Last Wednesday I hooked up with John Gross, one of my freshman dormmates, circa 1972-73, in quest of chinook salmon on the Elk River located a few miles north of Port Orford on the southern Oregon coast.  It was a busy day on the Elk with most of the fishermen launching their drift boats at the top of the drift, about 8 miles upstream of the take out.  John, who owns Roaring Fork Guide Service and fishes the Elk regularly, said we should only bother fishing on the lower 3 miles where most of the fresh fish would be and well downstream of nearly all the other fishermen.  The first hour and a half was slow then 2 fish were hooked and landed within 10 minutes at the Stick Hole, one of John’s favorite spots.  90 minutes later we had our third and largest salmon.  When we got off the river we were met by ODFW employee Dina to measure and record our catch.  Dina also happens to by one of my renters so there was lots of cajoling.   I later found out from Dina that we caught 25% of all the fish recorded that day out of 32 drift boats that fished the river the entire day.  Although we had a great time and were done by noon most fishermen got skunked and were discouraged after spending 8+ hours on the river.  Is it luck, skill or was it John’s Stanford and UC Berkeley  educations that made the difference?  I conclude it is a multivariant analysis requiring a larger data set to arrive at a valid solution.  I’m applying for a grant to Roaring Fork funded in part by my great sense of humor and lots of beer to expand the data set to help solve this complex problem.