Chinook Salmon Stocking Strategy

[Rick]

ALGOMA, WI - At our last two Lake Michigan Fisheries Forum meetings (Dec 2012 and April 2013), the Department and stakeholders have discussed creating a new strategy for the county by county distribution of Chinook salmon in Wisconsin waters of Lake Michigan. In preparation for the April 2013 meeting, Department staff prepared a draft strategy based on the comments and direction we received from numerous stakeholders and members of the Lake Michigan Fisheries Forum

Utilizing these comments, a new draft of our proposed stocking strategy is now ready for your review. We think this is close to being our final strategy and want you to look it over to be sure.

This draft differs from the April, 2013 version in just a few ways---------

1) To more accurately reflect the economic benefit of the Charter Industry, we replaced the number of Charter Boats docked by county with the number of charter boat trips by county (using a 10-year average)

2) We added a placeholder for CWT (coded wire tag return) information that will be forthcoming from our ongoing Chinook salmon CWT study.

3) We updated the stocking numbers for all species to reflect Wisconsin’s current lake-wide stocking plans for 2014

4) We set the strategy to account for 25% of the Chinook salmon stocking (the other 75% of the Chinook stocked maintains a basic fishery at each port as we discussed)

The results of this strategy can be seen starting in column R of the enclosed spreadsheet.

The next step is to collect more comments on this strategy over the next two months and then prepare a final version for review at our October 12, 2013 Lake Michigan Fisheries Forum meeting.

If you have any comments, please feel free to email Brad att ([email protected]), call (414-382-7921) or drop them in the mail (WDNR, Brad Eggold, 600 E. Greenfield Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53204) by September 23, 2013.

Brad

Bradley T. Eggold

Southern Lake Michigan Fisheries Supervisor

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources