[3] Sportfishers, Gillnetters Clash Over Share Of Spring Chinook Run

Sportfishers and commercial gillnetters are fighting for changes in the allocation of spring chinook catches that would give their constituents a little bigger slice of the spring chinook pie.

Both groups are limited by ESA constraints limiting their combined non-treaty fishing impacts to 2 percent of the wild-listed springers heading for the Snake and upper Columbia rivers. Treaty fishermen are allowed 11 percent.

The current management scheme splits the impacts in favor of the recreational side, with sporties getting 60 percent of the non-treaty share of the early spring fishery, and the lower Columbia gillnetters getting 40 percent.

The sport side wants 70 percent; the gillnetters are calling for a 50-50 split.

According to Hobe Kytr, administrator of the Astoria-based Salmon For All--the main support group for the 100 or so lower-river gillnetters--the recreational fishers end up with over 80 percent of the allocation in most years if their tributary catches are included. Kytr said the gillnetters usually have to end their seasons early because they have reached their limit of estimated impacts to either winter steelhead or upriver wild springers.

At the Jan. 6 meeting of the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission, commissioners gave the commercial side a break and voted 4-3 to boost the commercial take to 55 percent.

The battle moved across the river to Washington, where both sides made their case on Jan. 14, when WDFW commissioners considered the issue. Sports interests are calling it the "sportfishing industry Super Bowl."

The commissioners decided to stick with the current 60-40 allocation for the next two years, which means the issue goes back to Oregon one more time. If Oregon commissioners don't change their minds, then the ball is back in Washington's court.

For years, the two states have managed lower river harvests to minimize impacts to ESA-listed upriver stocks. This means that most of the gillnetters' actual catch is made up of hatchery chinook bound for the Willamette River, which usually show up a bit earlier than the upriver stocks. They are sold on the market as Columbia River spring chinook, which are prized for their high fat content, and most consumers don't know the difference. The chinook command $20 a pound or more at the retail level, and are worth about five bucks a pound to fishermen.

Though the commercial side also augments its spring income with modest terminal net-pen fisheries developed with the help of Bonneville Power Administration funding, these early springers are worth about $100 apiece. Hence, the fight over who gets a few extra handfuls of fish has become a serious economic issue.

With last year's spring run showing up about half what was expected, the gillnetters harvested about 5,500 upriver chinook. In 2004, they landed more than 13,000 of them.

But the sporties say the gillnetters need to be cut back. In a letter to Oregon's F&W Commission, Trey Carskadon, president of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, said a new harvest regime should manage the gillnetters more conservatively early on, but allow a "mop-up" fishery for the commercials if a run-size update by fish managers calls for it.

Carskadon also said the financial impacts are just as important to the sport fishing industry and its recreational fishers. "The food and market value is the past," he said in his letter. "The demand for these particular Columbia River salmon is exceeding the supply and prioritization is required."

His group said the sports side only caught, on average, 39 percent of the spring salmon harvest in Oregon since 2000, while the commercial side caught 61 percent. They included the numbers in a table presented before ODFW commissioners at their Jan. 6 meeting.

But Salmon For All spokesman Kytr said the numbers were misleading, and included the springtime catches of Oregon ocean trollers, who are targeting early runs of fall chinook off the southern Oregon coast that are heading for California's Sacramento River. The inclusion of the troll catches makes a huge difference, since the trollers had caught more than 100,000 chinook by the end of June in two out of the past three years.

Chuck Tracy, staff officer with the Pacific Fishery Management Council, said the table put together by the sports group does include the spring catch of the California-bound fish, and neglects to include the spring ocean catches of recreational fishers, though he said that didn't amount to much.

To sort out the economics of the allocation issue, Oregon commissioners asked a team of economists from Oregon State University to review the matter. In a draft report released Dec. 23, the academics said earlier studies had looked at different parts of the picture; some tried to assess value, while others looked at economic impacts. The results cannot be compared, they said, because they measure different things.

The review did recommend, among other things, that ODFW should develop a research plan that defines the basic data needed to assess both the commercial and recreational inriver fisheries. The economists said the complexity and variability of the issue "make it impossible to find a stable economically 'right' allocation." As complexity grows, they said, so will the difficulty of determining the economically best allocation.

In their review of earlier work, the OSU economists said a 2004 study of fisheries (Huppert et al.) that was part of Washington's Columbia River Initiative, was fundamentally flawed, overestimating the value of the recreational fishery ($27 million) by at least 100 percent.

Sportfishing advocates also claimed that the recreational side was more efficient at catching chinook since only hatchery fish were kept, and less lethal to wild fish that must be released.

They pointed to the 10-percent mortality rate from the hook-and-release of wild fish by recreational fishers that is used by Columbia River managers in their fisheries assessments, compared to the 18-percent rate used by the managers to assess mortalities from tangle net releases and the 40-percent mortality rate from releasing wild fish caught in regular-size gillnets.

But they neglected to mention that the 10-percent rate may be too optimistic, since the mortality rate of hook-and-release procedures used by the Pacific Salmon Commission in its own analyses of U.S. and Canadian harvests is 30 percent.

Another sticking point in revising inriver management policy has been the differing opinions between Washington and Oregon about incidental take of ESA-listed winter steelhead, which spawn in Columbia tributaries in both states.

NOAA fisheries had OK'd an increase of the incidental catch rate of winter steelhead from 2 percent to 6 percent last year, based on increasing escapements and would allow gillnetters more time to target spring chinook. It was a position endorsed by both Washington and Oregon fish managers, but Washington commissioners voted to bump it up to only 4 percent. OFWC commissioners nixed any increase, so it didn't take effect.

However, extremely low returns this winter will likely keep the incidental catch of winter steelhead at 2 percent in the foreseeable future. The feds have now indicated they will likely conclude any incidental mortality above the 2 percent rate would jeopardize the survival and recovery of the lower Columbia stock. -B. R.

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