[5] West Coast Harvest Managers Offer Lukewarm To Grim Fishing Prospects

The Pacific Fishery Management Council will meet in early April to decide how many chinook the citizenry will be able to take home in their coolers this year. This year's harvest options include the possibility of a draconian closure for sports and commercial fishermen in southern Oregon and northern California to boost numbers of the weak Klamath River fall chinook run.

Off the Washington Coast, three options are on the table, ranging from total allowable catches between 35,000 and 65,000 chinook for the non-Indian sector, split equally between sport and commercial folks. Last year, the two groups caught a little over 100,000 chinook between them. Options for treaty fishermen range from 25,000 to 50,000 chinook.

South of Oregon's Cape Falcon, the picture gets much darker, as concern for Klamath River stocks may keep both sport and commercial boats tied up for most of the summer. The potential closure has already led to demonstrations by commercial fishermen whose bread and butter is based on the Sacramento hatchery chinook runs that accounted for most of the 600,000 chinook landed by Oregon and California trollers last year.

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski hosted an emergency summit Mar. 28 to coordinate a response to the expected closure that would reduce the economic harm to fishermen. He said he has already prepared a request to the Secretary of Commerce to take steps to declare an economic disaster.

Gov. Kulongoski also called on federal authorities to look at the question of how many chinook are really needed to return to the Klamath to maintain the run's viability.

"Science has not yet supplied an exact answer to this question," Kulongoski said in a press release. "Accordingly, the state of Oregon has asked for an amendment to the salmon management plan that provides more flexibility from year to year, until we have that answer in hand."

Kulongoski wants to meet with both Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez and Interior Secretary-designate Dirk Kempthorne to discuss Klamath harvest issues and the kind of financial aid the government should provide to coastal towns and fishers.

Federal fish managers said in a pre-season report that if Klamath spawner numbers dip below 35,000 in 2006, it will be the third year in a row that the conservation objective will not be met.

In 2002, a good portion of the Klamath run, 30,000 fish or more, died from lethal temperatures during part of their upriver migration. That year, the Iron Gate hatchery saw its third highest return of fall chinook (24,000), but only 3,500 spawners returned to the nearby Trinity River Hatchery. Biologists think the later running chinook bound for the Trinity suffered the most damage.

Fishing interests have pointed to farmers in the Klamath Basin as the culprit in the 2002 fish kill. They say more water should have been used to help cool the river for migrating salmon. The high temperatures encouraged growth of a common parasite that killed many of the chinook.

The overall return to the Klamath Basin is predicted at 110,000 fish, about half the number that returned in 2005. More than 435,000 chinook returned to the basin in 2001, and numbers were above 300,000 in other returns years from 2000-2003. The lowest return on record occurred in 1992 when 96,000 chinook returned to the basin.

Meanwhile, spring chinook in the Columbia River are beginning to show, but in such small numbers that regional harvest managers are growing concerned that the run may be even less than the 88,000-fish pre-season prediction for the upriver stocks.

With ESA concerns limiting non-tribal impacts of upriver stocks to 2 percent, gillnetters in the lower river have netted about a thousand spring chinook in four openings since Feb. 23. About one-third of the catch is estimated to be from upriver stocks. Harvest managers have figured about 27 percent of the commercials' impact has already been reached.

Sportsfishers in the lower Columbia had caught about 953 chinook by Mar. 26, with about 40 percent estimated to be upriver fish. On the lower Willamette, about 188 hatchery springers had been landed by Mar. 19. Only eight chinook have been counted at Willamette Falls so far this spring.

Harvest managers voted to keep the commercial season closed for the time being because only four fish have appeared at Bonneville Dam and catch rates in the test fishery are low. WDFW harvest biologist Joe Hymer said this year's smelt run turned out to be pretty modest, which managers have used as a signal of recent ocean productivity, so he's not expecting anything big in the way of spring chinook numbers.

Managers are curious however, if a significant number of three-ocean chinook will return to the Columbia this year, which would allow them to re-affirm their faith in the use of jack counts to pre-sage the next year's run size. Last year's upriver spring run came in less than half the pre-season prediction. -B. R.

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