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Idaho Fish and Game

Chinook Salmon Update for the Clearwater River, lower Salmon River and Little Salmon River fisheries (5/8/19)

idfg-jdupont

Hi Everybody.  It is time for the weekly spring Chinook Salmon update for the fisheries in the Clearwater River Basin and in the lower Salmon and Little Salmon rivers (Rapid River Run) (5/8/19).

Run Update

Since I wrote you last, counts have been jumping around a lot.  This has resulted in a lot of emotional reactions on my part –excited to bummed to uncertainty.  If you take a look at the graph below, you will see what I mean.  Counts jumped up considerably on May 2 (the exciting part) and then the following day they dropped back down (the bummed part).  The scary thing is I could not explain why the run may have dropped so quickly.  Often something like increases is flows or turbidity or decreases in temperature can cause fish movement to slow, but none of those things seemed to have happened.  Fortunately, the last two days counts have picked up again, making me uncertain on what we could expect next. 

 

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The real question is, how do we think these returns will influence our fisheries in Idaho.  To get at that question, I have updated the table I shared with you last week that describes returns over Bonneville Dam (using data through 5/7/19) and what we are projecting for harvest shares for our fisheries based on these returns.  This table assumes the run timing is late (about 40% complete for the Clearwater return and 45% complete for the Rapid River return) and survival for these fish as they migrate from Bonneville Dam to Idaho is average.  Based on this table you can see that we are projecting a harvest share of 371 fish for the Clearwater River run and 1,951 for the Rapid River run.  Based on how the run over Bonneville Dam has been bouncing around, I can’t say I have a lot of confidence in these harvest share estimates.  Interestingly though, these harvest share estimates are very similar to what we forecasted before the season started.


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Fishery Update

As of last Saturday (5/4/19) only 27 Chinook Salmon had been counted passing over Lower Granite Dam.  As such, it was not surprising that we did not observe anybody salmon fishing last week during our creel surveys.  Based on how fast PIT tagged salmon are moving between the dams, it looks like adult Chinook Salmon are going to take about 14-20 days to make it to Idaho from Bonneville Dam this year.  That means we could start seeing the front edge of the surge that passed over Bonneville Dam (see first graph) enter the fishery in the lower Clearwater this weekend.  There still will not be a lot fish, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we document our first harvested fish of the year.  It will likely be a couple more weeks (or more depending on flows) before we see our first fish harvested from the lower Salmon or Little Salmon rivers.

As I indicated last week, as more salmon start making it to Idaho and fish start being caught, I will provide a table that shows where and how many fish we estimate have been caught. 

That’s all I have for you today.  I hope you all are enjoying the beautiful weather.

Have a good week everybody