I love it, I contributed log book data, no one can tell me where it went... Was at a meeting last spring, the fellow from DFO (Bald Guy) said they only had around 60 pages of data. My book had over 45 pages of data, so I wonder where the ones from Wolf, Banannas, Tailspin, and a lot of other guys I knew did it went..
Any idea what a pain in the butt they are? Or a pain in the butt it is bagging up and dropping off heads every day, especially since there is no place at my springtime marina to do so? Or in Renfrew, when I am dragging my butt, 15 pound bait cooler, rain gear, and a big bag of Renfrew heads up to the cooler, it actually gets in the way a lot. And I did it for three years, and the reward was "I'm sorry, we don't know what the hell we did with the data, we just put a picture of the province on a dart board, and threw darts at places we want to close"..
Anyone who was at that meeting with me will know what was said.. Complete waste of time. Needless to say, no one has approached me about a logbook, I guess the 50 pages I submitted last year did nothing. They can now go to their bosses, and say "look, instead of managing the straits of Juan De Fuca, we have enough guys giving us data that we don't really need to analyze, so now we can close it".
Funny enough, I did get the sheet of paper saying where all of my headers were from, and one was the Fraser, but at the meeting, when they said the total number of pages from area 19 and 20 was 60, that's when I realized that one of two things was happening:
1) They don't have a clue. Plausible, but unlikeley
2) It's easier to close a fishery then to manage it, and find out what is wrong..
They took the entire commercial salmon fleet off the water in the 1990's. So that took our catch rate down from around 500,000 pieces a year, to south of 100,000 . So if an %80 reduction in the total catch has done nothing, hmmm, let's see. What else could it be?
When asked at the SFAB, if they monitored fish leaving the Fraser, they said "NO". I wonder how the exploding merganser population in the lower Fraser may affect young fish heading out to sea? They are stunned when they hit the brackish water, they would be an easy target? All they know is fish go to the spwaning grounds, and that is it.