South Fork Salmon River Update - July 5, 2023

Hi Everyone. 

As I suspected, fishing was exceptional on the South Fork Salmon this past week and we’ve reached our harvest share. Effective today (July 5th), the South Fork Salmon Chinook fishery is closed for the year. 

The check station is still running today to get interviews from the last few folks that are packing up camp and heading home, so I don’t have all of the final numbers run from Monday and Tuesday yet. As of the end of fishing on Sunday, July 2nd, our season total harvest estimate was 832 hatchery adults (see table below). 

After we add the harvest estimates from Monday and Tuesday, we’re likely to slightly exceed our harvest share of 939 hatchery adults. However, I don’t think we’ll overshoot it by much. Effort really decreased after Sunday as most folks headed home with coolers full of fish. I sat at the check station for a few hours on Sunday and Monday, and it was incredible to see nearly every group leaving the fishery was successful with harvesting fish every day over the weekend. Here is the daily breakdown of our harvest estimates from the past week. 

I hope you all had a great holiday weekend. For those of you who fished this weekend on the South Fork Salmon and got to experience these great catch rates, I’m glad you made it out. I got to experience some of the best Chinook fishing I’ve ever done this weekend. I wish we had more time and could keep it going, but now its time to let the fish move up river and into the hatchery so they can catch broodstock, spawn them, and start raising the next generation of Chinook that we’ll all be fishing for in 2026. 

For those of you who haven’t quite satisfied your Chinook fishing addiction yet, there are still fisheries open in the Clearwater basin and the Upper Salmon River near Stanley. If you’d like to receive updates for either of those fisheries, write an email to the fisheries managers listed below and ask them to add you to their list. 

Clearwater Region Fisheries: joe.dupont@idfg.idaho.gov

Salmon Region Fisheries: greg.schoby@idfg.idaho.gov

I hope to see a lot of you or at least hear from you during the public scoping period for the 2024 Chinook Salmon seasons. That will take place in February, 2024. I’ll be sure to send an email out to all of you when we get those meetings scheduled. In the meantime, have a wonderful rest of the summer!