What an exciting week!
Starting bright and early Monday morning the first batch of returned angler surveys were on my desk, Hooray!  Granted as stack of 20 or so white envelops does not seem all that exciting, the information they contain is invaluable.  The surveyed anglers will help determine how we can save the more lives of protected rockfish. The experiences, opinions and suggestions of these anglers are important to our cause because they are stakeholders in the resource ODFW is trying to responsibly manage. Responsibly managing resources is a community affair which requires the participation of Oregon’s anglers.  Thank you to all of the respondents for doing your part!
The public comment meeting I attended this evening further emphasized this point.  A public comment meeting is an opportunity for stakeholders to meet with natural resource managers and provide their suggestions about regulation changes and receive updates about the goings with commission meetings etc.
Today’s meeting was presided over by the halibut and groundfish management time, with whom I’m associated.  Important news that was discussed included how to arrange the sport halibut season and the potential for China Rockfish to become an overfished species in the coming years.
For last three days have been busily entering survey data into the computer.  Because respondents answered a series of multiple choice and short response question, the data set which is created as a result is more complex than I am custom to.  I have transcribed all the short answer responses in to the computer and then coded the responses with a number that correlates to a summary of the response.  It is a time consuming task but I have really enjoyed looking over the responses.  Thus far I have about a 20% return rate of surveys and the requested return date is not until next Monday.  This is very encouraging since I have been anticipating a 25% return rate over all and it looks like this will be far exceeded.