Fishing with Cliff

Puget Sound needs some serious help and it doesn’t look like Christine Gregoire is going to hit her goal of cleaning up the Sound by 2010 like she promised.  The fact is that the fish runs are declining, water quality is not good and something needs to be done.

Lawmakers agonizing over the expense and complexity of cleaning up Puget Sound need to know their efforts are backed by legions of eager citizens already hard at work on the challenge.

Hundreds turned out on a brisk Saturday morning for Sound Waters 2010, presented by WSU Island County Beach Watchers.

A six-page list tallied those who led the daylong program of seminars spread across the combined campus of Coupeville High School and Middle School. The aggregation of experts and topics was impressive. So was the overflow crowd that paid to learn more and find out how to help.

Restoration of Puget Sound is an imperative for Washington’s environment, health and the economy. We live, work and play around a glorious body of water, and our intimate proximity is the essence of the dilemma. All the easily identified pollution sources are either under control or on the radar. The rest come from how we live and develop the land.

Cleanup confronts a nasty trifecta: industrial and agricultural effluent, human waste and stormwater runoff. The first two are works in progress, but the latter scours and flushes everything.
Read the full article.

I would definitely like to see more done to bring back the Salmon runs.  Lets cut off the commercial fishing and tell the Indians to go to hell.  If we don’t do something pretty drastic, we could see the end of Salmon fishing in Puget Sound in this lifetime!

The weather here in the Northwest is great for growing things.  Apparently a little too great!  Here is another non-native plant that is causing trouble and a group that is working to keep it from ruining watersheds.

The Stilly-Snohomish Fisheries Enhancement Task Force is getting almost a quarter of a million dollars to fight this highly invasive plant that you have to spray to kill because cutting it down or pulling it up just makes it mad.  Sounds like some Blackberries I know of.

This SeattlePI Article has more info on what is going on, but these invasive plants really suck!

Looks like at least a little of the state budget will be going toward something I approve of, fish habitat restoration and protection!

The state Salmon Recovery Funding Board has slated the projects in Walla Walla and Columbia counties for more than $1.6 million in funding. The awards were announced by Gov. Chris Gregoire Friday.
Six projects totaling $931,664 are in Walla Walla County and four totaling $694,619 are in Columbia County. The money from state and federal sources will be disbursed in coming months as contracts are approved, said Susan Zemek of the state Recreation and Conservation Office.
Project grants in several cases will be matched by donations of labor, equipment and funds from the applicants.  The Full Article

This is just a small part of the $19.8 million dollars in state grants that have been approved by the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office.  While I complain a lot about what is going on with fishery management, it does please me to see at least something being done to restore habitat and give our fish a fighting chance.

Now if we can just knock back commercial and indian fishing a bit we might just get some Salmon runs back in good shape!

I have been listening to the rumbling about the explosion of Humbolt Squid down in California for a while now, and read a few articles about it, but this is the first to point out the positive effect of having a whole lot of big squid around.

On Thursday morning out of Bodega Bay, 20 fishermen aboard the New Sea Angler caught an estimated 15,000 pounds of Humboldt squid in 90 minutes; 400 squid that averaged 30 pounds and topped out at 70, with 90 percent of them hooked near the surface.  The Full Article on Humbolt Squid

After watching the last show that mentioned that they produce millions of eggs at a time and mate 3 times a year, I wondered who was benefiting from this horde of aquatic locust?  This article makes mention of the fact that a pod of Orca came in and had a big meal of Humbolt Squid while they were watching.

In another episode, a gang of Humboldt squid had circled the boat New Salmon Queen from Emeryville. The squid were in full attack, with the anglers aboard hooking up on every drop. Capt. Craig Shimukuzu got out his video camera to film the action and as he pressed the record button, the ocean "blew up" – a pod of 10 killer whales came to the surface in a feeding frenzy of their own, slashing the squid to bits with their teeth.

People forget that with every change there is a reaction.  If the Humbolt Squid are appearing in massive numbers and eating all the fish we normally target then that is just the way it is.  In the mean time the fish that eat the Humbolt eggs will be happy as hell, and it sounds like the Orcas and anything else that eat squid are hearing the dinner bell.  What we as humans have to do is help minimize our impact on the species the Humbolts are eating.  This may mean laying off the netting of fish that are trying to migrate upstream to spawn.  Again it is time for us as human beings to put aside our lust for money, back off on the commercial and tribal fishing (commercial fishing disguised as heritage)  and let the salmon and other fish stocks recover.

In the mean time, I am betting there are some very happy and fat Orca off the California Coast

A recent article from The News Tribune out of Tacoma sheds light on a study conducted on the migration of fish along the West Coast of the United States and on up into Canada.  Researchers implanted tiny tracking devices in a number of fish and in different species, and have been following their movements via underwater listening devices.

A salmon’s life in the ocean has always been one of nature’s best-kept mysteries.

However, scientists using the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking network have made some startling discoveries that challenge long-held beliefs about salmon survival and raise new cautions about how global warming might affect salmon and other marine species.

“I hope it will be a revolution in the way we do marine science,” said David Welch, president of Kintama Research Corp. in Nanaimo, B.C., a founder of the tracking system. “I think we will make discoveries that are incredibly important and unexpected.”  Read The Full Article

I find it really interesting that according to their numbers the dams that fish encounter heading down stream were not an issue.  This really changes the argument that some environmental groups have started over the removal of dams for the protection of fish.