CalTrout News
The South Fork Eel River is a salmon and steelhead stronghold and represents the best opportunity to restore wild fish abundance. This stretch of river has been impacted by excessive water diversions in many of its tributaries. Improving stream flows is critical to protecting key life-stages for coho salmon and steelhead survival.
To inform our conservation work on the Eel, CalTrout has teamed up with partners on this new project – The Adult Salmonid Sonar Monitoring Program – to tally the annual spawning run of Chinook salmon, coho salmon, and steelhead on the South Fork Eel River with a Sound Metrics Dual Frequency Identification Sonar (DIDSON) camera.
We covered this project in a previous article in the Current, “Using Sonar to Count Fish on the Eel River.” Check it out for more information.
Here’s the latest update for the 2019-2020 project year from CalTrout’s Matt Metheny, North Coast Project Manager.
This season’s Sonar deployment on the South Fork Eel River began 21 November 2019 and ended 30 May 2020. The preliminary estimate for Chinook Salmon was 2,093 adult spawners during the months of November and December. The preliminary estimate of 2,182 fish during the months of January and February represents a mixture of Coho Salmon and steelhead. The preliminary upstream estimate of 1,317 fish for the months of March and April represents steelhead, with an estimated 171 steelhead kelts returning to the ocean after spawning. The combined count of 5,538 fish for the 2019-20 season is well below the estimate of 9,194 for 2018-19. Funding for the 2020-21 season has not been secured, so the future of this monitoring effort is uncertain.
Read Matt’s full report below:
SF_Eel_River_2019_20_sonar_update_3
1 Comment
Commercial fishing is certainly scooping up a lot of future spawners too? Is there not some viable way to stop excessive salmon harvest in the ocean for like… 5 or 6 years to let them recover a bit? Even AK’s kings are going down the tubes fast. With nets across the Kenai 20 out of 24 hrs/ day, how long will it be before there are NO returning fish? Same policies have destroyed fish stocks around the globe, do we think ‘it’ll be different this time?’
Fishing methods definitely need a re-work, and for starters it looks like it’ll have to be a single hook and line per fisherman, no nets allowed…
The Eel is already a Catch-n-Release river, but they still allow bait – the hooks of which are often swallowed and rip the guts out of fish they have to release. Does anyone else see a flaw with this policy? This isn’t rocket science. I’ve been saying this (to parties supposed to be working on these issues) for years while watching dead juveniles drift down the Eel after a weekend of bait-draggers have assaulted it. Between this, commercial harvest, and (lets not forget) severe pot field erosion/ pollution, the fish are being destroyed from all angles. I know the wheels of Gov’t turn slow, but the fish are running our of time… They need a more aggressive dog in the fight here.