
Washington Coast Winter Steelhead Forecasts Out As 2024-25 Season Talks Begin
Washington Coast winter steelhead forecasts are out ahead of this week’s town hall with anglers to begin shaping 2024-25 season proposals, and for a change the Chehalis prediction looks decent.
WDFW expects just under 9,800 wild steelhead back to the river system, which is about 1,200 fish or 14 percent more than the escapement goal and theoretically means 490 would be available as incidental catch-and-release mortalities IF a season were to be held on the mainstem and Wynoochee, Satsop, Skookumchuck and other tributaries.

That’s all to be determined over the next six weeks or so and of course requires reaching an agreement with the Quinault Indian Nation, but at the very least it’s a positive sign for a watershed that has been suffering from chronically low steelhead returns that have led to closed seasons or only slivers of opportunity the past several winters.
The forecast came out during a special meeting of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission’s Fish Committee this morning, and overall WDFW is predicting 36,756 wild winter-runs back to coastal rivers from Naselle north to Forks this season, about 5,500 more than they thought would come back last season, and just over 11,000 fish more than 2020-21’s nadir.
Breaking the numbers down, biologists and managers are predicting 4,923 to Willapa Bay, 717 fish or 17 percent more than the escapement goal; 2,260 to the Upper Quinault, 1,060 fish or 88 percent more than goal; 4,287 to the Hoh, 1,887 fish or 79 percent more than goal; and 9,662 to the Quillayute, 3,762 fish or 64 percent more than the goal.
The Queets-Clearwater forecast is 4,345, but WDFW and QIN have different escapement goals (2,500, 4,200) for the system.
But it’s not all partly cloudy skies on the coast.
“We’ve got one system right now that’s predicted to not meet escapement and that’s the Humptulips system,” WDFW Fish Program Director Kelly Cunningham told commissioners.
The forecast is for 1,482 natives back to the Hump, 118 fish or 7 percent fewer than the escapement goal. A negative balance or low number of allowable mortalities doesn’t necessarily rule out holding a fishery, but the agency’s statewide steelhead management plan limits impacts to runs that are predicted to be below escapement goals to no more than a 10 percent from all fisheries.

Along with the run predictions, Cunningham offered a heavily caveated bullet-point list of initial fishery considerations WDFW wants to talk to the public and comanagers about.
“Some things bouncing around between our ears this year again, we want to target hatchery fish specifically during their run timing, so that’s that December timeframe. We’re looking at early closures in some systems. Again, you know, we want to protect the peak of the run, that wild run. Where we’ve got concerns, we’re looking at closures in some systems where we don’t have hatchery fish. We have some opportunities to talk about expanding fishing from a boat, which is, as you all know, a pretty significant change over the past four years. We’re looking at, obviously, gear and bait and/or bait restrictions. We want to also take a hard look at providing salmon opportunities where we have steelhead abundances that that would allow for that. That’s been a concern from the public,” Cunningham said.
Late-arriving coho overlap with early-returning hatchery steelhead on some Grays Harbor systems, but heavy WDFW-QIN disagreements last fall kept the door shut on tapping into either stock, leading to large surpluses of clipped fish.
Cunningham also talked to commissioners about funding constraints around creel surveys as well as plans to try and expand catch sampling from the North Coast systems into Grays Harbor.
Next up on the agenda is WDFW’s Wednesday, October 23, virtual town hall with steelheaders beginning at 6 p.m. Agency managers will present last year’s final fish escapements, the above forecasts and fishery proposals, ask for other ideas, and also detail the results of a one-year boat fishing survey on the Hoh from last season.
While some may discount this now annual meeting as a dog-and-pony show, a familiar face will be missing, or at least not leading the discussion. James Losee, the former regional Fish Program manager, took a new job with the Wild Salmon Center over the summer.
This is the fifth fall in a row for setting coastal steelhead seasons this way. It began with winter 2020-21, which saw blanket bank-only fishing, bait bans and other restrictions and a “lowest on record” return of just 25,723 wild steelhead.
On a related topic, Cunningham provided commissioners with a bit of an update on the status of a National Marine Fisheries Service deep dive into whether Olympic Peninsula steelhead warrant an Endangered Species Act listing.
“We are awaiting their [NMFS] determination. We don’t have any idea when that will be, hopefully before the end of the year, but that will likely drive where we go not this year but next year,” he said.
The Fish Committee today also took a look at Lower Columbia sturgeon stock status and Grays Harbor and coastal Dungeness crab management. The 100-minute meeting was recorded on TVW and staff presentations can be found here.