Impending Fall Salmon Season Signals Rule Changes

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Notoriously slippery preseason forecast numbers are driving regulation changes for the upcoming lower Columbia River fall salmon season. 

Most notably, the salmon fishery, which begins on Aug. 1, will come with a reduced daily limit for hatchery steelhead. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife announced on Thursday that because of an anticipated depression on the steelhead return, anglers will only be permitted to harvest one steelhead per day below Bonneville Dam during the fall fishery. Most years, anglers are allowed two steelhead per day. 

The single steelhead limit on the Columbia River will extend upriver to McNary Dam on Sept. 1 and then again up to the Highway 395 Bridge in Pasco on Nov. 1. In accordance with WDFW regulations, only hatchery steelhead with a clipped fin and healed scar may be harvested.

Additionally, coho runs are also expected to return at just 27 percent of the 10-year average. Due to that poor projection, fishery managers have dropped the daily hatchery coho limit on Columbia River tributaries from six fish adult per day to just two. Unmarked coho must be released. 

The new daily limits apply to fisheries on the Cowlitz, Cispus, Tilton, Green, Toutle, Kalama, Lewis, Elochoman, Grays, Deep and Washougal rivers.

Bucking that down is a swell of fall Chinook. 

About 960,000 fall Chinook are projected to return to the Columbia River this year, which is well over the 10-year average.

“A big part of the challenge this year is to conserve coho and steelhead, while providing a full fishing season for chinook salmon,” said Ron Roler, a Columbia River fishery manager for the WDFW, in a press release. “As always, we want to protect wild salmon and steelhead populations, while providing great fishing opportunities for abundant hatchery fish.”



The Buoy 10 fall fishery on the final 16-mile stretch of the Columbia River will come with a caveat this year as well. In order to meet federal conservation guidelines for imperilled Chinook runs that are listed under the federal Endangered Species Act, anglers will be required to release wild Chinook on Sundays and Mondays. 

Fishery managers anticipate that almost 48,500 Chinook will be harvested before Labor Day in the Buoy 10 area alone.

The fall salmon fishery also has a new rule in regard to fish with a clipped ventral fin. Those fish, released from the Youngs Bay off-channel fishing zone in Oregon, have been found straying into natural spawning areas in the Columbia Basin. The new regulation, which permits the harvest of adipose or ventral clipped Chinook through Dec. 1, will help eliminate the stray hatchery fish from those locations. That regulation is valid from Buoy 10 upstream to Bonneville Dam.

In other stray news, during the fall salmon fishery, anglers will be allowed to retain hatchery Chinook and hatchery coho during designated hatchery steelhead seasons on numerous lower Columbia River tributaries. 

That new rule was implemented in order to help keep stray hatchery fish out of natural spawning grounds.

Complete fishing regulations for Washington in 2016-17 can be found online at http://wdfw.wa.gov/fishing/regulations/.