The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife this week adopted temporary rules closing the upper reaches of the Sandy River to the harvest of summer steelhead through Aug. 31 largely as a means of protecting threatened chinook salmon that ply the waters.
Anglers and sport-fishing charters off the California coast are returning to the docks with full boats and happy customers as the strong ocean salmon bite continues, making 2012 one of the best salmon seasons in years.
Sturgeon anglers fishing in the Columbia and Snake river reservoirs above McNary Dam are asked to watch for and return special tags found in some of the fish.
Anglers got a holiday treat this week with the approval of a Saturday-Sunday reopening of the lower Columbia River spring chinook salmon fishery, which had been closed since April 13.
Anglers will have at least four more days to fish for hatchery-reared spring chinook salmon on a section of the Columbia River stretching 163 miles upstream from Bonneville Dam.
Catch rates have improved for both sport and commercial fisheries but apprehension over what appears to be a late arriving, or light, spring chinook salmon run to the Columbia-Snake river system has forced state managers to pause at least until a run-size estimate can be recalculated in early May.
Both sport and commercial fishermen continue to get a bite at the apple as fishery managers await what they still believe will be a relatively high return of upriver spring chinook salmon to the Columbia-Snake river system.
With the lower Columbia River running high, cold and murky and filled with debris, anglers have had little success so far this spring – a fact that prompted state managers on Thursday to allow an extra week of early-season salmon fishing.
Idaho Power’s trout-stocking program can bring some thrills to a lot of anglers, and none bigger than the one Marvin Channer of Boise got when he recently won $1,000 in the twice-annual jaw-tag drawing.
More than 100 boats were counted on the lower Columbia River one day in late February but only five salmon were caught (two fin-clipped hatchery fish were reeled in and kept and three chinook were released) during the week ending Feb. 26, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. A total of total of 291 boat anglers, and 201 sportsmen fishing from the river bank, were counted during the week on the lower river.
Oregon fishery managers announced Thursday that the Willamette River downstream from Willamette Falls, including Multnomah Channel and the Gilbert River just north of Portland, will not be open to sturgeon retention on Feb. 24-25 as had been planned.
Oregon and Washington fishery managers announced Wednesday the closure of the white sturgeon “retention” season in the Columbia River mainstem and tributaries from Bonneville Dam upstream to The Dalles Dam at the end of the day Friday, Feb. 17.
Anglers who turn in their 2011 combined angling tag before May 18, 2012 could win one of 100 outdoor products, including a complete drift boat package.
Lower Columbia River salmon and steelhead sport harvests, in some cases, were the best on record in 2011 and, with rosy return forecasts for many species, the fishing should be good again in 2012, according “preliminary draft” data compiled by the Oregon and Washington departments of fish and wildlife.
Anglers participating in a special reward program this year hauled more than 155,000 northern pikeminnow from the Columbia and Snake rivers, thus saving an estimated 4 million young salmon and steelhead from getting eaten by the hungry predators.
More than 250 steelhead will be stocked in the Boise River on Thursday, Nov. 10, the first of four planned stocking efforts during the next few weeks.
Through September, an estimated 26,591 adult fall chinook salmon have been caught and kept during 2011’s fall lower Columbia River.
That catch eclipses the previous record, 26,195 fish caught in 2003, according to data compiled by the Oregon and Washington departments of fish and wildlife. The record will increase after the October catch is added to August-September totals. The records began in 1969.
The total sport catch of fall chinook salmon this year in the lower Columbia River -- 25,677 adult chinook through this past Sunday, Sept. 25, -- is now the second largest since at least 1980 and could well take over the top spot in the coming days.
Last Wednesday anglers got their first chance to catch summer chinook salmon in the tailrace of the hydroelectric powerhouse operated by the Chelan County Public Utility District in Chelan.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Seattle District, is increasing outflows from Albeni Falls Dam and lowering Lake Pend Oreille with an elevation target of 2,060 feet above mean sea level by Sept. 30.
The summer of 2011’s record-setting steelhead season on the mainstem Columbia River is due at least in part to a cooperative marketing effort among the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, Travel Oregon, Oregon State Marine Board and the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, the groups say.
The special fishery for triploid rainbow trout below Chief Joseph Dam on the Columbia River closed Aug. 26 at midnight.
Anglers intent on filling their freezer with salmon might be advised, strangely enough, to head for a place that not long ago was largely barren of fall chinook.
Beginning Sept. 1 people fishing the strip of lower Snake River from where it hits the Idaho-Washington border upstream along state lines to the Hells Canyon Dam can take home up to six adipose fin clipped adult fall chinook salmon daily.
The estimated kept catch of 9,800 hatchery summer steelhead by anglers on the lower Columbia River so far this month (through Aug. 22) is already an all-time record not just for August but for any month in the past 32 years at the very least, according to data compiled by the Oregon and Washington departments of fish and wildlife.
Since May 1, anglers participating in the pikeminnow sport-reward fishery program, have caught thousands of predatory pikeminnow from the Columbia and Snake rivers and as a result saved migrating juvenile salmon and steelhead that are protected under the Endangered Species Act.
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