" program proves successful. However, the question is still, where are the hatchery fish? I caught 2 last week. That was it in 3 days of fishing. Small return to the hatchery, also, I hear. Even if fewer smolts were released, there should be more fish. Either they're late, suffered a natural catastrophe, or some lucky trawler was at the right place at the right time and boated thousands of our fish!

[ycflyfisher]

It's highly unlikely that the total abundance or even just the hatchery abundance in December on the T will eclipse the like abundance for Nov or Oct. The historic run progression has to my knowledge, based on catch rates because the weirs come down in Dec, has never once eclipsed the abundance in the prior months. I can't ever remember a single season where the fishing was better, numbers wise in December than it was in the previous months dating back to 1988. Before the implementation of the elevated spring flows, it definitely got more "interesting" in December.

Most of the guys that camp out for months on end down at Blakes simply didn't experience any huge slugs of fish like they saw from 2001-2009 and the weir counts didn't have a single week where the counts jumped significantly. The bottom line is that in all likelyhood, the fish are nearly "all in" and we've simply returned to more "normal" abundance levels. Hell, we'd have killed to have this years weir counts back in the late 1980's through 1996. It's all relative. The freakish fishing from 2004-07 and 2009 is likely never to happen again in anything approaching that magnitude. Hatchery fish on the T typically have had return rates of slightly less than 1% to the basin, and it's largely not known (or at least there's no real concensus) why they're SS's somehow became more successful and hatchery abundance started trending upward the year before the fish kill and literally went off the hook in 2006-07. It was weird especially considering Chinook abundance was the lowest ever recorded in the years where the hatchery SH returns where the highest they've ever been.

[westslope]

Floated from JC to Lime Point this past Tuesday. Turned out to be a beautiful day considering the weather system that moved through the night before. Caught several little guys, some in the 12-13" range but only hooked/lost one adult. Counted two other boats the entire day.

[NCL]

I fished yesterday and caught a brown. Talked with two different groups and they each had one small fish.

[Tim P]

It's highly unlikely that the total abundance or even just the hatchery abundance in December on the T will eclipse the like abundance for Nov or Oct. The historic run progression has to my knowledge, based on catch rates because the weirs come down in Dec, has never once eclipsed the abundance in the prior months.

I'm curious (not combative) about the source of the data for angler success - I suppose the DFG has a proxy for Catch Per Unit Effort (in the current steelhead cards, anyway), but I hadn't seen it published anywhere. Even if angler reporting compliance to the DFG was perfect, unfortunately it is not very granular spatially. For wild fish especially (which I presume ascend tribs), the angler cards data can't discriminate between fishing at the top of the river - nor below WC where the sample counts are observed. OTOH, casual angler reports have the problem that results are not corrected for effort, so it is hard to compare them year-over-year in a meaningful way.

It is my impression that the fisheries biologists produce the seasonal run-size estimates for SH by multiplying the WC raw counts by the ratio of untagged to tagged hatchery return fish counts at Lewiston (with corrections for angler harvest/poaching factored in). For that to work correctly (as you point out), the entire season would need to be sampled, and/or the relative timings of wild-vs-hatchery returns would need to be known a priori.

Anyhow, your comments intrigue me, as I have largely fished the T in Dec. and Jan. in past years; and while I have seen some of the Wade Sinnen spreadsheets, as well as some historical analyses of full-season run estimates, I haven't bumped into any pubs which detail month-to-month angler CPUE results.

If you have some links to any interesting reads, I'd appreciate it.

If not, just say "Go read everything on KRISweb"

tim

[ycflyfisher]

I'm curious (not combative) about the source of the data for angler success - I suppose the DFG has a proxy for Catch Per Unit Effort (in the current steelhead cards, anyway), but I hadn't seen it published anywhere. Even if angler reporting compliance to the DFG was perfect, unfortunately it is not very granular spatially. For wild fish especially (which I presume ascend tribs), the angler cards data can't discriminate between fishing at the top of the river - nor below WC where the sample counts are observed. OTOH, casual angler reports have the problem that results are not corrected for effort, so it is hard to compare them year-over-year in a meaningful way.

It is my impression that the fisheries biologists produce the seasonal run-size estimates for SH by multiplying the WC raw counts by the ratio of untagged to tagged hatchery return fish counts at Lewiston (with corrections for angler harvest/poaching factored in). For that to work correctly (as you point out), the entire season would need to be sampled, and/or the relative timings of wild-vs-hatchery returns would need to be known a priori.

Anyhow, your comments intrigue me, as I have largely fished the T in Dec. and Jan. in past years; and while I have seen some of the Wade Sinnen spreadsheets, as well as some historical analyses of full-season run estimates, I haven't bumped into any pubs which detail month-to-month angler CPUE results.

If you have some links to any interesting reads, I'd appreciate it.

If not, just say "Go read everything on KRISweb"

tim

Tim,

My statement was based largely on the prevailing angler concensus. My catch rates going into December are in agreement with the concensus. I do have an older Administrative document somewhere from either the USFS or DFG (don't remember which) that was the summary of angler catch surveys conducted in the winter months. I don't think the fall months were included because I seem to recall catch rates being pretty abysmal but could be wrong. I believe it basedlined success into CPUE and had a spacial breakdown.

I don't think (but don't know for sure) either the USFS or DFG has conducted angler surveys on the T for several seasons and the only place on the river where I've been surveyed in the last 8 years or so is down on the Res by tribal fisheries staff. Don't know if the tribe publishes it's data anywhere. It's not on their website, but I think you could probably request it if they produce it in any type of administrative document for peer review.

If you have the complete seasons of .XLS formatted data for the W-S DFG data you can see how fish counts over the weirs tapers off down to nothing most years in late Nov in years where conditions allow the weirs to remain up into late Nov/Dec.

Abundance is actually calc'd via some variation of the Peterson M & R method but I don't remember off the top of my head which one. I've got most of the finalized salmonid abundance reports for the T up until 2008 or so. I'll try to find some of those along with the angler survey, scan and post them later this week.