Lucky13

I was also there Thursday, spoke with Betsy, who said they were on track with ~1 million eggs, needing about 4 million. I got there just after they finished, and my hat is off to the crew, bolstered by a class from Morrisville, for their meticulous work in cleaning the area when they are done. If restaurants spent this much care in cleaning there would never be a food poisoning case. It stopped raining so I headed to a store to get gloves and then go fish, but by the time I got the gloves it was pouring again, and I heard that Steve Lapan was at the hatchery so I wnt baxck to seem if I could say hello. No Stev, but Fred, the camo bandana wearing worker in WC's pix, an old friend, came upstairs and we spoke for quite a while. They will likely be taking King eggs for another week, then cohos. They do not sound concerned about egg numbers, but he says they are getting a lot more males than females. He asays they think they have enough kings with what is in the chute, holding pens (they are only using two) and the ladder. The brook is mainly filled with cohoes with some kings dominating the entrance to the ladder. What I saw of the Publ;ic river was pretty devoid of fish. DSR was mixed, there were a lot of ki9ngs spawnijg in the gravel at the little black, but a olot of other spots are slim pickings. There was a push Wednesday PM in the heavy rain, but it didn't amount to a huge run and by Friday Town was elbow to elbow with new PA and NJ arrivals, likely another circus today! Walked 1.5 miles of lower DSR yesterday and saw one 15 lb BRIGHT hen king caught, a few other fish push through shallow spots but no big run. Lots of chatter up there about poor returns this year, those west end fish are probably still in transit!

http://www.fishcreeksalmon.org/history-atlantic-salmon.htm Likely some do, as they are having problems with Coho salmon on the Gaspe Peninsula, and they had to originate in New York, but the scientists are convinced that most stayed in LO. Similarly, while some Cayuga salmon likely went out to LO, most stayed in Cayuga, Seneca, Oneida or Onandaga Lakes.

I did not "insinuate" anything, I made a simple statement. Yes, age two fish run, but in natural systems, the majority of spawners are age three fish. Some one year old fish run also, totally immature jacks. Because the age and condition report is based on returns to the hatchery, three year fish, which are the " targets" in the gauntlet of 13 miles below the hatchery, show in lower numbers, two year fish dominate. A lot of the ~20 lb three year olds end up on stringers, while the 12-15 lb two yr olds are less desirable to the P-Town visitors. Fish went into Sandy on 4/21/2017, and were stocked on 4/27/17, 6 days . My main point with that was you and others were working with 2016 as the years of no pens, you were off by a year. Word from my Friends in P-Town is that the run there is pretty much a dud, too. Maybe it is early, but Columbus Day weekend is upcoming.

Not to rain on anyone's parade or throw water on anyone's fiery theories, but a check of the annual LO annual reports will conform that in 2016, the only pen site that was direct stocked was Sandy Creek, as no pen was available. Oak Orchard fish were delivered on 4/12/16, stocked on 5/10/16; 18 Mile on 4/13/16, stocked 5/3/16; Genny 4/15/16, stocked 5/5/16; Sodus 4/18/16, stocked 5/11/16; Little Sodus4/19/16, stocked 5/14/16; Oswego 4/20/16, stocked 5/12/2016; and Niagara 4/27/16. stocked 5/17/16. In 2017, the Genesee River, Oak Orchard and the Niagara were direct stocked. The other pen sites received their fish. Those fish will have three years in the lake NEXT fall, or please correct my math. While my reading on homing mechanisms in anadromous fish indicate that way more is NOT known about this phenomenon than is known, I fail to understand why fish that are raised in Beaver Dam brook, a relatively small tributary of the Salmon River, home in so heavily, but fish that were raised in Spring Creek, a small tributary to a tributary of the Genesee did not "en masse" home in on the Genesee, as everyone says they are doing on the Salmon River. These fish in their native range could find the Clearwater River in Idaho in the outflow of the Columbia River, why didn't they imprint strongly on Caledonia, but instead distributed themselves to all the western tributaries. Of course, fish that recruited from the natural component in the SR would imprint on the river and return there, less the amount that strays, maybe a natural mechanism that insures that a catastrophe in one river would not totally eliminate fish from the river. Reports from the Salmon River are not indicative of a massive run there, no " hundred rooster tails in the ripples below Joss all day" reports from DSR, and many of the fishers I hear from reporting average to less than average numbers of fish up river. Lots of fish in the hatchery, but when I was there last year at this time it was mostly cohos, the observer I heard from could not say for sure this year. Maybe my doctor will let me fish this week, and I'll see first hand. There were 1,882,500 kings stocked in 2016, no reduction. They are not in the west end, they are not in the Salmon in HUGE numbers, so where are they? When I first said it, I was half joking, but maybe they "died of gluttony", if the alewife they have been feeding on were low condition (as the trawl data indicates), loaded with thiaminase, and they overfed on them, maybe a lot of them have recently "hit the wall" as happened to the Steelhead a few years back. We'll have to see what the next couple of weeks bring. On a personal note, in my service to the GLFC citizen's panel, I have attended every face to face meeting, and been on every call (one when they were double session calls) with the exception of the last one, when I was with my wife in the emergency room in Utica, and they wouldn't let me use my cell phone.

That is Cedar Springs, it is tiny and ancient. DEC does not talk a lot about what they do there, my understanding is that it is used as a research facility, and they may do some rainbow work as the water is not whirling disease contaminated like Spring Creek. The operative word is tiny. And to get a sense of the volume of water, drive down Cedar Springs Road (Cedars Avenue on Google Maps) to where the stream crosses the road, right before you get to the gates. While you, can't step across Mill Creek there, it's not much bigger. "No need to buy Powder Mill. I brought up at the state of the lake meeting years ago about seeing if the owners of the hatchery would contract out raising our kings or leasing out the space to do it. It was an instant No." The County of Monroe still owns the Powder Mills Hatchery, the Reidman Foundation just operates it. The County was still kicking in 25 K/ yr to operating costs last time I looked at a County Budget. Again, water source might be a major issue there as the volume from the springs is low, and quality has declined somewhat since all the houses got built up and over the ridge. "It may have been built in the 30's, but was there not 800,000 recently put into it for an Atlantic program?" https://www.syracuse.com/outdoors/2012/01/tunison_lab.html According to the Outdoor column in Syracuse (maybe the only one left in WNY?) it was 800 k for a new UV treatment facility which is being used in the AS and cisco and bloater projects. It kills all pathogens in the water. Maybe this is a new and useful technology that has application in other areas of the fishery, often a side benefit of science. And as it was paid for with a Great Lakes Initiative grant, all the cowboys in Wyoming that we are usually subsidizing from here in NYS kicked in their share, too.

Guilty Hooker, the Tunison Lab was built in 1930, not recently, and has supported Federal Fisheries research throughout the Great Lakes, not just AS in NYS. It is not directly affiliated with Cornell, and is located outside of Cortland, New York. I toured it about 20 years ago with the new USGS section Chief at the time. It is no bigger than the Powder Mill Fis Hatchery, has inside raising trays and a few outdoor raceways. It is likely that a lot of that capacity is devoted to raising bloaters, another "two basket" project that the Feds (LO is an international waterbody, you might remember, so the feds have skin in the game, too) have a big hand in. Maybe you can all buy the Powder Mills Hatchery.

Rick, please, more specifics on this Federal Hatchery, where is it, does it have a name?

I have 30 years of experience working in Environmental Science, have worked with such illustrious scientists as Drs Ed Mills and Lars Rudstam from the Cornell Biological Research Facility on Oneida Lake, Fred Luckey from Region II USEPA, Dave MacNeill and his colleagues at Sea Grant, and Dr. Brian Weidel of the USGS (some of you deal with his "anonymous" self on here, and there are only a few self promoting posters here who use their own name, so I am hardly alone in having an " alias") and many of the DEC Regions 6, 7 and 8 staffs, among many others. I serve with you on the Great Lake Fishery Commission citizen advisory panel. As to instigating, I have not gone to the major outdoor print outlet in New York and publicly lambasted the mangers of this fishery based on my Television watching experience. How many screenshots do you have to take to get one big bait pod, Vince? It s an interesting hypothesis that raising fish in one of the more unique water sources in New York, a limestone spring with a very unique chemistry, would imprint fish to rivers 80 to 100 miles away that have no resemblance to Spring Brook in their water chemistry. Even comparing the flow in Spring Brook to the total flow in the Genesee River, it is amazing that that Spring Brook signature does not get "swamped" with all the other chemical influences for a big old muddy flow like the Genny. Perhaps you can put some kind of science together to prove your contentions, something a little more rigorous than " back in the day it was shoulder to shoulder (may I remind you that all aspects of the fishery are down somewhat, people seem to get bored with fishing after a few years) and a couple of cherry picked graph shots. BTW, all your noise about how much bait there is and there aren't enough salmon could be viewed as " the sky is falling" talk by out of staters, so you may be shooting yourself in the foot down the road regardless of whether the cuts are noticeable, and the bait bounces back, or not.

The Genesee has only dropped below 66°F last night and has only been below 67° three other nights. Maybe these fish only respond to temperature when they are offshore? Bill Abraham, retired Region 8 Fisheries Manager, always said the west end runs late because of warm source waters, what he called the thermal barriers, no deep shady woods like on the Tug Hill to cool the rivers down and keep them colder. But what would he know, he was just a university trained fisheries scientist! While there are fair numbers of fish in the Salmon River and the Oz, they are not yet experiencing the massive runs they have seen in past years, so there may be another big push to come. Or if Vince is right about the massive schools of bait he finds every time he turns on the graph, maybe the salmon all died of gluttony!

EVERYTHING dies anyway! That is no justification for anything!