Washington and Oregon officials have approved eight hours of gillnetting for summer chinook and sockeye in the lower Columbia River Monday night.
The Columbia River Compact today adopted a commercial fishing season from 9 p.m. Monday to 5 a.m. Tuesday between Beacon Rock and the mouth of the river with 8-inch-minimum mesh.
Robin Ehlke, assistant Columbia River policy manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, said the commercial fleet is expected to catch about 500 summer chinook and fewer than 200 sockeye from about 50 deliveries.
State, federal and tribal biologists on Tuesday revised the Columbia River summer chinook forecast to 91,000 adult fish, down slightly from the initial forecast of 93,000.
The sockeye run, though, was changed to 350,000, compared to the initial forecast of 101,600 fish.
The lower Columbia commercials have a summer chinook allocation of 2,511, Ehlke said. The fleet fished on June 16 and caught 1,945 chinook and 343 sockeye from 90 deliveries, leaving a balance of 566 chinook.
Ehlke said if the commercial fleet fished this week it is projected they’d catch 620 to 660 chinook, exceeding the allocation.
Chinook numbers in the lower Columbia River decrease as July progresses, making a fishery feasible next week, she added.
However, most of the commercial fishermen testifying at today’s hearing — and one sportsman — called for a gillnet fishery tonight or Thursday night, perhaps with a per-boat landing limit.
Kent Martin, a commercial fisherman from Wahkiakum County, said the tides next week are not conducive to netting and there’s no conservation issue with summer chinook.
Jack Marincovich, a commercial fisherman from Astoria, said most of the summer chinook by next week will be upstream of Woodland, leaving little for estuary netters to catch.
Commercial fishermen noted that sportsmen in the lower Columbia have an allocation of about 5,000 summer chinook, yet through Sunday had caught about 2,000.
The management period continues through July 31, but sport catches for summer chinook typically decrease in July.
Sportsmen are allowed to keep only hatchery-origin summer chinook, denoted by a clipped adipose fin. Jack Bowman, a sportsman, told the compact he fished every day last week, catching 18 summer chinook, but only two were fin-clipped and could be kept.
Robert Moxley, a member of the bistate Columbia River Recreational Advisor Group, said the regulation limiting sportsmen only to fin-clipped summer chinook is “ridiculous.’’
The low mark rate and lack of retention opportunity dampens angling effort, Moxley said.
He suggested giving the gillnetters fishing opportunity to harvest some of the fish that sportsmen cannot catch due to the hatchery-only regulation.
Tucker Jones of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife said he doubts the whole sport-fishing community would agree with Moxley’s willingness to give part of the sport allocation to the commercials.
Jones also said if a landing limit were imposed on the commercials there would be issues with accounting for fish released and related mortality rates. Landing limits are used in spring fisheries, which have on-board observers and other restrictions..
Jones and Kyle Addicks, Washington’s vote on the compact, said they could not vote knowingly for a commercial fishery that is projected to exceed long-standing allocation agreements.
