[4] Spring Harvest Adjusted To Help Weak Willamette Run

Washington and Oregon harvest managers have reached a compromise over how to keep their recreational anglers and commercial gillnetters relatively happy, while reducing impacts on a spring chinook run in the Willamette River that's expected to be the among the lowest in many years.

Luckily, the spring run for upriver Columbia chinook is likely to be huge -- it's expected to be the third largest at Bonneville Dam since 1938. This is why the managers have decided to move all commercial gillnetting in the mainstem far upriver from their typical areas, away from the Willamette run.

"This year's fishing seasons are designed to give anglers an opportunity to take advantage of strong returns of chinook bound for upriver hatcheries, while protecting weak Willamette River stocks," said Cindy LeFleur, WDFW's Columbia River policy coordinator. "Like anglers, fishing seasons have to be responsive to changing conditions."

It's an about-face from previous management actions that allowed commercials fishing in the lower Columbia to target Willamette chinook in order to reduce impacts in upriver Columbia chinook. Managers kept track of differing proportions of the two runs by test fishing.

But after a Feb. 15 hearing between the two states, managers decided that commercial fishing -- other than the off-channel select-area harvest effort -- will be restricted to an area in the Columbia above the Willamette mouth from the Hayden Island power lines (west towers) upstream to the upper commercial fishing deadline at Beacon Rock.

It is planned to occur on Tuesdays between March 25 and April 29 with a goal of 5,200 hatchery chinook. The gillnetters must use tools like onboard recovery boxes to help revive any wild ESA-listed fish before returning them to the river, a practice that has had only limited success in the past.

Managers estimate a whopping 40 percent post-release mortality for wild chinook and 30 percent for steelhead when large mesh nets are used. When fishers use much smaller mesh tangle nets, they expect chinook mortality to be cut by about 50 percent.

Recreational fishers got a severely limited spring season in the lower Columbia, a mere 12 days, but they have been allocated 100 percent of the harvestable surplus of the Willamette spring hatchery run's 6,000 fish, out of an expected return of 29,000.

It's a much rosier scenario in the Columbia, where harvest managers hope to keep sportfishing open between Hayden Island to Bonneville Dam, from the middle of March until the end of April. They have reduced the bag limit to one hatchery chinook a day.

There is some potential for both gillnetters and sporties to be out fishing in the same area at the same time. However, managers will also open the river between Bonneville Dam and six miles below The Dalles to bank fishing until May 10.

Both states agreed on another compromise to peel back a little of the gillnetters' share of the 2-percent impact on listed upriver spring chinook allotted to non-Indian fishers. Recreational fishers will now get 61 percent and the gillnetters 39 percent. Before, it was 57/43.

The expected bounty in the Columbia translates into a significant boost for tribal fishers above Bonneville Dam. They will be allowed a 10-percent impact on the upriver run, up from last year's 7 percent.

A 269,000-fish estimate for the upriver Columbia run means the tribes' increased share should be more than twice the number of chinook that sea lions ate at the dam last year.

As of last week, NOAA Fisheries was still working on a plan that may allow up to 30 or so sea lions to be lethally removed in order to reduce marine mammal predation on the spring run. -B. R.

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