Thanks Colt !

A few days back when it was looking real grim for our salmon run my friend Colt McCann over in Qatar on the Persian Gulf offered to sacrifice a goat. Obviously they don't have a Fish + Game department because I hear they have alot of goats in Qatar. Well thanks Colt, its working. Below are the newest graphs from ADF+G, over 1000 Kings have come into the river in last few days. I would expect that if this trend continues we'll be open for fishing, if not its certainly good news for the future of the run. At the very least we've avoided a cataclysmic disaster.

The first graph is the daily sonar counts and the second is the total to date. I know its not sweet science but you can see that with 21 days left in the month the minimum of 5500 should be easily met. How ADF+G handles it will be interesting, I hate to be skeptical of the science but I've been on the river with eyes wide open for 30 years....alot has happened.

For instance there was the great radish experiment. Yup, you read that right, radishes. Years ago somebody at ADF+G was puzzled crazy wondering how many of our out migrating smolt got caught up in our huge spring tidal swings and never made it out to sea. This person was afraid they were not counting any mortality because surely when we have the 24 ft. tides many smolt got confused on where the river stopped and started and ended up high and dry in the woods. SO, they dumped bushels of radishes upriver on the big tide days to see how many ended up at sea and how many ended up in the woods. Not just any radishes either, they painted their research radishes a brilliant red so as no prankster fishing guide could pollute the study by adding more radishes. Low and behold...lots of radishes ended up in the woods, and I mean alot. I guess the only part I can be critical of is they should have gotten those radishes that have fins.

Then there was the pre season forecast. Every year based on previous escapements and spring smolt counts along with other scientific data the ADF+G makes an expensively researched forecast for most fisheries. For sport guys it helps set the season climate but for commercial guys the forecast helps processors, fisherman and the infrastructure prepare. It was in the mid 90's and the Kenai River Red run was estimated to be 3.1 million fish. By Kenai River standards this is so little that people talked of aid for the fisherman and economic hardship for the community. 13.1 million fish arrived which was a wonderful surprise, but, it leaves you wondering....did we just get the decimal point in the wrong place or what?

All of this leaves me reminded of a story a guy told me about the science of frogs. Somebody wanted to study how far frogs could jump. They laid a frog on the table next to a yard stick and yelled "jump", the frog jumped 4 feet. Then they snipped one leg off and yelled "jump", the frog jumped 3 feet. They repeated the process and the frog with 2 legs jumped 2 feet and with one leg one foot. So when they yelled " jump" to the legless frog and it didn't move it was obvious...frogs with no legs are deaf.