For the record…"Its sad to see all these old guys come out against a fishery"
Most of the old guys you are referring to, including myself, fished only occasionally in the summer months in boats that were generally 16' or smaller, didn't have downriggers or depth sounders and took nowhere near the salmon the big boats of today take who are the fully equipped with electronics and downriggers and can fish most anywhere in most any weather!
are you trying to say that the recreation harvest is more now than it used to be?
"estimates of the recreational share of the total salmon harvest varied between 4% and 7%. A presentation to the SFAB by DFO officials in 1981 used this range and said that recreational anglers were catching between 1.3 and 2 million salmon, of which between 500,000 and 750,000 were chinook."
"On a per fish basis, in 2004 the 332,693 licensed tidal water anglers caught 453,218 salmon, or an average of 1.4 salmon per angler. With respect to the separate species, tidal anglers caught an average of one-half a chinook each, one-third of a coho, one- quarter of a sockeye, one-twelfth of a chum and one-fourteenth of a pink. It is obvious that these averages disguise the fact that some anglers are much more successful than others. In his 1982 report, Peter Pearse concluded that “Ten percent of the fishermen catch more than half of the total catch, while nearly 40 percent catch no salmon at all”.18 Tidal water anglers surveyed in DFO’s 2000 Survey of Recreational Fishing in Canada claimed to have kept an average of 5.2 fish of all species and these recall numbers probably are biased on the high side. For example, respondents to the survey claimed to have caught 239,783 chinook salmon while the DFO creel survey says the actual number was 133,248.19 The difference between these two numbers highlights the need for accurate catch monitoring to support conservation efforts."
Shifts in Fishing Effort
When Peter Pearse was conducting his royal commission in 1982, angler effort in Georgia Strait involved 559,393 boat trips. These fishermen caught at least 538,938 salmon.
By contrast, in 2004 angler effort in Georgia Strait was 57,842 boat trips, 10% of the earlier number, with a salmon catch of 49,996, just 7% of the 1982 catch.
In terms of species, in 1982 Georgia Strait recreational anglers caught 124,402 chinook and 411,402 coho. DFO didn’t count the sockeye and chum catch. In 2004, the Georgia Strait chinook catch was 38,000 and the coho harvest 9,500. Pearse estimated that Georgia Strait accounted for 90% of the coast wide recreational salmon catch. This would have meant that anglers outside Georgia Strait were catching about 60,000 salmon in 1982 and seems a reasonable estimate. In 1984, the first year for which statistics are available, the West Coast Vancouver Island catch was 47,157. North Coast recreational catch numbers became available the following year and totalled 66,442 salmon. In 1985, Georgia Strait anglers caught 962,969 salmon of which 728,167 were coho. By 2004, the situation had changed dramatically. The North Coast sport harvest had grown 300 percent, to 198,767 and on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, anglers had caught 125,787, of which only 23% were chinook. On the other hand, the Alberni canal sockeye catch, which was considered inconsequential in 1984 and not recorded, had grown to 79,787, or 63% of the WCVI recreational salmon catch As already mentioned elsewhere, one other major shift in fishing effort was the development of a recreational sockeye fishery in the non-tidal portion of the Fraser River. This fishery simply did not exist on any scale in the 1980s. No data were collected. A serious creel survey was first mounted in 2002, revealing 281,053 angling hours of effort and a catch of 125,040 sockeye. In 2004, effort had grown to 325,687 angler hours of effort for a smaller catch of 50,388 sockeye. One of the troubling aspects of these shifts in angler effort is the fact that despite a dramatic drop in both effort and catch in Georgia Strait, the health of many chinook and coho stocks does not seem to have improved. Several, such as Cowichan and Nanaimo chinook, are in serious trouble. This raises the question of whether shifts in both recreational and commercial effort to areas where the stocks are more mixed is having a negative impact. One other related issue is what seems to be growing tension between ocean and fresh water recreational harvesters. There is a need for government to grapple with the implications of this tension. When the allocation policy was put in place, the recreational sector agreed to lower retention limits for fresh water as opposed to ocean harvest on the assumption that the closer the fish were to the spawning grounds, and the more that runs were differentiated, concentrated and easy to access in relatively confined circumstances, the more precautionary the rules had to be.