[4] Summer Chinook Season Begins Right On Schedule
A couple thousand chinook have been pouring over Bonneville Dam every day to signal the start of a decent summer run. And right on schedule, not like the spring run, which turned out to be much better than anticipated, but showed up later than any other spring run on record.
The summer stocks are mostly headed for the upper Columbia, and fishery managers have estimated about 49,000 of them will enter the river this year. That's about 80 percent of last year's run size.
Since the summer run is not listed for ESA protection, about 20,000 are eligible for harvest, split evenly between treaty and non-treaty fishermen. A few listed sockeye and summer steelhead will be mixed in with the summer chinook. The allowable non-treaty impacts to ESA-listed sockeye are 1 percent, and 2 percent for summer steelhead.
Most of the non-treaty harvest will take place above Priest Rapids Dam where the sport fishery and the Colville/Wanapum tribal fisheries will each be allowed 3,750 fish. (The Colvilles and the Wanapum are not parties to the U.S. v. Oregon process, so their share is taken out of the non-treaty allocation.) The remaining 2,650 fish will be evenly split between sport and commercial fisheries below Priest Rapids.
Last year, the lower Columbia commercials saw their first targeted opening on the summer stock since 1964. The reopening still sticks in the craws of some fish advocates since the fishery is allowed to keep unmarked fish. A few late-running ESA-listed springers are probably mixed in with the summer stocks, but according to the University of Washington's DART Web site, only two pit-tagged wild spring chinook heading for Idaho had logged in at Bonneville Dam after June 12.
The non-treaty gillnet fishery in the lower river began June 26, while the treaty fishery above Bonneville in Zone 6 has already begun with platform-caught fish opening on June 8. Tribal gillnets hit the water in June. The tribes are also expected to harvest about 1,000 sockeye.
Harvest managers expect about 31,000 sockeye to come back to the Columbia this year, with nearly 8,000 headed for Lake Wenatchee, 23,000 for the Okanogan watershed and 21 precious sockeye estimated to be headed 900 miles upriver to Idaho's Redfish Lake. About 12,000 sockeye had been counted at Bonneville by June 22. -B. R.
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