[1] Chinook Run Stymies Managers, Finally Builds Momentum

Numbers finally began to climb fast last week at Bonneville Dam fish ladders as high river flows eased along with the concerns of harvest managers charged with figuring it all out. This morning, they updated their estimation of the run size from the pre-season 88,000-fish number to a more cautious range of 65,000-88,000 chinook. Fishing remains closed to all recreational and commercial fishers in the mainstem, but managers are now discussing whether to re-open them.

Fish counters saw daily numbers hit the triple digits for the first time this year on April 24. By April 28, a paltry 3,000 chinook had appeared, but less than a week later, the run had quadrupled in size, with more than 13,300 fish passing the dam. By last Thursday, more than 2,000 chinook were being counted every day. Two days later, the count was really humming along, with more than 8,600 counted on Saturday and another 7,700 on Sunday.

The total stands now at 35,000, still a pretty miserable showing, since the 10-year average is over 120,000 fish, and even last year, more than 50,000 fish had been counted by now.

The Willamette has finally perked up as well, with over 9,300 chinook counted at the falls by May 1. Only 45 fish had been counted by April 21.

Harvest managers released a statement on May 2 that reflected their continuing state of uncertainty over the run's lateness. They said they still couldn't update the run size from their pre-season expectation of 88,000 upriver chinook (to the river mouth), but signs are pointing to a spring run less than they had expected.

The situation could be a nail-biter for some time because this is one of the latest runs on record. In 1952, the spring run didn't peak until May 27.

By April 23, only 488 springers had been counted at the dam. But on April 25, about 440 were tallied in one day, showing skeptics that the run hadn't completely disappeared. However, it was still a long way from the nearly 90,000 spring chinook that harvest managers originally expected to enter the river this year. And with a normal spring run about half over, the technical advisory committee said that it couldn't yet update the run size.

"Because this run is so low to date, and it is unclear when 50 percent passage at Bonneville will occur, TAC is not able to use run timing to update the run size at this time," the committee said on April 27. "As the run progresses, we will have greater confidence in using historic data to update the run size."

Harvest managers said they didn't have a good explanation for why the counts to date were so low, but suggested several possibilities. The run could be much smaller than anticipated, really late or a combination of the two factors.

The managers pointed out that the 1996 and 2005 spring runs were very late and did not reach 50 percent until May 6. But they had looked at other factors that might explain the situation (water temperature, flow, pH,) but couldn't tie anything together with the paltry show of chinook.

They said no one knows the total effects of predation by sea lions on this years' spring run, either, nor whether it could be delaying the run. TAC did say that average numbers of encounters with upriver chinook in the lower river were documented in the earlier sports fishery, but that hasn't translated into numbers across Bonneville Dam.

With counts lower than anyone had seen since the dam was built in 1938, fish managers asked dam operators to pull a couple of steel grates that had recently been installed to keep sea lions out, to see if it had a detrimental effect on adult fish passage.

But after two days of watching fish counts rise at ladders with and without the SLEDS, the two 10,000-lb. grates were lowered back in place at the ladder near Powerhouse 2.

According to the historical record, the spring run of 1943 came the closest to being this late, when only 2,700 fish had been counted by April 25, but the run ended up around 66,000 fish.

In 1952, only about 3,500 fish had shown by this time of the month, but 116,000 had appeared by June 1--and that was after another 165,000 chinook had been caught by inriver commercial and tribal fishers.

After the first chinook finally showed up April 27 at Lower Granite Dam, The Idaho Statesman used the occasions to pen another editorial supporting dam breaching. By May 7, a whopping 50 chinook had passed the demon dam on their way home.

In coastal waters, harvest managers in Alaska and British Columbia have reduced their allowable catches for fall chinook by about 10 percent because the abundance indexes for most stocks has declined due to less productive ocean conditions.

So far, this year, the Canadian fleet off Vancouver Island had landed about 7,500 chinook by April 19. Managers have aimed for a chinook harvest of up to 28,000 by the end of April, and a 40,000-fish catch by the end of May, down from a preseason target of 55,000. Canadians are concerned about having too much impact on their own weak stock of chinook in the Lower Georgia Strait area.

According to a preliminary DNA analysis of the Canadian catches, few spring chinook from the Columbia River show up in their fishery.

However, concern for another West Coast fall chinook stock from California's Klamath River has led to a severely curtailed fishery in Oregon and California. Pressure from the commercial sector was instrumental in getting Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski to declare a state of emergency on April 24 for his state's coastal communities to ease the economic hit they are expected to take from the closures.

Kulongoski's declaration is likely to help the federal government free up disaster funding for the hard-hit communities, even though recreational fishing will not be affected as much by the closures

California senators Barbara Boxer (D) and Diane Feinstein (D) have introduced a bill in Congress that would provide $81 million for strapped fishermen, tribes and businesses adversely impacted by the Klamath closure. Included in the measure is $45 million to pay for "immediate" conservation measures on the Klamath River, and a requirement for NMFS to produce a recovery plan in six months.-Bill Rudolph

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