Monterey Bay Salmon & Trout Project

During our Chinook Salmon Enhancement Program this year, our MBSTP volunteers again participated in a team effort with CDFG and two other cooperative fish rearing organizations to vaccinate approximately 396,000 chinook smolts at the Mokelumne River Hatchery.

We continued to have great success this year at the Santa Cruz Harbor location with the use of our semi-ridged piping system for transferring the chinook smelts from the CDFG transport truck to our net pen for the completion of the acclimation process. Unfortunately we were not able to conduct our Chinook Salmon Program at the Moss Landing Harbor this year due to the lack of availability of personnel for a full crew at that location and due to some technical difficulties as well. Never-the-less, our chinook smolt acclimation program this year was essentially as successful as the last two years with an outstanding survival rate at release time of ~99.8+%.

As was the case for the past three years, the juvenile chinook fish delivered to, and released from, our sea pens this year were in excellent physical condition. A significant contributing factor from our experience was no doubt the fact that these chinook smelts again came from the Mokelumne River Hatchery. The overall total of juvenile chinook salmon released into the Monterey Bay during the sixteen years of the Program is now well
over 2,085,000.

MBSTP continues to be very impressed from our observations in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 with the excellent condition and health of the chinook smelts that have been delivered to us by CDFG from the Mokelumne River Hatchery. We take pleasure in strongly recommending that the Mokelumne River Hatchery continue to be used as the source of supply for our juvenile chinook smelts in the future. As a result of our experience this year in not being able to put together a full crew for a Moss Landing Harbor chinook operation, we are in need of 6 or 7 volunteers to assist our Moss Landing Harbor Chinook Program team leader for 2007. If we cannot obtain a full crew for the Moss Landing site we will be unable to conduct our chinook operations there for 2007.

Please contact Larry Wolf at 831-688-4257, or Al Smith at 831-722-4753 or 831-458-3095 if you are interested in helping us to conduct our Chinook Program at Moss Landing in 2007. Our target number of chinook salmon smelts to release in 2007 is 240,000 fish. Our juvenile Steelhead inventory heading into the Fall of 2006 is at a decent level of approximately 52,000 fish while our juvenile coho population stands at approximately 2,200 fish. This number of juvenile coho at our facility is substantially less than we had hoped for from this year’s returning adult class. For the total life of our coho and Steelhead programs, the cumulative amount of juvenile fish released into area streams is over 2,041,000.

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