[1] Late Spring Chinook Run Beats Pre-Season Estimate By Nearly 40 Percent

By May 30, non-Indian sport and commercial fishermen had only caught about half their allotment of spring chinook after lengthy closures kept them off the water, but a late shot of fish has helped gillnetters reach their full share.

With spring fish numbers going downhill, harvest managers thought non-Indians would have trouble catching the rest of their share, pegged at 2 percent of the upriver run (57 percent for sport, 43 percent commercial). But improved fishing last week coupled with a slightly reduced forecast increased the commercial fishermen's impact to its limit and may have gone slightly over. Sport fishers will still be allowed to chase springers in the lower Columbia through June 15.

Managers kept mainstem fishing closed this spring until the run finally showed serious signs that it was going to appear at all. Now the count at Bonneville Dam stands at more than 103,000 springers, which beats last year's tally by nearly 30 percent. It's a surprise ending to a run that has turned out to be the latest on record. Next year's run may be considerably smaller since jack counts are down 30 percent from last year's numbers.

But once the numbers of returning chinook began to perk up, managers breathed a collective sigh of relief and updated their pre-season run size estimate by about 40 percent, from 88,000 to 125,000 chinook (to the river mouth). On June 5, they downsized it to 120,000.

Far upriver on the Snake, the numbers of spring chinook reaching Lower Granite Dam has topped 19,000, with another 5,000 or so heading that way. Last year, the spring run was about 26,000-fish strong. With the count running until June 17, this year's run is likely to end up close to that. Spring chinook jacks in the Snake are also running about 22 percent behind last year's number.

Over at Priest Rapids on the mainstem Columbia, the spring count is only 7,489 chinook. Last year, over 11,000 spring chinook had been counted by now.

On the Willamette, chinook numbers have improved considerably over the past few weeks, but the 24,000-fish count (as of May 30) is only about half of the pre-season estimate. However, chinook will trickle up the Willamette for months more. By this time last year, only about 30 percent of the run had been counted at the falls.

Despite the late start, it's still on track to reach or eclipse the pre-season estimate of 46,400. But jack counts in the Willamette are way down. Only 130 jacks had been counted by the end of May, compared to last's year's 905, an 85 percent drop. -Bill Rudolph

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