River Reports and a New Fish!

[Darian]

Hmmm,.... Baked Squawfish and steamed Brussel Sprouts with slivered almonds.... A bit of aoli for the sprouts.... Garlic French bread.... Maybe a good hard cider. Whadda ya Thin'

Orrrrr,.... Squawfish sashimi....

[Frank Alessio]

Smoked Squafish.... I did once... I got it a little too salty... Nothing wrong with the texture.. never tried it again...

[JerryInLodi]

Tony, very few fish in the north delta right now and most well under five pounds. I'm picking up five to seven fish in about four hours fishing but lots and lots of water with nothing showing on the graph.

I think the population estimates by DFG are way off this year. Almost everyone that fishes the delta agrees that last fall and the spring so far this year are the absolute worst experienced in the last few years.

It's my guess that three years of the fish being pounded by the bay party boats while salmon fishing was shut down have taken a severe toll on the fish over 20 inches.

[Tony Buzolich]

Jerry,

Sadly the delta just didn't ever come alive and the same results seem to be happening up here too. Maybe with a little rain this week the rivers will start to flow and move some fish up. If it still turns out to be a poor year there aren't too many other things to blame it on.

The party boats really take more than their share and they've never heard of catch and release. When they keep everything that is caught they're taking out a big percentage of the spawning population which will rapidly put the entire population on a decline.

Now here's a good question about party boat ethics. Why is it that one guy on a back corner of a boat is allowed to continue fishing after he has already met his limit? Maybe this ought to be a new thread but it struck a nerve.

I've seen it numerous times that one guy will be catching a whole lotmore fish than anyone else on the boat, and instead of him quiting he or the mate start filling the bags of others on the boat who haven't limited. Pisses me off! I want to catch my own fish not let somebody do it for me. And, this seems to be a common practice on a lot of the party boats. Uugh
Tony

[Darian]

I can't say they all do it, but the boats that I grew up fishin' on in SoCal did the same thing. It seems to me that the reason that's done is to make sure everyone on board takes home some fish as there's always someone who doesn't seem to catch anything. These bay/ocean trips cost a lot of money for the number of days involved and possible equipment rentals. It's the same whether up here or down in SoCal. Customers probably wouldn't return for another trip if they didn't take something home.

If you think about it from the captains/crew point of view, they're trying to make sure that there won't be a lot of bad mouthing the trip going on. Not much conservation going on, tho.

You mention that there's always someone in an aft corner that catches all of the fish.... That sounds like whoever gets that position stays there for the entire trip. That would've been a no-no on most charter boats that I went on out of SoCal ports. They all seemed to have a rotation policy (except when trolling for albacore). Every passenger got to fish a position for a fixed period and then too a step to whatever the next position was. Sometimes a guy would refuse to rotate and that resulted in some heated exchanges with an occasional punch-out. That's what made me stop going out on "da bait boats."
Haven't been on one since 1968.

[Kevin Goding]

Most likely it is a splittail and they can get quite large for being a "minnow". It is used as a common testing species for water quality stuff here in CA, and some of the broodstock I've seen in tanks were easily over 20 inches.

[Nick B]

CA definitely has a lot of different minnow species... some of which can be tough to ID. That particular fish in the picture is a splittail. You can tell because the mouth is small, slightly underneath the nose and the upper lobe of the tail is longer than the lower one. They make a spawning migration from Suisun Marsh/Grizzly Bay up the Sacramento. They actually were a federally threatened species until 2003 when the water agencies sued and managed to de-list them. Having caught a couple myself, I have to say, that is the first one I have ever seen taken on a 4/o... they are also popular striper bait for the bait-fishing die hards of the world.

[Marty Gingras]

...I think the population estimates by DFG are way off this year. Almost everyone that fishes the delta agrees that last fall and the spring so far this year are the absolute worst experienced in the last few years...

DFG hasn't yet produced mark-recapture estimates of striped bass abundance for the year 2011.

Trend-wise, catch per unit effort (CPUE) data from Party Boats (CPFVs) gives us an index of striped bass abundance. We haven't yet worked up the 2011 CPFV CPUE data, but here is a figure showing CPFV CPUE through 2010:

http://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=34815

[Dabalone]

DFG hasn't yet produced mark-recapture estimates of striped bass abundance for the year 2011.

Trend-wise, catch per unit effort (CPUE) data from Party Boats (CPFVs) gives us an index of striped bass abundance. We haven't yet worked up the 2011 CPFV CPUE data, but here is a figure showing CPFV CPUE through 2010:

http://nrm.dfg.ca.gov/FileHandler.ashx?DocumentID=34815

Marty, notice the steep drops in 1995, 2002, and 2010 followed immediately by a steep rise with the drops bottoming at about the same levels. Are there any coinciding events or factors, weather pattern, ocean conditions etc. that can be tied to these drops in numbers?

[Marty Gingras]

Marty, notice the steep drops in 1995, 2002, and 2010 followed immediately by a steep rise with the drops bottoming at about the same levels. Are there any coinciding events or factors, weather pattern, ocean conditions etc. that can be tied to these drops in numbers?

We have not yet tried hard (we will) to figure this out, but we've ruled out 'funky or sparse data' as a cause. 1986 and 1995 were wet years following 1 or more dry years, but 2006 was a wet year following a somewhat-wet year and 2010 was a somewhat-dry year following a dry year. It could be recruitment of fish to legal size, but --- unfortunately --- we don't get fish-length data from the CPFVs. It could be movement of fish to the ocean, but our quick look at CPFV data from the ocean hasn't shown any 'smoking gun'. I'd love to hear ideas/observations from those who were fishing.