TOPIC:

I’ve noticed that our end of the lake is getting a lot of 8-10 lb kings.  In years past I feel like there has been bigger fish around this time of year.  Is there any scientific reasoning for this?  A few 16s here and there but not much I have seen outside of that size range.  Are bigger kings on the way?  Or is this our best value right now?  Would love to hear from someone out of St Joe if this is the case up there.  North Point seems to reflect this trend from what I’ve seen via reports and pictures.

Majority of the fish are wild as well. My prediction is there was a nice recruiting class of fish 2-3 years ago from the rivers when we had the last good Alewife spawn. 

Also increase in stocking leads to smaller fish but more of them. 

There was a decent alewife spawn in 2021, and alewife spawn strength is almost always strongly correlated with survival of kings from that same yearclass.

So the likely explanation for 8-10 pound kings right now is that there was good survival of the 2021 chinook yearclass, which would be in that 8-10 pound range right now as 2 year olds in the spring

Don't have great data on the 2020 spawn since there wasn't a survey done in 2020, but the best info we have suggests it wasn't nearly as good as the 2021 spawn, so there are probably way fewer 3 year old kings in comparison to 2 year olds right now. Especially when you add in that some of those 2020 yearclass kings spawned as 2-year olds last fall and subsequently died