Homer Elks Derby! Oct 1 & 2

I also want to find out how to pull the wires when there isn't a biologist around.

Congrats on the nice catch. That's a good fish from any boat.
The event turned out to be a great success, especially with the weather cooperating too. According to the Elks Lodge info the 20th Annual Winter King Tournament is in the books. 204 anglers catching 372 fish totaling 3,349 pounds!

So 1st, 2nd, and 3rd plus the average fish prize went a bit over $4000, $3000, $2000, $2000.  Whole lot better odds of winning than in Las Vegas for sure.

About the Coded Wire Tags, its not likely you will be able to retrieve the tag. They are only about 1/16 of an inch long. About like a devils club thorn size. The reason why they are so microscopic is because they are injected into a very small salmon smolt nose and anything larger would kill the fish. So finding that tiny piece of metal in an adult salmon head usually requires a very expensive detector ($7K) to determine if there is a wire in the fish head.   And then the biologist starts cutting the head into pieces, detecting which piece still has the wire, cut in half again, and again until they are down to a piece of tissue about 1/4" in size. Then under a microscope they start probing that material to find the wire. It takes a 30 power microscope to read the code number on the wire which identifies where the fish came from.

(Many hatcheries will clip the adipose fin on all or maybe only a few of their released fish and only put coded wire tags in as few as 10%, so many of the clipped feeders in Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay will not have a tag, only a clipped fin. And many feeders from the same hatchery will not even be clipped.)

I processed 4 heads a few years ago (2013) and only retrieved one tag. Pressure cooked the noses (that's all you need where the tag is embeded) for 12 hours to break down the tissue. Then meticulously started removing material and using a 90# neodymium magnet, I finally recovered one.

The Photos:
A coded wire tag at the tip of a fine point dissecting tweezer. (10X)
A 30X view taken with my microscope to read the code, 181484-1
And the Coded Wire Tag (CWT) information identifying the hatchery location of this chinook salmon and release date.
The hatchery is located in British Columbia. http://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/sep-pmvs/projects-projets/robertson/robertson-eng.html

Thanks KK. I guess I'll leave it to the biologists lol.

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I had seriously thought about purchasing a detector for my own use until I tracked down the price tag. Apparently the company that manufactures these rolls of laser etched encoded wire for the injector units is the only maker of the detector to locate them in the tissue samples. $7K is a bit over my Xmas budget.    And when I realized how many clipped fish did not have a tag in them I have put off searching for any other tags for the immediate future. (I have about 15+ king heads in my freezer from clipped fish my charter friend has provided.)

For the record, the West Coast hatcheries from BC down to N Cal have consistently released 253 million king smolt and fry each year since the late 1990's. That does not count the natural wild production contribution of those streams. Hatcheries in AK have only stocked roughly 4 million kings out of that quarter billion count each year. The odds of a Cook Inlet feeder coming from an outside location is probably in the high 90 percentile bracket. Homer F&G biologists have processed many hundreds or even in the thousands range of tags submitted by charter and private anglers during these past 5 years as well as performed genetic sampling especially in the summer when adult kings are returning to spawn. I believe they are working on summarizing the study this winter hopefully to be used at the Feb 2017 Board of Fish meeting. With favorable information maybe we can get the limits changed or increased, or remove the reporting of kings on your license year round south of Anchor Point, etc.