July 29th-Return Update

Chum returns to our inside summer sites appears to have peaked and is beginning to wind down. Catches this week will likely be about half of last week at Thomas Bay, SE Cove and Hidden Falls but all are on track to meet or exceed our pre-season forecast.  A first for the inside sites in many years.  While the summer chum return to Deep Inlet is winding down, the fall chum return continues to show strong early numbers. The Deep Inlet net catches for chum last week quadrupled from week prior with an 80% male sex ratio on seine, gillnet and troll samples and are track to at least double again this week. Vast majority of our most recent Sitka Sound troll caught chum are age 4’s with a mix of  45% Bear Cove, 45% Deep Inlet, and 10% Crawfish Inlet bound fish. Sitka Sound/Eastern Channel chum troll catch is starting to look like it may be the largest troll harvest for this stat week in the history of Deep Inlet chum releases. With a projected 50k plus harvest this week alone. I anticipate that the timing of the summer troll closure, combined with the good Sitka Sound troll harvest rate, will translate to substantial effort over the weekend. We are updating our data pages frequently to provide the most current information, here is a link to the Deep Inlet page ( https://www.nsraa.org/?page_id=884  ).

Crawfish Inlet continues to be quiet, with no cost recovery effort or reported troll harvest.  We will be taking a look at Crawfish Inlet this weekend with cost recovery and likely begin our Silver Bay brood stock management cost recovery early next week.  We estimate around 10k fall chum brood have already made it back to Bear Cove, which is quite early for this large of a build. We will be performing a small harvest to collect sex ratio, and scale/otolith samples. This information is valuable to assist us in effectively managing the number of brood stock chum staging in Bear Cove. It is now clear that the fall chum return is early and/or going to be very large.  Progression of catch over the next week will give us a better picture of the run strength but things are looking positive.