There will be a common property seine opening at Crawfish Inlet on Thursday September 13th. Look for the official ADF&G announcement on Tuesday September 11th. I expect there will be one or two additional openings to clean up the tail-end of the run (announcement possibly on Friday, September 14th). Cost recovery is expected to harvest <one million pounds total between today and Tuesday with no cost recovery on Wednesday.
The run to date is just over 3 million fish; 1.6 million have been harvested by the seine fleet and 220,000 by the troll fleet. Approximately 480,000 chum were caught on the past Thursday opening.
As most people are aware this run is an anomaly in several regards. Broodyear (BY) ’14 had 184,000 3s return in 2017 (1.4% marine survival) which was a very, very good survival. The 4s from that year (BY’14) also survived well with 501,000 4s so far, or 2.7 fours for each three year old. Adding the 3s and 4s from BY ’14 yields a 5.1% marine survival (that will go up with next year’s 5s). All this is very good but not an anomaly.
Broodyear ’15 chum return this year as 3’s is off the chart! 2.5 million chum have returned in 2018 as 3’s. This represents 9.1% marine survival just for 3’s. I would call that Anomaly 1. The proportion of male to female is unusual as well. We do not have the weighted average complete but it appears the male ratio will be on the order of 70%, or Anomaly 2. The high male ratio is being driven by Age 3’s, although in the past week 53% of the harvest has been female, both 3’s and 4’s.
So what happens next year? What will the forecast be? This will be difficult to predict given Anomalies 1 & 2. Even if we used 2.7:1 or the ratio of 4’s to 3’s we saw for the BY’14 return the forecast would seem improbable or 2.7 x 2.5 million 3’s = 6,750,000 4’s plus additional chum for BY’16 3’s and BY’14 5’s. It seems fairly certain there will be a lot of chum at Crawfish Inlet in 2019.
The NSRAA board will be discussing a management plan for Crawfish at its November 14 & 15, 2018 board meeting. It is unlikely NSRAA will need to conduct cost recovery at Crawfish Inlet in 2019. Trollers will continue to have a preference in Crawfish Inlet, but given the magnitude of this year’s return there will need to be a minimum of one seine opening per week in the early and late segments of the run, and two openings during the peak weeks to maintain high quality fish throughout the run.
Finally, NSRAA has two seine seats, as well as four other gear seats, expiring in November, with nominations due on November 14th at 5 pm. The election count will be conducted in February with winners being seated at the March 2019 board meeting. Please take an active roll in your organization.
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