New Coho Record Set At Willamette Falls – 30K And Counting

Well, that didn’t last long – 2023’s record count of adult coho at Willamette Falls has been eclipsed, and September isn’t even over.

An updated tally posted this afternoon by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife shows 30,154 of the salmon have used the fish ladder at the falls in Oregon City so far this fall, and October is likely to bring thousands upon thousands more of the fish, and the run will probably continue to trickle in till late in the year.

A press release earlier this month from ODFW pegged last year’s record adult coho return at 28,700 (the agency’s falls’ count states 29,654).

Anglers have been piling onto the Willamette in hopes of hooking into some of the big run, but it’s been anything but a limitfest for most, despite the two-rod endorsement being in effect since last weekend.

These natural-origin coho will bite, sometimes, occasionally anyway, with pink, orange, red and cerise Wart- and Wiggler-sized plugs, in solid or herringbone, drawing grabs, and many anglers are also running 360s and salmon spinners. Thirty to fifty feet of line out with the plugs and 20 feet or so of line out with 8 ounces of weight ahead of the flasher are good starting points.

Anglers typically concentrate at the mouths of primary tributaries, either to troll or anchor and cast traditional spinners and plugs, but some break away to fish other stretches. Beware snags.

So what’s driving this huge coho surge?

“The parent year in 2021 was over 20,000, so they could have put a lot of eggs in the gravel,” noted Beth Quillian, an ODFW spokeswoman based in Salem, this afternoon. “Ocean conditions have been decent and other coho doing well too. Looks like good production lined up with good ocean survival may have contributed to this huge run.”

Coho counts are high at Bonneville Dam and Puget Sound has seen good fishing. This year has also seen new record sockeye returns to the Columbia River and Lake Wenatchee, beating-expectations runs of upriver brights and A- and B-index steelhead, and Willamette summer steelhead also came in well above the 20-year average and the most since 2016, all indicative of productive freshwater and marine conditions across Northwest sea-going species.

A harbinger of a big 2024 Willamette run was seen last year in a record count of 11,000-plus jacks, salmon that come back from the ocean a year ahead of schedule. “High jack counts typically indicate a robust return of adult coho the following year,” ODFW said in the press release.

This year’s jack count is running well behind 2023’s pace and is closer to the 10-year average.

Some of this year’s daily adult counts have been amazing when compared to the run over the decades. One of the biggest days, 2,567 on September 21, is itself bigger than the annual totals for 2018 and 2016 (albeit by a whisker), as well as 2005, 2002 and 2001, not to mention nearly every single complete run in the 1990s and many in the 1980s and 1970s.

It’s unclear how much larger the coho run might become, but as the ODFW biologist told me last year, “there’s thousands of miles of stream habitat that have different levels of access and suitability.”

These salmon are actually a bit of an invasive species. Coho are not native to the rivers above the falls; historically, only winter steelhead and spring Chinook were able to swim into the upper basin, thanks to the timing of high runoff flows.

They’re the progeny, apparently, of some 80 million coho released widely in upriver tribs from the 1950s to 1996, when hatchery stocking ended, and probably strays from the lower Willamette.

Meanwhile, in the here and now, they’re available for harvest, but it won’t be easy. To quote myself in an article last fall, “River coho are cruel and you’ll be filled with self-doubt, loathing and angst, and suffer multiple crises of confidence between bites. Which, I can attest, makes the bright fish and even slightly colored up ones that you’ll catch taste all the better.”