[3] As Chinook Run Winds Down, Politics Heat Up; Salmon Hearings Scheduled
The fall chinook run on the Columbia River is drawing to a close as sporties have filled their allocation of upriver chinook and put their gear away for the season.
But harvest managers have given commercial gillnetters more time to target returning coho, which has led to angry outbursts from disgruntled sporties and a tirade from Oregonian outdoors writer Bill Monroe, who lambasted officials for their inflexible approach. Monroe called for a reallocation of the 50-50 split between sporties and gillnetters to give sporties more fish and more time on the river.
It's bound to be a topic of discussion next week at Congressional field hearings on salmon recovery. But the gillnetters were perfectly legal since they hadn't reached the limits of their impacts to upriver brights and probably won't once their dinky coho season ends.
It's just another management headache as agencies cope with trying to preserve small numbers of ESA-listed fish bound for the Snake that are mixed in with large numbers of perfectly healthy chinook headed for the Hanford Reach.
Meanwhile, managers updated the fall run size on Sept. 25, whittling Bonneville Pool hatchery returns by a few thousand from a previous estimate. The latest return estimate (to the mouth of the river) is 572,000 fall chinook, down from their preseason prediction of 671,400 fish. Upriver brights were coming in about 20 percent less than originally estimated, pegged now at 383,000 fish.
About 396,000 fall chinook made it past Bonneville Dam by Oct. 2, with the upriver brights making up the largest part, along with mid-Columbia brights and Bonneville Pool hatchery fish.
By Sept. 25, sporties had caught about 28,000 chinook, while lower river commercials had netted around 11,000 chinook in August and another 10,000 in September, along with around 20,000 coho. The two gear groups are supposed to split the non-tribal share of about 8 percent of the upriver bright run 50-50.
The gillnetters also caught another 8,500 chinook in select area fisheries that target returning hatchery fish in the lower river.
Tribal fishers are allowed about 23 percent of the upriver bright run. So far, they have landed nearly 106,000 chinook in their fishery above Bonneville Dam, with about half the catch upriver brights. That's about 85 percent of their treaty allocation. They have also caught about 73 percent of their allotment of ESA-listed wild B steelhead heading for Idaho.
The good news is that a fair number of ESA-listed fall chinook are making it over Lower Granite Dam on the lower Snake. By Oct. 2, 9,600 hatchery and wild chinook had been counted here, about twice the 10-year average, with several thousand more fish headed up from Ice Harbor.
Several Northwest congressmen will wade into the waters next week and take testimony among regional stakeholders about all aspects of salmon recovery. Details are sketchy at present, but at least two hearings (in Vancouver and Seattle) are planned by representatives Greg Walden (R-Ore.), Brian Baird (D-Wash.) and Norm Dicks (D-Wash.).
The talks are expected to focus on current salmon recovery efforts, their economic costs and benefits. The politicians are also interested in any suggestions about "how we can improve the survival of returning adult salmon," according an e-mail from one of Baird's aides.
The hearings may provide a forum for more debate over reducing harvest rates on listed stocks, which has become a hot issue of late, with at least one potential lawsuit in the offing. An official announcement of the hearings is expected later this week. -Bill Rudolph
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