(The Fraser Panel holds its first meeting of the New Year in Portland this month, to finalize reports on the 2001 salmon run and look ahead to the coming year. This is Mr. Otway’s report on the panel’s findings, as reported at the last meeting, regarding the Fraser River run.)

The Pacific Salmon Commission data indicates a total run size of 6,194,100 Sockeye in 2001. This is composed of a total catch estimate of 1,582,500 and an escapement of 4,611,600.

For Pinks the end of September estimate was a total run of 10 million with an estimated catch of 1,244,000. The Commission has no way of estimating the Pink run size in-season anymore due to the fact that there are no late fisheries. The Mission hydrocoustic system is not set up to estimate Pink passage so we have no real time estimate. DFO does a tag-recapture program to estimate the run size but this is not available until after the season.

At the meeting we had the latest reports on escapements as they had been calculated on the grounds by DFO staff to that time. These reports were as follows.

Stock Escapement Escape Goal Ave Historical Esc.

Early Stuart - 170,900 154,000 263,000
Early Summer 312,211 110,000 61,500
Summer 4,727,000 3,100,000 1,500,000
Late 105,000 433,000 108,000

This adds up to an actual escapement to date recorded of 5,315,111 plus the en route losses of the Late Run Stocks which should be in the order of 300,000. Our actual escapement goal was 3,797,000, which as I have noted previously far exceeds the historic escapement of 1.5 to 1.7 mill prior to the 1990’s and an overall average escapement on this cycle of 1,932,500.

If you add the numbers of actual escapement to date plus the probable en route losses of the late run stocks and the estimated catch of 1,582,500 you get a probable run size of approximately 7,200,000. This as you will note is about 1 million over the in-season estimate.

With regard the Fraser Pink salmon run DFO now estimates the escapement to be in the order of 20 million. This is the highest ever recorded for a Pink run. We will know what the results of this will be in two years when the progeny of this escapement return to the river. There was little catch in this run due to a combination of restricted fisheries due to Thompson Coho concerns and concerns for Late Run Sockeye stocks. At the same time there was little market demand for these fish. We agreed with the U.S. to allow them to fish for some time after our fisheries shut down and we did not restrict their effort. They in turn took precautions not to retain and release unharmed Coho and Chinook. They shut down their fishery early because there was no demand for the fish and they could not get anyone to fish.

So overall, while we had very successful fish runs to the Fraser in 2001, we had far less than successful fisheries.

Despite some early indications to the contrary and while the final figures are not in, it appears we still had a major loss in the Late Run stocks due to pre-spawn mortality. They entered the river earlier this year again, not as early as last year but still earlier. Certainly on the Weaver system, less than 10% made it to the spawning grounds to spawn. We should have the final figures following our January meeting.

For 2002 the current forecast of Fraser River Sockeye is estimated to be; at the 50% probability level – 12,768,983 fish and at the 75% probability level – 10,495,183 fish.

The majority of the run and the main harvestable surplus is in the Summer stocks, aprox 7 million, and the Late stocks, aprox 3 million. The concern for Late Run stocks remains and so we will be facing a difficult management year again in 2002. This may be reduced somewhat if we can get some flexibility in the escapement goals and the harvest levels allowed on Late Run Fish.