[3] Fight Brews Over Upcoming Spring Harvest

With nearly 270,000 upriver spring chinook expected to show up in the Columbia River, sport and commercial fishermen have been sparring all winter over the shape of the upcoming season. It could be one of the biggest returns since Bonneville Dam was built in 1938.

However, in one sense, it's a big fight over practically nothing. Due to ESA concerns, the non-treaty fishers are allocated only two percent of the upriver run, and the issue is complicated by low expectations for spring chinook returns on the Willamette River, where only 34,000 are expected. If the return is that low, then it will be one of the lowest on record.

To complicate things even more, the fisheries agencies in Washington and Oregon have decided to take different approaches to managing the spring fisheries this year.

The Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission voted Feb. 8 to give the sporties a little more of the spring chinook pie. They were allocated 65 percent of the wild fish impacts, and the gillnetters 35 percent. Previously, the allocation was more equal, with 57 percent sport and 43 percent commercial.

"This was a tough decision, because the spring chinook fishery is important to both sport and commercial fishers," said Jerry Gutzwiler, chair of the state's F&W commission, in a press release. The commission voted 5-3 in favor, with one abstention, while the previous week it had been deadlocked at 4-4, with one member absent.

Despite relatively small catches, commercial gillnetters have found the niche fishery especially lucrative, with dock prices running above $5 a pound.

But sportfishers, since they can only keep fin-clipped salmon, claim the moral high ground. They are getting a boost from a national sports-based group with new chapters in Washington and Oregon called the Coastal Conservation Association, which has made getting rid of gillnets their highest priority because the nets are not selective. So far, they are only after non-Indian nets.

The sports side does have less impact on listed stocks, according to fisheries biologists, who estimate that one wild chinook dies for every ten that are unhooked.

Commercial gillnetters have started using tangle nets to reduce their impacts on ESA fish, but releasing and resuscitating a wild chinook only seems to keep the fish alive about 60 percent of the time.

At a heated meeting in Oregon, where sports and commercial segments recently met head to head, Oregon commissioners took a different approach.

To protect the Willamette springers, they voted to keep both sport and commercial fishers off the Columbia below the Interstate 5 bridge at Portland, but let them both fish in the river from the bridge to Bonneville Dam. They also kept the old 57/43 allocation in place.

Their plan is aiming for a longer sport season (to April 30) and a 6,000-fish harvest for commercials.

However, the two states will have to come up with a compromise before the fish begin to show. They were slated to meet Feb. 15 to iron out their differences (see Story 4).

Tribal fishers above Bonneville Dam have stayed out of the fray. Since they are allocated impacts to ESA stocks based on a sliding scale, this year's expected blockbuster means they will be entitled to 10 percent of the upriver run. -B. R.

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