Even more 2013 Creel Project Analysis

    As we continue to build the foundation for future data, one of the things we are doing along with gathering all of the specific annual data, is to start creating longer-term historical data for each region of the North Shore: Lower Middle and Upper. Annual data helps us see the direct interactions between flow, temperature and fish movement. Placed into a regional historical context, we begin to see the larger patterns in start, peak and end of run. We also begin to get a peek at the length of the run for given regions.

    Now, you have understand a few things about this larger picture; fluctuations in year to year weather have all kinds of effects on the run. Early warmups kick it off sooner, late warmups kick things off later, rapid warmups tend to compress the length of the run, while more gradual warming seems to expand or lengthen the run. So far this is the general picture developing in the data.

    We'll talk about what the relationships are later between the annual, regional historical and overall historical picture, but for now here is the regional historical picture:

Lower Shore

 

 

    Lower Shore probably gives us our best picture simply because more people fish there compared to other regions, so we just have more data to work with. Keep in mind with all of the charts here that you are looking at four years worth of aggregate numbers. Represented in those numbers are what could be described as an "early", "normal" and "late" run (my terms). That is to say we have years represented where the run kicked off very early, late and so forth from an anectdotal perspective. Because of that you can't draw conclusions about the overall length of the run on the Lower Shore from the chart. The annual data helps us with that, but where these charts are useful is they do (given enough data), begin to illustrate the typical peak of the run. You can also plug them into a sort of Shore-Wide aggregate to get a high-level view of the run picture. More on that to come.

 

Mid Shore 

    Mid Shore is a bit of a character. Here you see the heavy influence of an early and late run. As we gather more data, the chart theoretically should normalize somewhat with regards to the totals where we don't see the wild fluctuations, but only time and data will tell. Who knows, we might find some surprizes, and that's what the Creel Project is all about. I'm not willing to try and interpret much from this one, even running a 9pt. moving average trend to try and filter out some of the data noise just leaves me scratching my head. My apologies, I really geeked out there for a second... So far all I'm willing to say is that Mid Shore appears to closely mirror Lower Shore with respect to peak creel, maybe.

Upper Shore

 

 

    Here again we see an early run influence, despite that we're starting to see a solid peak around the first of May, some three weeks after the Lower Shore. That said, we have a solid month of prime steelheading based upon the data we've captured so far. What's not so clear about the Upper Shore is how long does it last? The steep drop in numbers after May 28th probably isn't due to the lack of fish, it's more likely that it's simply a lack of anglers out fishing the tribs at that time. 2013 wasn't a year I would consider out of the ordinary, and the folks we did get reports from were catching fish well into the third week of  June. We also have plenty of reports from prior to the official start of the creel project reporting fish into July in some cases.

 

    So far we're looking at approximately 3 months of steelheading in the tribs. At least one month of that looks to be prime steelheading with fish being at peak or slightly post-peak depending on where you are. Add on fish (Kamloops and Steelhead) staged in the lake on the front end, and you're looking at a season that's easily 4 month long and allows for every technique you care to try to be employed.

 

More to come-

NMF