North Coast (Areas 3 & 4) Creel Survey

The North Coast-Skeena First Nations Stewardship Society (NCSFNSS) proposes to conduct a creel survey of the Area 3 and 4 recreational fishery following the design and methodology used by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) in the last 6 years (Van Tongeren 2012), in order to ensure continuity of data for temporal comparisons. Software for data management and analysis will be developed in partnership with LGL to offer comparable statistics and precision of catch and effort estimates as provided by DFO’. The purpose of the survey is to provide estimates of the catch and effort of all species targeted by the recreational fishery with known variance. Of high priority for the survey is the provision of monthly in-season catch estimates for all salmon species and Halibut harvested in the North Coast recreational fishery. Biological data will also be collected, such as fin clip incidence for Coho and Chinook, scale samples of Chinook, and Halibut lengths.