A Slumgullion Of Northwest Fishing And Hunting Stories

With about 42 tabs open on my browser and the January 2025 issue’s deadline actively starting to poke me a bit more seriously, I’m going to have to just pass along links to a number of Northwest fishing and hunting-related articles that have caught my eye of late.

To wit:

1) The Spokane Spokesman-Review is reporting on that Ruckelshaus Center draft report on WDFW and the Fish and Wildlife Commission, ordered up by the Washington Legislature. It’s a good long story that adds more context and nuance to last week’s initial reporting by the Capital Press and Yours Truly.

“When asked what about the agency’s governing structure was not working well, the report says, ‘nearly all interviewees talked about the Commission,'” reports outdoor writer Michael Wright, who folds in commentary from current and former Spokane-area commissioners Woody Myers and Kim Thorburn, as well as outside observers.

2) One hundred miles down US 195, the Lewiston Tribune is reporting on an important salmon and steelhead presentation given to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council earlier this week:

“The raw number of adult salmon returning to the Columbia River has increased over the past 40 years, but is still not meeting regional mitigation goals, and wild fish protected by the Endangered Species Act remain at risk of extinction,” writes outdoor reporter Eric Barker, who adds:

“The Northwest Power and Conservation Council reported Tuesday that an average of 2.3 million adult fish returned to the basin from 2014-23. That is on par with the 2004-13 average of 2.4 million but dramatically higher than the 1.3 million average recorded in the 1990s.”

In an email, NWPCC spokesman Peter Jensen pointed out to me that those averages are a composite figure that includes Columbia salmon and steelhead harvested in the ocean, actual fish returns to the mouth of the river and adult passage at Bonneville Dam.

As background, the council is an outgrowth of 1980’s Northwest Power Act, and its Columbia River Basin Fish and Wildlife Program has a goal of returning 5 million salmon and steelhead annually, a benchmark that was nearly reached in 2014 during a period of extraordinary fall Chinook returns. This week’s presentation on fish numbers is touted as having “the most robust dataset and tracking of performance indicators to date showing progress made under the Program, while also highlighting the significant and ongoing challenges to fish and wildlife in the Basin,” per an NWPCC press release, which continues:

“2024 has provided clear examples of both progress and challenges: the Basin has seen record-setting adult returns of Okanagan Basin sockeye and Willamette River coho, yet a need remains for efforts to support, rebuild, and reintroduce, where appropriate, weaker stocks in the Basin. The Council’s Program and related recovery and mitigation efforts in the Basin help ensure that habitats have sufficient capacity to accommodate a year of major returns, while also aiming to help fish and wildlife managers bolster and improve stocks that are struggling.”

3) Speaking of 2024’s Columbia Basin salmon runs, NewsData’s NW Fishletter reports:

“The total number of adult Chinook, steelhead, sockeye, coho and chum salmon counted at Bonneville Dam this year is the highest in the past nine years. At almost 1.8 million total adult fish—not counting immature jacks—the total so far puts 2024 among the best four years for returns since the dam was built in 1938,” writes reporter K.C. Mehaffey, who adds:

“This year’s total isn’t going to surpass the highest adult return since counting began of nearly 2.4 million salmon and steelhead set in 2014, or the other two years with higher returns: 2015 with almost 2.2 million adults, and 2001 with nearly 1.9 million fish.”

As Mehaffey notes, this year’s salmon run was powered in no small part by sockeye returning to Lake Wenatchee and the Okanogan/nagan River. As NewsData is an energy-sector organ, Mehaffey, a former Wenatchee World reporter, interviews proponents of dams as well as a wild salmon advocate.

4) For some reason I found myself poking around the University of British Columbia’s press releases yesterday – oh, yeah, it was about bipartisan love of nature around core, big-picture ideas found in a research study of 1,500 Americans – when I stumbled onto another UBC study that looked at catch-and-release mortality of marine-caught Chinook and coho off Vancouver Island and provided 15 ways to improve fish survival.

It has good ideas as well as ramifications for salmon anglers south of the border.

Basically, researchers caught, tagged, released and tracked 1,500-plus salmon as well as put another 500 under a laboratory microscope over the course of the six-year study, and the nut, as presented at a Sports Fishing Institute of B.C. conference back in November, is that “injuries to fins, scales and eyes reduced survival by up to 20 per cent within 10 days of release, compared to fish that were in good physical condition when released. Eye injuries, caused by larger hooks, further cut Chinook survival by 20 per cent after 40 days.”

Here’s the Executive Summary with more specific results.

C&R recommendations include using 3/0 or smaller hooks and avoiding trebles and two-hook rigs so as to decrease the likelihood of hooking fish in the eye or other areas that reduce survivability; avoid inline flashers and land fish quickly so as to reduce metabolic taxes, per se, on fish during the fight; keep ’em wet and avoid exposing fish to the air for more than 10 seconds; move to new locations if you’re catching lots of shakers, which apparently are more susceptible to C&R injury, or a bunch of seals and sea lions are keying in on you to steal catches; and wet your hands before handling fish and instead of reviving them while holding onto their tail, use a “torpedo” toss back into the water immediately for all but the worst-off ones.

Other suggestions include to not use a landing net – even rubber-coated ones – so as to reduce scale loss, what’s known as fin splitting and removing the protective mucous layer of fish, and to work on releasing the fish while it’s in the water at the side of the boat instead.

In conjunction with the recommendations, the Sports Fishing Institute of BC teamed up with Brendan Morrison of Reel West Coast to talk about rigging hoochie setups for coho with smaller hooks and releasing fish.

Some of these are easier said than done, and we can all think of scenarios where they’re just not going to work very easily, if at all, and where they don’t even apply – you can’t use trebles for salmon in Washington or Oregon saltwaters.

But where the BC researchers are hoping the Department of Fisheries and Oceans institutes new “best fishing practices” rules, down here we can take the scientific study’s results into consideration around not just our own saltwater fisheries but elsewhere as we improve our overall angling game. The point is to do better for the fish to ensure we’re still out there fishing, not shut down because there aren’t any.

5) And with that, it looks like I’ve closed down all those tabs. Hurray for me! Lunch break!