[3] Super-Hot Sport Fishery Shuts Down Early

Columbia Basin harvest managers shut down the hot sport fishery below Bonneville Dam April 21 to keep from exceeding impacts to ESA-listed chinook. With catch rates higher than any time before 2000, recreational fisheries were expected to harvest more than 22,000 hatchery spring chinook by then.

Between April 1 and 13, the sporties landed nearly 8,500 chinook, which was well ahead of managers' expectations. They had hoped to keep the fishery open through the end of the month.

Meanwhile, commercial gillnetters were expected to harvest about 5,400 hatchery chinook by then, while releasing more than 1,800 wild ones.

The hot fishing still didn't translate into much of a tally at Bonneville Dam. By April 16, the spring chinook numbers added up to 8,594 fish, only about one-quarter of the 10-year average.

For a run that's expected to end up in the top three since 1938, when the dam was built, it has been a pretty slow start. Managers have estimated that 269,000 upriver springers will enter the river this year, but they didn't expect fish to move upstream until both flows and temperatures picked up. In recent years, about 14 percent of the run has passed the dam by the middle of April.

River temperatures in March were one degree Fahrenheit cooler than normal, and in April have averaged only 47 degrees, about 3 degrees below average by mid-month.

Flows were in the 150-kcfs range, about 75 percent of the 10-year average. Water clarity was also higher than normal.

In other harvest news, Pacific Salmon Commission member Larry Rutter told NW Fishletter that talks between the United States and Canadian counterparts have so far borne no fruit in regard to developing a mark-selective chinook fishery in B.C.'s Vancouver Island commercial troll and sports fisheries.

Rutter, who works for NOAA Fisheries, said both sides met in February and March, and have more sessions scheduled for the first week in May.

A hot-button topic for both countries is increasing interceptions of Puget Sound and lower Columbia fall chinook by B.C. commercial trollers, who now generally fish earlier in the year to keep from hammering their own weak chinook stocks.

But Alaska fishermen are getting more scrutiny as well for their impact on Lower-48 stocks, including Oregon coastal chinook.

Rutter said the PSC's chinook technical committee found its estimate of overall chinook abundance was lower than thought last year when they pegged allocations.

That means Alaskans caught about 60,000 more chinook than they should have, given post-season abundance indexes. That's about 20 percent of their allowable catch of treaty chinook.

He said northern B.C. trollers also caught about 35,000 chinook more than real abundance would have suggested, and Vancouver Island fishers caught about 20,000 more than the post-season analysis would have allowed.

Rutter said the harvest model tends to underestimate abundance when stocks are building, and overestimate abundance when it is declining. That's because some stock estimates from state fish managers are based on averages, which have a built-in time lag for reflecting trends in abundance.

Gary Morishima, a member of the PSC chinook technical committee, said ODFW was revising the structure of its chinook estimates to better reflect changing abundances, so, in turn, the harvest model can do a better job of reflecting the current state of the fish populations. -B. R.

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