Spring chinook season opens with little fanfare, few fish

Spring chinook seasons begin opening today and continue into next week in parts of eastern Washington and Idaho, but anglers who hit the water will face the longest of odds.

Through Wednesday, just 15 adult spring chinook were counted at Ice Harbor Dam near the Tri-Cities, and only three had climbed over Lower Granite Dam. At Bonneville Dam on the lower Columbia River, just 316 spring chinook had been counted. That is compared to a 10-year average of 10,479 and it's behind even last year's late run, when nearly 700 had been counted there through April 18.

Washington will open three sections of the Snake River to spring chinook fishing two days per week. The first near Ice Harbor Dam starts today. Short stretches of the Snake River near Little Goose Dam and Clarkston will start their two-days-per-week fishery on Sunday. Idaho's spring chinook seasons on the Clearwater River and its tributaries, the lower Salmon and Little Salmon rivers and the Snake River in Hells Canyon, open April 28.

It's not unusual for the fishing season to start before the bulk of the run has arrived. But this year's run is lagging behind the 2017 return, which didn't pick up until early May. That has anglers and some fisheries managers anxious.

Alan Byrne of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game at Boise said it's too early to panic, but he did note that last year's late run was blamed on high flows and cold water in the lower Columbia that have not been a factor this spring.

"It's been a colder year, but the water temps aren't that far from normal and the flow is more typical of what you would expect for this time of year," he said.

He also said late runs, as a general rule, tend to come in below preseason predictions.

"The counts at Bonneville are probably the lowest they have been, but things can rebound pretty quickly," he said. "In order to rebound, we have to have fish show up pretty soon. If we get into May and still don't see a lot of fish at Bonneville, that is a pretty big red flag this run is not going to be very large."

Chris Donley, fish program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife at Spokane, speculated spill at Bonneville Dam and the presence of sea lions there might be causing the fish to stall.

Fishing in the lower Columbia River has been slow. Anglers there caught just 4,769 chinook, including 3,680 bound for areas above Bonneville Dam, before the season hit its time-out mark and closed on April 7. That is about half of the quota for the lower Columbia.

Fisheries managers in Oregon and Washington reopened the season last Saturday, saying the one-day extension was meant to make up for a fishing day lost to bad weather. Harvest numbers for the extension have not yet been released. But the move to allow more fishing in the lower Columbia angered anglers here. In a meeting at Clarkston on March 28, Bill Tweit, head of Washington's Columbia River Management Unit, said the lower river fishery would be managed more conservatively this year, and the agency would not give anglers there more time to fish if they fell short of their quota by April 7.

Donley, who was also at the meeting, has fielded several complaints from upriver anglers.

"I've gotten a ton of calls and those guys are right," he said. "Our policy guys stood up in that meeting and said we aren't going to go fishing without compelling evidence (the run is as strong as predicted)," he said. "I can understand where they are coming from."

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Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.