Hi all,
Many of you have been anxiously awaiting some news on the upper Salmon River Chinook run and the potential for fisheries we may be able to offer in the summer of 2023. Well I’m happy to share some relatively good news…
I’ll focus on the return of adult hatchery Chinook to Sawtooth hatchery in this update, as it’s still a bit early to have much info regarding the Pahsimeroi return, as we’re just starting to see the first few PIT tagged adults crossing over Bonneville Dam. In the pre-season update I posted in February, I touched on the migration timing of these stocks, as well as the forecasted return to each hatchery. The Pahsimeroi pre-season forecast was to just barely meet the broodstock need, so it’s most likely that we won’t see any fishing on the Pahsimeroi stock this year. But I’ll keep you posted on the Pahsimeroi return as the run progresses.
For the Sawtooth return, the pre-season forecast suggested we’d have a small surplus above and beyond the broodstock need for harvest share. As of today’s date (5/22), we should be just past 50% of the run at Bonneville Dam (based on historic timing) and it looks like the run is coming in larger than forecast. This is great news as we were originally thinking there would be only a few hundred fish for harvest share, and it’s now looking like our harvest share will be somewhere between 500 and 1,000. The graph below shows the daily counts of Sawtooth hatchery adult Chinook (including some Yankee Salmon River hatchery releases) over Bonneville Dam from 2023 (red line), 2022 (gray line), and the 5 year average (dashed line).