CLARKSTON, Wash. — Salmon fishermen vented at and commiserated with fisheries managers from the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Tuesday during a public meeting aimed at collecting comment on the state’s upcoming spring chinook salmon season on the lower Snake River.
Anglers in eastern Washington are seeking to have some of the annual harvest of spring chinook in the Columbia Basin shifted upstream so anglers on the Snake have a more equitable share of the run. As it stands now, anglers fishing below Bonneville Dam are allowed to catch the vast majority of the fish.
For example, according to proposals for the 2015 season, anglers in the lower Columbia will be allowed to harvest about 10,000 hatchery spring chinook. Anglers in the Snake will be allocated just more than 1,000 fish.
The complaint is one that anglers have voiced for several years, and they let managers know they feel as though they are being ignored.
“You guys have pretty much blown us off,” said Dick Ducharme, who lives on the Tucannon River. “I want you to know it’s not going away.”
“We are not going to let this issue die, it’s unfair,” he said. “It’s a matter of equity.”
But allocation of harvest, which is based on the effect fishing has on protected wild fish, was neither on the table Tuesday nor within the power of the department’s fisheries managers to change.
Instead, they came to explain how seasons are set — including harvest allocation — and to present bag limit and days-of-fishing options for the lower Snake River fishery.
Both Ron Roler, a fisheries manager for the department at Vancouver, and John Whalen, fish program manager for the department’s Spokane-based Eastern Region, said allocation of 75 percent of wild fish impacts to the lower Columbia and only 25 percent to the Columbia River above Bonneville Dam and the Snake River is set by the fish and wildlife commissions of Oregon and Washington.
Anglers must release protected wild spring chinook. But biologists figure about one in every 10 caught and released dies. The state is allowed to incidentally kill a certain number of wild fish. Because of the allocation, anglers fishing the lower Columbia use 75 percent of them, allowing them to fish longer and catch more of the unprotected hatchery chinook.
Whalen said as a regional fisheries manager, he doesn’t disagree that Snake River anglers might deserve a bigger percentage of harvest.
“You are basically talking to the choir here in the region,” he said.
Asotin County Commissioner Brian Shinn said the department has been deaf to the complaints. Instead of getting action, he said anglers are getting stonewalled.
“If you are the choir, you are singing off-key,” he said. “Right now we are not getting representation. We are only getting lip service.”
Roler said there might be some tweaking the department could do regarding better accounting for the wild Clearwater River chinook that are caught in the Snake River. Since wild chinook bound for the Clearwater are not protected by the Endangered Species Act, Lewiston angler Brad Johnson said those fish shouldn’t count against the state’s wild fish impact.
“I will look at that,” Roler said.
Anglers also asked that fishing in the lower Columbia be closed a few days each week to allow more Snake River-bound chinook to make it upriver, both for harvest and to ensure fish hatcheries in Idaho get enough adults back to produce the next generation of fish.
“We think that would be beneficial to the run,” Ducharme said.
Both fish managers and anglers sang the same tune when it came to frustrations with the growing number of sea lions in the lower Columbia. According to one study published last year, sea lions may be eating as much as 40 percent of returning adults. Sea lions are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which gives fisheries managers little flexibility to reduce the population.
“It’s worrisome,” Roler said. “If they stay, they could do some real damage to the run.”
When it comes to fishing on the Snake River, District Fish Biologist Jeremy Trump of Dayton said the department is likely to implement a season structure similar to the one adopted last year.
That would mean a daily bag limit of one adult chinook on the Snake River and four separate fishing areas — one near Ice Harbor Dam, another at Little Goose Dam, one at Lower Granite Dam and one near Clarkston.
The fishery near Clarkston saw more success last spring than in previous years. The department has considered closing it and just offering fishing near the three dams. But Trump said it appears anglers are starting to get better at catching spring chinook there and the fishing effort is improving.
“The fishery up here is growing interest, and my inclination is to leave it open,” he said.
