2014 king salmon season

[BAITNH]

I am  new  back to  the big O   got to fish  this summer  and  I thought  the fishing was  pretty   slow.   whats  your thoughts on how  2014  is  or was     in  various parts of the lake     west,   central     and east .Was   this a normal  year ?   above average?  below  average ?

[Gill-T]

One of the worst seasons for age 3 salmon I can remember. Thankfully, there were other species around to fill the void.

[momay4000]

Disagree - we have been lazy the past few years and accustomed to large catch rates and matures in the shallower waters between 100-200 feet and earlier in the July/early August timeframe, so if you compare chinook catch rates in this water and time frame then yes the season was terrible.

 

However, if you were willing to venture offshore in the vast deep water of mighty Lake Ontario, then you would have been presented with an incredible bounty of three year olds and some of the biggest and best steelhead that I can remember.

 

The fish are/were there, you just need to find them.       

 

Good luck,

 

Chris

[Fish Hunter]

Big Salmon River has not really seen a big push of fish yet, 2's and few's, here and there.

[finsntins]

i dont have much to compare to,as this was only our second full season fishing the lake,but it was alot tougher fishing than compared to last year.we fish mexico bay area.there was a good amount of fish off the plant end of june and most of july and then they were gone!!!!end of july and all of august you really had to hunt for them and when you did find them it was tough getting them to go.what worked yesterday wouldnt move the next day,so you were really having to work for them.im sure the seasoned veterans that have been fishing the lake alot longer then us had better results.the other thing that kept catch rates down for us was for a long time this summer temp was down well over 150 ft.we only fish 2 riggers,so take your copper and dipsies out of the equation and you have alot less baits in the water.as far as the size of fish,we caught more 10 to 20 lb fish this year compared to last year.last year most of the fish we caught were over 20 lbs.it was frustrating at times this year,but it still was alot of fun and fished with alot of good people.boat isnt out yet,but already looking forward to next year.

[TyeeTanic]

It was a tough year.  Cold water didn't help, but my guess is something is going on with the salmon fishery, based on one reason. Baitfish explosion.  Less predators = more bait fish.  Started last year and got worse this year.

[BAITNH]

Chris,   why do you think the fish were out there ? was there plenty of bait there, there also  was  in 100-300  fow. How many rivers other than the Salmon river do they count the return  of  the kings?Is there  any  measurement of  pen reared  fish returns ? I hope this year was just a fluke.

[Gill-T]

Dr. Chris you are dead nuts wrong.  There are fish offshore all the time.  The difference is the fleet had to go chase them because the inshore bite was non-existent compared to other years.  I have to believe we lost most of the three year olds somehow.  Didn't mark them on my fishfinder, not seeing them on the piers and now trib guys are going to find out the hard truth.  Why did a bunch of our three year olds run last year at age two?.....who knows?  Did something happen at the hatchery or in transport?......someone probably knows.  Did VHS in Gizzard shad die-offs the last two springs effect this years class of matures?......someone should know.  Would VHS in Gizzard Shad die-offs in spring bath our pen-reared kings in virus laden water?.......someone better figure that out.

[momay4000]

Dr. Chris you are dead nuts wrong.  There are fish offshore all the time.  The difference is the fleet had to go chase them because the inshore bite was non-existent compared to other years.  I have to believe we lost most of the three year olds somehow.  Didn't mark them on my fishfinder, not seeing them on the piers and now trib guys are going to find out the hard truth.  Why did a bunch of our three year olds run last year at age two?.....who knows?  Did something happen at the hatchery or in transport?......someone probably knows.  Did VHS in Gizzard shad die-offs the last two springs effect this years class of matures?......someone should know.  Would VHS in Gizzard Shad die-offs in spring bath our pen-reared kings in virus laden water?.......someone better figure that out.

 

Dead nuts wrong? That's a new one for sure! Since you are a micromanager Gill, I'd be happy to present my argument based on the original question asked by the gentleman who started the post. Perhaps we can dissect it a little, and possibly micromanage it just a bit:

 

His original question was how the "fishing was in various parts of the lake". He doesn't mention ports by name, he simply mentions east vs. central vs. west.

 

My reply was meant to reflect on my own personal experience this year, much of which was spent in the later portions of the season fishing in much deeper waters offshore out of the Rochester area as we could not find the big boys in the traditional waters closer to shore. Although I do not have any scientific proof on catch rates by Chinook class year lake wide (i.e. DEC creel survey data), I can share with you my personal experience this year that the mature fish that I caught were later in the season compared with past years and were offshore in deeper water. My own personal catch rate of matures was certainly down early in the summer, but seemed to approach my typical year end numbers by targeting fish in different and deeper waters later in the summer. As a conclusion of my personal experience, I had to disagree with you that the mature fishing was one of the worst seasons on record.

 

Perhaps I am the world's greatest fisherman b/c my catch rates of mature salmon and other species were similar to other years. However, it's obvious this is not the case, and probably more luck or being opportunistic than anything. However, to tell me I am dead nuts wrong based on my own personal experience is well.....simply dead nuts wrong. Your logic would imply that my own personal experience of having to search offshore for fish and target other species, and catch the mature kings was a mirage. I think some of my videos would argue the contrary.

 

Keep in mind, and read my post very carefully (i.e. think "micromanage") but I am not commenting on the health of the lake and what may truly be a problem with the mature Chinook population. I would love to see DEC creel survey results and data based on sound scientific principles done by folks much smarter than me. VHS, Gizzard shad die-offs, transport issues with the fingerlings, the cold winter, Altmar hatchery issues, Caledonia hatchery no longer supporting Chinook, excessive bait fish are all great theories but I think it first needs to be scientifically concluded how severe the problem is in the first place. I agree that there probably is some sort of problem caused by something, but I was able to overcome some of it by fishing different waters. That is all I am arguing here. There are some terrific fishermen on this site that have enlightened me with some their great posts on this already: i.e. Yankee Troller, Vince P., and many others.

 

In conclusion, you can think of me as a case study (perhaps not the best way to determine cause and effect in the name of good scientific principle) but what's probably more important is a retrospective analysis or at least a current analysis of the trib fishermen over the next few weeks. I believe there will be some sort of DEC meeting in the next few weeks (there was a post on this earlier) which could enlighten all of us on what problems currently exist and hopefully ideas to improve it. That being said, to tell me that my own personal experience is dead nuts wrong is analogous to telling me that a patient with chest pain that I saw in the office today could not possibly have been an "aortic dissection", but rather a "heart attack" because all the other doctors you talked with over the past three months who had patients with chest pain all were heart attacks.

 

Just my two pennies....and please keep in mind there's a big difference between disagreeing vs. telling someone they are wrong........

 

Chris

[Silver Fox]

Kings fishing sucked this season off sandy. When fishing lake trout from mid June thru July is the only game in town, it sucked. Offshore didn't get going till august and the matures were hit or miss. Went 3-9 in a couple hours sunday off sandy in 10-25fow with only a few matures the rest we netted or lost were those 10# 2 yr olds. Overall the whole lake was way down compared to previous years and that has been well documented through the season.

Edited September 23, 2014 by Silver Fox

[baitrigger]

Weather and water temps made fishing tough. Offshore is a ****. Lots of water out there. The guides in the lower niagara are taking limits before 9 am. The fish are piled on top of each other. They have been out there, just not where we think they should be.

[Big Water]

I'll go back to what I stated on another thread.  I started fishing the lake in 2011 and had a hard time keeping skippys off of my lines.  The next year (2012 and this year's 3 year olds) they were almost non-existent.  2013 had a few more showing up and this year I had to change from Blacks releases to Scotties so I could tell when I was dragging one. I don't think they were there in any numbers for whatever reason this year (and yes, they were offshore more than in close) but if this theory holds true 2016 should be a banner year.

[Adk1]

Well I am glad to hear I wasent alone on thinking the salmon fishing was less than average. I never landed a salmon for the only three days I fished the lake the end of july

[Legacy]

No doubt, a terrible King catch lake wide this year. Very soon though, the tributaries will tell how bad the story is. 

[King Davy]

This isn't the first time this has happened. In fact as recent as 2007, the Hatchery in Altmar on National Hunting and Fishing Days which is always the last weekend of Sept. had little or no Kings in the raceway. A week later there were 20,000 fish in the raceways and beaver dam brook. I applaude Chris, for venturing out to find fish, as I've stated before , in a year with an Easterly flow of weather I always had to look much further off shore and east for that seasons mature fish. I have some friends on the eastern end of the lake in Canada who had a wonderful king season, and my Canuck brothers are having a normal trib king season.

 

For the record....everybody talking about the flood year up on ther salmon river washing away the eggs...the actual data in the spring of 2011, showed a banner crop of hatched fingerlings.

 

Another thing I'm noticing from pictures and fish we've caught last week up on the Salmon River the fish arriving, are in a condition that one would see after these fish are in a river for several weeks. Pics out of Oswego look like mid Oct. fish. To me looks like arriving late and maturing IN the lake as if they were in a river for several weeks...suggest in my tiny brain, that they may have been so displaced this year to the south shore tribs due to conditions, they are arriving later then usual, and are way into their accellerated spawning metabolism changes before reaching the pier heads.

 

BUT the true test will be actual returns, and it won't be guess work. Remember creel census for the first part of the season showed near record catches. Talked to my friend at the Hatchery yesterday, and a nice cluster of very dime bright Coho's have just arrived, last few years we've seen them run a couple weeks earlier as well. Hang in their folks.....let's see what the fish tell us. We can have as many theories as we'd like but soon we'll get some true science involved....whether it's good or bad news, we'll have some experts to assess the data.

Edited September 23, 2014 by King Davy

[Silver Fox]

Not for nothing dave , but for the most part, the offshore fishing chris did was mostly in august (as usual) when everyone else did well too. Before that it was a baron wasteland. All the tourney boats crossing the lake back and forth found squat.

.

[momay4000]

Not for nothing dave , but for the most part, the offshore fishing chris did was mostly in august (as usual) when everyone else did well too. Before that it was a baron wasteland. All the tourney boats crossing the lake back and forth found squat.

.

 

I agree with this comment 100%. Again, I'm not disagreeing by any means that there could be an issue (based on my experience earlier in the year) lake wide, I was simply sharing my total year experience and my own personal creel survey.

 

Thanks for the support!

 

-Chris

[King Davy]

yeah Scott I get that.....I remember a couple years out of Sandy back in the late 80's and early 90's when we had this kind of weather pattern....I took a week in July each time, ran over to Port Hope, and fished 10 to 15 miles east of there and crushed the kings while everybody on our side was scratching their heads. Could have been an anomaly...but I have lots of friends in the Kingston area, and they had fish all summer where they usually don't.

 

but think about it....Spawner Kings way offshore in August isn't  the norm lately and maybe the fact that they were behind in their migration. I saw some fish from the Genny up near the powerhouse this past weekend. They looked healthy but short...suggesting again two years olds that matured early. Just wonder if the winter pushed the button on younger fish to mature quicker. Maybe some of the older fish didn't handle the stress of a long cold winter where they didn't feed well. They have to eat in winter to survive, Not as often, but they have to eat.

 

We need to get fish in the hands of biologists. First part of the year slammer fishing for kings right on track with the past few years and second highest creel count in the last 10 years. Second half creel count will have to be below normal we would expect with all the poor fishing reports. Sooo...if the a horde of fish arrive as usual, we'll probably have to chalk it up to a weather related possibly bait dispalcement to where the fish hung out related issue and not an issue with specific health of the species.

 

If not we'll expect DEC to autopsy samples to see if they can determine a true health issue.

[Patriot]

At least the DEC has been out and around getting numbers or not on catch rates and talking to people. I’ve seen them a few times in Oswego, weighing, measuring, taking scale samples, etc. So they’re doing their job, getting a pulse of the lake. And that’s valuable information for all of us.

Not an easy task, taking care of half +- of 7,340 square miles of water

[Tim Bromund]

 

For the record....everybody talking about the flood year up on ther salmon river washing away the eggs...the actual data in the spring of 2011, showed a banner crop of hatched fingerlings.

 

Another thing I'm noticing from pictures and fish we've caught last week up on the Salmon River the fish arriving, are in a condition that one would see after these fish are in a river for several weeks. Pics out of Oswego look like mid Oct. fish. To me looks like arriving late and maturing IN the lake as if they were in a river for several weeks...suggest in my tiny brain, that they may have been so displaced this year to the south shore tribs due to conditions, they are arriving later then usual, and are way into their accellerated spawning metabolism changes before reaching the pier heads.

 

 

 

Well, yes and no Dave.  The data from the 2011 Annual report doesn't quite show a banner crop.  The data kind of has to be viewed as incomplete.  They were unable to do their test seinings 2 out of the four weeks in May due to high water in the river.  The 2 data points they do have for may were above average, but all four weeks in June were below average.

 

 

Also regarding the pictures that have been posted for the last month, lake wide, but especially from Oswego to Mexico where there should be a high percentage of wild fish, almost every mature 3 year old is clipped, you see very few if any adipose intact bigger kings anywhere.  The only mature kings that I'm seeing with an adipose fin are smaller high teens/low 20's fish which are mature 2 year olds from the 2012 year class.

 

This lack of wild fish in that year class was evident to the DEC Creel Census folks last year, when, in the fish they checked, there was a much lower percentage of wild 2 year olds in the lake wide catch in 2013.  I believe it was around 30% or a little less, where in past years, it had been typically upwards of 60% for immature kings in the catch.  That low number of 2011 wild fish last year, coupled with the harsh winter we had last year definitely seems to have had a big impact on the wild fish numbers for this years 3 YO year class.  Regardless of the spring 2011 seining data, something happened to the 2011 year class of wild fish, because they just aren't out there in any numbers.

 

Tim

[King Davy]

Which is a valid point Tim....but data when available suggested strong hatching, and with high water, could and most likely would have induced the leaving of fish ....which could have resulted in less then stellar June data. 

 

Still...big Fry hatch never means a probabale big load of adult fish to the fishery. So absolutely those fish could have been impacted as fry and YOY by many many factors. Wild fish are unpredictable, and a reason we should be lobbying to keep the Clipping operation in tact. We won't be able to conclude data between wild VS hatchery much longer, and this year I think it's going to be a much more important factor.

[Tim Bromund]

Totally agree Dave,  We have been pushing the DEC hard to continue the clipping of kings since they made to decision to stop, but to this point, they don't want to hear it.  They have other studies that IMO are of rather dubious value that they want to use the trailer for, namely, they want to do a study of whether coho survival is better when stocked as fall fingerlings or spring yearlings, and they want to do a study to determine whether barge stocking vs direct stocking of brown trout is more effective.

 

Both are a waste of time, money and resources IMO.

 

We already know that coho survive much better when stocked as spring yearlings, the decision to switch to fall fingerling stocking of coho from spring yearling was financial, not biological, it cost's them a lot less when they hold the coho in the hatchery for six fewer months, period.  Except of course for the Salmon River's allotment, those are still released as spring fingerlings so that they ensure a good brood stock back to the hatchery, so they already know that spring yearlings survive and imprint better.

 

Regarding the brown trout stocking,I don't know of anyone that isn't happy with the quality of the brown trout fishery in Lake Ontario, they brown fishing is fantastic from one end of the lake to the other, if people choose to fish for them.  They get very little attention on the west end in particular, because in a normal year, we have kings to play with all summer.  They are there, but no one targets them, for the most part when kings are around.  Also they are in shallower than the kings typically are, so there aren't a lot of incidental catches of browns by guys targeting salmon.  I happen to like browns, so even in mid summer, I'll spend a couple trips targeting them out of Olcott.  You typically find them in 35-50 fow anywhere there is some kind of even subtle structure, gorging themselves on gobys for the most part.  I catch all the browns I want when I go in tight and target them,  You can troll from the piers to Somerset and catch browns all the way down.  I don't know what value there is to that study, It seems that both strategies are very effective and have good/excellent survival.

 

The wild card in the lake is the kings, and IMO, that is where they need to be directing their limited resources.

 

Tim

Edited September 23, 2014 by Tim Bromund

[Gill-T]

"Just my two pennies....and please keep in mind there's a big difference between disagreeing vs. telling someone they are wrong........"

 

Chris

 

Yes you are correct!  Sorry for the angina.  

Edited September 23, 2014 by Gill-T

[ReelPower]

Great info guys...Tim's data is quite persuasive and my small sample of kings this summer was all stocked fish.

Dr. Chris I suffered a random complete aortic dissection last year and the first docs missed it...thanks for keeping that diagnosis front and center in your differential, it's a killer that gets missed too often.

[GAMBLER]

My number of kings boated was the second lowest since I started keeping my fishing log.  On the other hand, my laker numbers were WAY above normal.  Steelhead, Browns, Coho, and Atlantics were right around average.  As crappy as the king fishing was, it was still a great season.  This was one of the weirdest seasons I can remember in all the years I have been doing this.  Hopefully next season is back to what is was in 2010 - 2013.