I hate to say ' I told you so'....now let's go fishing

Until Monday I hadn't gone fishing since I left Mazatlan two months ago. So Keith and I went to the Ninilchik river to fish the high tide for a few hours and recorded our first skunk of the year...and it felt great.  I didn't really get any fishing photo's because it was awful darn quiet down there but this Eagle caught my eye, there's an absolute abundance of these guys everywhere anymore so somebody somewhere somehow is doing something right in the Eagle management department...who knows it might even be the experts and the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game.

And speaking of ADF+G there has to be some serious head scratching going on over at their headquarters on K-beach road, and maybe even a few ' high fives' . By June 1 the historical data shows that 5 to 10% of the early run is into the Kenai River, right now we're at 960, for the sake of math ease for people like me lets call it a cool grand. It's pretty simple, the low figure puts us at the top of the escapement goal and the 10% puts us at a whopping number that should allow for a substantial harvest of fish ( oh, and never mind that that you can easily see that the reason we're not fishing now, the dismal forecast of only 6000 fish will be  met ).....but hold the show here...things around here are NEVER that simple.

The graphs above were updates Friday June 5th

You know, I know and the rest of the world knows that catch and release fishing is really the essence of what we do and is practiced all over the world and in many places credited with saving fisheries.  With an educated fishing fleet, barbless hooks and no bait mortality is virtually zero, that would be 0% if any of you ADF+G guys are keeping up. But, it's frowned on  here on the Kenai. Why ? Well, for example we have an over the hill angry old outdoor writer that thinks fishing should only be for food, and if you say it enough people start thinking he might even know what he's talking about...and you have a community full of commercial fishermen that have run the show here for 100 years and say that C+R fishing is playing with your food and of course they would do anything to stymie a competing fishery...the only good fish is a dead fish. And I think C+R fishing is viewed as a ' guide thing' and lord knows the community doesn't want to support that segment of this one horse town. Two more observations about C+R fishing besides the fact that it's just plane fun...it seems to work for the managers in July if we have to limit harvest for the sake of escapement and to keep the commercial guys fishing under a policy of ' paired restrictions' where they only fish with nets twice a week and we get to release all our fish. AND...C+R seems to be perfectly fine for ADF+G themselves who practice it daily...with a NET during the other side of the data collection, the long standing test net system. This test net fishery has caught  and released 25  so far this year , the most in almost 10 years.

I'm not saying the king fishery should be opened willy nilly, it shouldn't be. We need to be cautious and make certain that we make escapement and we should shoot for the high end of it to try and right the ship here. But there is no reason why we shouldn't have a catch and release fishery. In fact we should have had that to start this and every season while we see what the sonar counts tell us. There is this  strange political climate here but I'm confident that the managers at ADF+G will step up and allow opportunity to fish and I expect that next week we will be out on the water. So as you can see.....Jeff King, guide # 003, the Pro's from Dover are getting ready.

As Keith and I drove south the other day discussing the fishery I pointed out that when we had our first poor year in 2012 our people should have been planning for the recovery which we didn't do and now it looks to be on the way. So many small adjustments could have been made to reshape the fishery for the good the future...you know how I like lists, here's a short one of a few painless things that could help our early run out.

1. Finally, a limit on guides. Now that the numbers are down do we want to go back to 500 ?   I don't think the salmon, the community or the  politics can sustain that many.
2. Change the retention limit from 2 a season to 1 early run and 1 late run.
3. Add a driftboat day or 2, or 3 or....
4. If we have C+R and ADF+G is worried about the impact only allow fishing below the sonar at Mile 13.5.
5. Maybe only allow all fishing in times of questionable runs below the sonar so that all the counts translate to upriver spawning fish.
6.......well enough's enough, from here on out Mile 14 will be about the chase, the wonders of our sport. I  got the fisheries input itch scratched so thanks for reading. We'll see you on the water real soon !