August 14 Weekly Update

This week at Deep Inlet there was initial excitement as there was a good push of fish into the THA after the weekend rain and wind.  This push appears to have been short lived as the catch began dropping off on the Wednesday Gillnet day and continued to drop the last two days for the seine fleet.  At this point it is nearly a certainty we will close the Deep Inlet THA after the Gillnet rotation on Wednesday until further notice.  Most recent sex ratio is still 66% male but the 3 year old component has increased in the last week from 60% to 74%.  This combined with the drop in numbers is very concerning and necessitates the closure to protect brood stock for the egg takes at Medvejie.  The Deep Inlet THA will reopen to common property fisheries as soon as practicable once we secure enough brood stock at Medvejie and from Deep Inlet.  We will keep our website updated with the most recent information https://www.nsraa.org/?page_id=884.

There is little good news from the Hidden Falls egg take also.  The recruitment has slowed to a trickle and no significant additional egg takes will likely occur.  We are currently approximately 30 million eggs short of our 190 million goal.  We plan to take an additional 10 million fall Medvejie stock chum and are ready to receive eggs from DIPAC if they happen to have a surplus which looks less likely each day.

The one bright spot is that Crawfish Cost Recovery has made good progress and we are 35% of the way toward our goal with about 30% of that progress since Monday.  The cost recovery boats are fishing daily, even during commercial seine openings, and are doing a good job of keeping the head of the Inlet cleaned up.  Additional rain this weekend will likely bring in another pulse of fish and I anticipate next week will be the peak week for cost recovery.  There are good numbers of chum in West Crawfish still and there were approximately 15 trollers working in the area Friday morning.  Fish continue to move into the Crawfish Inlet SHA through Walker Channel and Middle entrance and the quality has remained high with few darker fish.  As with Deep Inlet there is a high percentage of 3 year old fish (61% on 8/11) with 5’s at 5%.  Sex ratio from the 11th was still 84% male but we will see if that holds up in the next CR sample this weekend.  Based upon all other chum returns this year I anticipate that there will be a sharp drop of in numbers once we hit the peak.  Lets hope I am wrong.