Here is some numbers I have been looking at and thought I would get some input from others to see if there is any trend building here. There are 3 major areas of Chinook Salmon released that I feel affect my fishing so those are the numbers I use. Those being Muskegon river Grand river and Manistee area. What I did was go to the DNR stocking info and look at 2 year stocking to give me a idea of how many possible returning 3 and 4 year olds we should have. For last years Muskegon class the number was 289,092 for this years class it was 290,568 for next year the number is 156,832. For Grand Haven last year was 786,457 this year was 785,131 and next year is 586,949. For Manistee last year was 1,375,311 this year was 1,281,674 and next year was 1,089,987. So for next year we have a drop of 523,599 in the 3 to 4 year old fish class for those 3 areas based on DNR release info. Now this is raw numbers and does not account for any natural reproduction nor does it account for loss. But I am guessing at around 10% meaning for Muskegon in 07 season we had roughly 28,909 adults to fish for in 08 we had 29,057 and for 09 we should have 15,683. For the 2010 season the numbers would drop to 11,893. This was a strange year for me as even though I caught more total fish for the year than last year I fished a lot more and had fewer limit catchs. I only got skunked a total of 4 times for the year but because of high gas prices I did make some changes to my program and one major change was I began a short program which involved selecting a area I thought would produce and driving straight to it and fishing it. Most of the time completely ignoring what everyone else was doing. A lot of time it worked with decent fishing other times not so good. But the big differance for me this year was that if my program failed I turned and drove back in rather than running to another area and restarting as it was most of the time I got 2 or 3 fish so not a total loss and I cut my fuel expense and got to fish more often. Because of that many of my trips were around 3 hours total now if I had a long drive to the lake this would not work. Also I noticed people were more willing to fish with me as they became aware that they would no longer be stuck on the boat till either the box was full or I ran out of gas ( no I never have ran out of gas but have had to run in on fumes before ). In my old boat it was time to quit when the main tank ran out and I had to switch to the aux tank. Back to the original subject does anyone think I am close to being right about the fish numbers? Perhaps the drop will do as expected and bring in larger fish that would be nice. I don't have any real data on how many boats fish out of Muskegon but I am trying to SWAG ( sceintific wild ass guess) and using 3000 trips a season the 07 and 08 seasons would break down to just under 10 fish possible per trip 09 would end about 5 per trip and 2010 would come down to about 4 per trip. Of course less trip would mean more per trip and more trips would mean less per trip and this is not real accurate numbers mostly SWAG and personal opinion as such feel free to dissagree with them but if anyone else has a thought on this let me know.
Tight Lines
Jim