Springers To Reopen On Columbia Below, Above Bonneville Starting Later This Week

Columbia salmon managers approved two more weeks of spring Chinook fishing on the lower river below Bonneville and two more days in the mainstem reservoirs above there.

The big river below the dam will open this Friday, May 9, and run for 14 straight days through Thursday, May 22, while above there the gorge pools will be open on Saturday, May 10, and Tuesday, May 13.

Managers expect anglers will catch just under 4,000 springers, including 3,228 of the constraining above-Bonneville stock, in the lower river and come within 25 fish of the updated allocation of 5,884 upriver Chinook.

Some fishermen had called for the DFWs to move the boat fishing boundary up to Marker 91 from Beacon Rock and, at the lower end, allow bank fishing only at Social Security Beach near Buoy 10.

“If we did that, we’d have to carve some days off the back end” of the proposal, Oregon manager Tucker Jones said about the former idea and needing to accommodate higher catch rates, and he said that keeping the river below Tongue Point closed during the spring Chinook period is a longstanding practice to protect feeder kings and outmigrating smolts in May and June.

Jones and his Washington-side counterpart, Dr. Charlene Hurst, adopted the staff recommendation that came out this morning in a fact sheet. The two-day gorge pool reopener is expected to yield 500 springers.

By policy, most of the upriver Chinook impact allocation goes to the downriver fishery (under Oregon’s, no more than 25 percent can go above Bonneville, while by Washington’s, no more than 70 percent can be used below the dam), but nonconcurrency between the states also leaves some harvestable fish on the table, which Liz Hamilton, policy director of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association, said amounted to 1,326 fish and 10,000 angler trips.

While the Columbia is flowing at about the five-year average and just a degree warmer at 54 Fahrenheit than usual over the last half decade, there’s an expectation that the Corps of Engineers is going to ramp up volume, which may impact the fishing.