July 30 Weekly Update

This past week we have seen continued improvement in brood stock numbers at Hidden Falls.  To date we have gone through 75,000 chum brood and taken 70 million chum eggs.  We have secured the 56 million portion for release at Hidden Falls and by Friday we should have the 20 million for release from Bear Cove secured and will be working on the 20 million brood stock release for Gunnuk Creek Hatchery over the weekend.  The next priority of projects in order is 24 million Deep Inlet, 45 million SE Cove and 25 million Thomas Bay.  While we still have a long ways to go there has been a steady but slow recruitment into Kasnyku Bay with an estimated 10-20k adults outside the barrier net.  We continue to have reports of jumps outside of Kasnyku and are hopeful we will continue to get recruitment for the next week or so.  Approximately 20k chum adults have been transferred from SE Cove to behind the barrier net at Kasnyku Bay.  These transfers will continue until there is no longer a need at Hidden Falls or the fish are not available at SE Cove. As at Hidden Falls the recruitment to SE Cove is slow but consistent.

On Thursday we had the first Hidden Falls stock chum eggtake at Medvjie which resulted in approximately 2 million eggs collected.  These will offset any shortages from Hidden Falls and as these eggs are from 3 year olds only will be released from one of our remote release sites.  It looks like there may be another 5-10k Hidden Falls stock chum in Bear Cove and we will continue to collect eggs from those as they ascend the fish ladder.

Cost recovery continued this week at Crawfish Inlet and 15,000lbs of chum and 300 chinook were collected.  Although still quite small poundage the chum are big, bright males and the catch volume went up 5x from the previous week.  Harvest has been hindered due to the large numbers of jellyfish and low numbers of fish.  I anticipate this harvest increase to continue and next week should see the first significant cost recovery in the inlet.  Cost recovery will continue to occur in the east half of the inlet unless large numbers of fall chum congregate in West Crawfish and ADFG requests we harvest those seen in specific areas.  In addition if no trollers are observed actively fishing in the Crawfish SHA then the full SHA may be utilized for cost recovery.