We have made strong progress at Hidden Falls this past week and have taken 130 million chum eggs and gone through 150k fish. We have taken an additional 5 million chum eggs at Medvejie for the Hidden Falls stock component leaving an additional 55 million to go. Chum eggtakes are continuing at both Hidden Falls and Medvejie. It is still to early to determine if we will make the entire goal of 190 million. The numbers of chum entering Kasnyku Bay is slowly diminishing each day although it would be unusual for the run to entirely shut off this early. We continue to collect chum at SE Cove but there the run has turned into a trickle with only 3,000 fish collected since last week. We will attempt to fish again tomorrow at SE Cove for brood collection and that will likely be the last of the effort there. We do have to additional backup options for Hidden Falls chum, we can take up to 10 million Medvejie fall stock chum to replace a shortfall in the Hidden Falls stock. In addition if DIPAC or Port Armstrong has any surplus chum after making their goal (questionable), we can utilize those stocks to replace any shortfall at Hidden Falls.
This past Monday through Wednesday we harvested 100k lbs of chum from Crawfish Inlet for cost recovery. This is an increase from a catch of 15k lbs the week before. Overall not large numbers but the chum are big, bright, 80% males and over 8lb average. All cost recovery has occurred in the SHA which is slightly early for fish to be pushing into the Inlet at this point in time. This next week the troll effort in West Crawfish and the Crawfish Inlet SHA during the coho troll closure will be a good indicator on how the run is building. Plan is to return to the rear half of Crawfish Inlet on Monday for cost recovery to clean up what has built up since Wednesday. Volume and fish quality will determine how cost recovery proceeds next week. If the current trend in numbers continues next week should see a significant increase in volume. Deep Inlet has slowly picked up the last few days and is appearing to be following the Crawfish Inlet trend.
Coho have started to show up in better numbers for the troll fleet and the Deep Inlet and Bear Cove releases combined catch to date is just over 10k. Deer Lake has a catch of over 3,000 with Hidden Falls trailing at around 1,200. There are reports of better than usual coho catches in the sound which could be an indicator of good survival of our local releases. Still a little early to know how strong the run will end up but is an encouraging sign after the slow start to coho fishing.
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