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Gill plate questions should come from a member of one of the Charter Associations as it will carry more weight. Contact James Johnson at Tunison lab via email [email protected] . Use your personal email as I have no idea how their outlook email service works.

Brian, was there any discussion regarding the amount of "gill plate missing fish" at the meeting? I would be interested to know if the alarm bells have gone off with biologists yet or do we need to tell someone our concerns?

Brian, a Canadian charter captain I know told me during the fall of 2013 while out fishing the blue zone near the fence there was a YOY school of alewives on top of the water that was 5 miles long. I think most of the small fish get spun to the middle by the toilet bowl effect of the lake currents.

I am done talking now....LOL. Time to get ready for fall.

We will be hearing soon from the DEC about the trawler take on the health of baitfish in the Lake O. The results of the trawler haul will show that we lost the 2013, 2014 YOY alewives due to the last two harsh winters. With fall and winter time zooplankton species limited to Copepods and Mysis Shrimp....these species put on fat reserves (lipid sacs) in the fall as a primer to spawning over the late fall and winter. After these zooplankton species mate and die there is a window during the winter where there is little food available in the system until the spring starts the process all over again. With a system overloaded with adult alewives eating everything, the YOY alewives and emerald shiners starved. This is a concern as you need these smaller baitfish sizes to feed the year 1 salmon enough so they can catch and ingest adult alewives. The shaker kings I was catching this year were puny. I was starting to see some bulges in stomachs on 1 year olds by my last outing over Labor Day. Hopefully we had a good hatch this spring of YOY to feed the next generation. The pain to the system could have smoothed out if the DEC and OMNR were allowed more flexibility in stocking numbers of Kings year-to-year to better reflect the bait populations need for predator balance. We missed the mark badly with alewives numbers too high going into the winter of 2013. Many of us were warning the DEC of the problem and advised more Kings were needed for the system at that time. With the DEC/OMNR's hands tied with the international stocking agreement, there was nothing that could be done. The DEC archaic trawler survey transects are outdated as they take the same routes when evaluating bait numbers that they did when they started recording bait levels in the 1970's. The lake has changed and the bait is more concentrated in the Hamilton Harbor - Genny area......esp. in june. The survey is spending a lot of time netting and surveying in dead water out deep where the baitfish have already left for the shallows. The result is inaccurate information about the true amount of bait in the lake. That is why the DEC has been saying for years that alewife levels were decreasing while fishermen were saying the opposite. Hopefully the state-of-the-lake meetings this spring where these discrepancies were brought to light might bring about change on how the DEC/FWS/OMNR evaluate bait levels to gain a better picture. It would be nice when the new stocking agreement with Canada is worked out that greater flexibility in stocking numbers could be agreed to by both parties.

http://www.mudhole.com/

I am not really trying to be accurate just generalizing to show percentages. Those numbers I guesstimated are not scientific and include Canadian fish. No I don't think there are 17 million 2 or 3 year olds swimming around at any time.....that would be a disaster. The numbers I threw out there are fingerlings coming into the system and probably are low considering the amount of natural repro the North shore creeks are getting and the X-factor of what is happening in the Niagara (nobody will ever know). The exercise is just to show that of the myriad of challenges facing a baby salmon getting to adulthood.......charter-take is miniscule.

The numbers are just a perspective to show how charter take represents a very small part of the pie. Disease, predation (think about all the hungry Coho, Lakers and Browns waiting for the fingerlings to come out of their port of dispersal every spring !!!!), natural disasters such as floods or droughts, lampreys etc. etc.

A two year blip is all IMO.....don't sell the boat. Even with productivity down in the ecosystem due to two bad winters back-to-back, Lake Erie keeps dumping her load into Ontario.....she will recharge. Good times will return.

700 kings X 100 charter captains = 70,000 (catching/keeping 2 and 3 yr olds) = 70,000 kings out of 3.5 million stocked + 5 million naturals? x 2 year classes= 17 million salmon available, which translates to charter captain's take of approx 4% of available 2 and 3 year olds swimming around (in a vacuum). Check my math but I don't think Charter take is the issue......we are missing MILLIONS of salmon.

The 2013 class was awesome. Not sure what happened but we had tons of fish to play with from that year class of fish. Interesting that you say the naturals are early as I would have thought the water would be too warm to successfully reproduce in September. Makes me think there is more natural reproduction happening in the Niagara than we know about.

I would imagine the vast majority of naturals are from parents that spawned in November/December.

Maybe someone can chime in here that knows for sure but I don't think the reservoir is that deep so probably not a huge difference in the temp from top to bottom.

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These are the two letters that went out in the spring. They went to Senators, the Governor, DEC higher ups. The idea was to make everyone aware of the situation so if we have a catastrophe at Altmar nobody can say....."we didn't know". I received return letters from Steve LaPan and Gov. Cuomo. Feel free to use the format when you send letters to our officials.