[5] Battle Over Spring Chinook Harvest Goes On
Fish and wildlife commissioners from Oregon and Washington will soon decide how to split up next spring's chinook catch on the Columbia River between sport and commercial fishers.
Last month, Oregon blew off recommendations from a bi-state advisory panel that would have bumped up the base rate (when runs were medium to high) of the recreational sector's share of spring chinook to 65 percent, and dropped the gillnetters' share to 35 percent. The panel had developed a sliding scale for harvest allocations based on the preseason estimates of the relative strength of spring chinook runs in the Willamette and upriver Columbia.
But Oregon commissioners endorsed a 55-45 split between the sport and commercial sectors and a 50-50 split when the Willy run was very low and the Columbia's very high. The panel had called for a 60-40 split.
Last year, after the two states differed on how to split things up, they compromised by giving the sport side 61 percent and the gillnetters 39 percent. Before that, it had been 57/43.
The Willamette runs have tanked of late, which has complicated the harvest regimes, since the gillnetters were usually able to fish in the lower Columbia on strong Willamette runs before they reached their impact limits on ESA-listed upriver chinook. But last year, harvest managers let the gillnetters fish above the confluence of the Willamette and the Columbia to reduce their impacts on the poor Willamette run.
The 2008 harvest agreement in the US v. Oregon process raised the non-Indian impacts of the spring run from 2 percent to 2.7 percent when runs are healthy, but left to the states how to allocate those impacts between the recreational fishers and the gillnetters. Since the netters have a higher rate of incidental mortality when releasing wild fish from their nets than sporties do when unhooking them, the recreational fishers say they should get more fish to catch because they have less impact on the ESA-listed wild springers. Both groups are allowed to keep only fin-clipped chinook, which means they are of hatchery origin.
Releasing and resuscitating a wild chinook from a large-mesh net only seems to keep the fish alive about 60 percent of the time, so gillnetters have started using small-mesh tangle nets to reduce their impacts on ESA fish. Managers estimate the tangle nets cut mortality in half, but it's still estimated much higher than hooking mortality in the sport fishery, which is pegged at 10 percent.
The panel's recommendations were based on goals of keeping a sport fishery open for at least 45 days in March and April, and commercial harvest opportunities in March and April, with continued catches in the select-area fishery outside the mainstem Columbia, along with implementation of a 35-percent conservation buffer built into harvest rates.
However, sportfishing blogs lit up after the ODFW Commission's vote. Some groups are actively working to move the gillnetters out of mainstem fisheries or get rid of them altogether (see NW Fishletter 253).
Both sides claim the high moral ground--sporties for their cleaner fishery, netters for providing food and saving the fishery years ago.
In many forums where these issues have been debated, there is always one gillnetter who makes the point that, but for their concern, Bonneville Dam would have been built without any fish passage facilities.
The issue came up again last month on The Oregonian's website, where one blogger wrote that "the Astoria fishers went to Salem to burn the capital if Bonneville Dam was built without fish ladders, as was planned. It is only for their militancy that there is the last fish to argue over."
But the netters' high moral ground may actually be more like the sandy dredge spoils they fish around. Stanford University historian Richard White reported in The Organic Machine, his 1995 book on the remaking of the Columbia River, that except for artists' sketches, the Corps of Engineers always had "provisions" for fish passage at the dam.
The netters say the sports side has provided no science to warrant their position, only complaints about the possibility of lost jobs. One blogger on The Oregonian website pointed out that it was actually the recreational sector that went over its allowable impact limit last spring. -B. R.
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