Hi Everybody. As promised, I am starting my weekly updates for the spring Chinook Salmon fisheries that are occurring in the Clearwater River basin and in the lower Salmon and Little Salmon rivers (5/1/19).
In these weekly updates, I will try to provide the most up-to-date information on run sizes, harvest shares, fishing conditions, catch data, and rules changes that apply to the spring Chinook fisheries in the Clearwater River basin and on the Rapid River run (lower Salmon and Little Salmon rivers). I will try and get these updates out on Tuesday or Wednesday each week in an effort to help you plan on when and where you might want to go fishing that week.
Run Update
If you have been following the salmon counts at Bonneville Dam, you probably have noticed that the numbers have not been very good at all. To be truthful with all of you, we were kind of expecting this based on the number of jack salmon that returned last year. The good news is the counts over Bonneville Dam have increased considerably over the last few days. In fact, we had our first count of over 1,000 fish yesterday. We need to see considerable improvements in these counts though before we get too excited.
To give you a feel for how many of these fish are destined for Idaho and what these counts may mean to Idaho’s fisheries, I have put together the table below. The information in this table was developed using information on the PIT tagged spring Chinook Salmon that have been detected passing over Bonneville Dam up through yesterday (4/30/19). One thing we are confident of is this year’s spring Chinook Salmon return is much later than normal. What we don’t know is just how late this run is, which makes a big difference on our predictions of how many salmon will ultimately return to Idaho. For example, if you look at the table below you will see that I have two sections that estimate what our returns to Idaho and harvest shares could be depending on whether the run timing is your typical late run timing “Average late run timing” or really late like we have experienced the last three years “run timing last 3 years”.
In case you were wondering, the harvest shares in the table above were calculated by subtracting the Broodstock need from the Estimated return to Idaho number and then divided it by two (half goes to the state fisheries and half go to the Tribal fisheries). As you can see from the Entire Clearwater River Run and Rapid River Run harvest share estimates, there is quite a range depending on what the timing of this year’s run actually is. We obviously are hoping the run timing will be similar to what we have seen in the last three years; otherwise, we may not be able to keep all our fisheries open. Based on my evaluation of the data, this year’s returns will fall somewhere between these two estimates. Obviously, only time will tell.
Fishery Update
I don’t have much to report on about our fisheries, as last Saturday when the season opened only two Chinook Salmon had been counted passing over Lower Granite Dam (the last dam these fish pass over before they reach Idaho). As such, we didn’t observe anybody out there fishing for salmon during our creel surveys. 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. Many people like to use this information to determine where the fish are, how good the fishing is, and how long the fishery may remain open. Based on the Dam counts, I don’t expect any significant harvest to occur for and least another 10 days.
That’s all I have for you today. As I indicated to you earlier, I will try to get my updates out to you next week no later than Wednesday to help you with your planning.
Have a good week everybody