Here is NWA post on Alaska forums
Copper River Kings and Reds.
I just got an e-mail from my daughter at the Miles Lake Tagging station. She is pulling and tagging Lots of kings. Yesterday theta tagged over 100 kings and as of noon they were above 50 Kings. They only tag and measure the Kings and release the Reds. They have had a hard time dealing with the shear volume of Reds in the live wells. She tells me that the numbers are huge so you guys on the Klutina should start seeing Reds soon. She also tells me that the size of the Kings are larger than normal and this reinforces the assumption that this is a heavy 5 year return with fewer Jacks than normal. I am just guessing but the Kings should be Gulkana bound and we should start seeing them in 10 days and in large numbers. There are very few fish wheels in the Copper as many were damages by last weeks ice and high water so I am hopeful this means few Kings get intercepted and we will see them.
The Miles Lake counter is running hard and from June 1-5 about 75,000 fish made it through the counter. The sonar does not id Kings from Reds and the counter was not 100% running until May 25th so the over all numbers are down from the expected. That reflects a lack of counts in late May and I expect many hammered through un-counted but that is nothing but my SWAG!
Here is AOD post posted the same day NWA posted his bad info
The Copper Sockeye counts continue to lag below ADFG daily expectations. When you only have 10,000 fish a day spread out over 24 hours and a river as massive as the Copper.....well good luck dippers. There are other conversations on a website forum apparently quoting workers at the Miles Lake sonar station. So to back up my "forecast" posted in another report of what is to come for that fishery I put in a call to the department to get a few more details.
Rumor #1: "...reports are that a lot of kings, and large ones, are currently being counted and tagged at the sonar site." The truth is ADFG does not do king tagging on the Copper River. There is a capture/mark/recapture program operated by the native corporation in the village of Eyak which has a fish wheel at Bear Canyon upstream of Miles Lake. They have only captured and marked 150 kings so far for the entire season to date. A lot? Hmm, not in my book. And definitely not for the mighty Copper. The village operates this program at separate locations independent of ADFG Sonar counts. They have another fish wheel for recapture at Canyon Creek which is below Chitina. Up to this date there have been no recaptured kings in the wheel there. Which means its not likely there are any kings yet at Chitina in any respectable numbers (of 150?). The corporation passes their program data on to ADFG for additional help in assessing the Copper River runs.
Rumor #2: "Large numbers of sockeye passed on the south sonar bank before that equipment was operational." Those fish would probably need their ice skates in that case. The south channel was frozen and had no water for the equipment to operate or for fish to swim until just before May 29th. (You can check the USGS river gauge levels during that time frame.) 5/29 was the first partial day of counting and the south bank recorded 145 fish. The next day 5/30 recorded 6480 on the South bank sonar. Pretty much of an indication the fish weren't traveling up river yet in big numbers due to breakup conditions. But who can see in muddy water, eh? Since there was no water for fish to swim in on the south bank until around May 29 it is not likely that perhaps in one day as the equipment was being set in place there would be more than a handful of reds go through undetected. And clearly not thousands of hidden reds when the counter documented only 6500 on day 2. A few thousand on any given day is a drop in the bucket, uh, river.
So in SUMMARY: I won't try to persuade folks to not believe what they want. Make the long trip if you choose, but I won't post sniveler reports here of no fish during the first opening. When 586,000 sockeye were harvested in the commfishery in just two periods and that number is the equivalent of 31% of the entire near record-breaking sockeye harvest of 1,900,000 in 2012 for the whole season, how can anyone think that the big blank spot on the chart doesn't mean NO FISH in the river? And remember that this year's ADFG sockeye forecast is for a normal size return. To each his own. Good luck, good dipping and if you get one,
