The Vancouver Wildlife League will ask Washington and Oregon on Monday to allow retention of any summer chinook salmon beginning in mid-June in the Columbia River, even if it means shortening the fishing season.
League members agreed last week to support elimination in 2015 of the angling regulation that requires release of unclipped chinook beginning June 16.
Sportsmen in the lower Columbia River have been required to release unmarked chinook for several years in the summer season, which is June 16 through July 31. Commercial and treaty Indian fishermen are allowed to retain any chinook, marked or not.
There is a growing disgruntlement with the hatchery-only regulation, particularly when just 39 percent of the summer chinook were fin-clipped in 2014.
Summer chinook salmon are destined for the Columbia River upstream of Priest Rapids Dam in central Washington. They are not listed under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The fish are a mix of hatchery-origin salmon plus wild fish that spawn in rivers including the Wenatchee, Methow and Okanogan. The new Chief Joseph Hatchery in Bridgeport, Wash., is coming online, although some other hatchery production elsewhere is being reduced.
A run of 73,000 summer chinook is forecast to enter the Columbia in 2015.
Under state management plans, harvest sharing with the Columbia River treaty tribes and sharing with non-treaty tribes, sportsmen in the Columbia downstream of Bonneville Dam will have 3,315 summer chinook available. That includes kept catch and wild fish that die in the process of being released.
Washington and Oregon biologists have modeled some scenarios where wild summer chinook are allowed to be retained.
Assuming the regulation in 2015 is clipped summer chinook only, and the mark rate is 50 percent, fishing could stay open the entire 46 days between June 16 and July 31.
If any summer chinook can be kept in 2015, 12 days of fishing from June 16 through 27 is possible before the allocation is used. If anglers are allowed only marked chinook in June, but any summer chinook in July, the allocation is used up on July 10, for a 25-day season.
In 2014, lower Columbia anglers kept 1,980 summer chinook, but released 2,703, according to figures from the Washington and Oregon departments of Fish and Wildlife.
Winston Falls, a league member from Vancouver, said releasing chinook in the warm water of the Columbia River in summer is a bad idea.
Falls said state officials claim 15 percent of the released summer chinook die, but most anglers think the percentage is significantly higher.
“We’re a conservation organization and these fish are being wasted,” he said. “It’s against our conservation principles.”
Falls set up a website — www.theanglersvoice.com — to survey ordinary sportsmen.
“Overwhelmingly, they want to keep unmarked fish,” he said.
Washington and Oregon officials, plus representatives of sport and commercial fishing groups, will meet at 10 a.m. Monday at the Hilton Vancouver Hotel to discuss ocean fishing this summer, plus summer and fall seasons in the lower Columbia River.
The meeting, part of what’s called the North of Falcon process, is open to the public. The process name originates from the fact that it deals with salmon stocks whose ocean residency is spent primarily north of Cape Falcon on the northern Oregon coast.
