July 5, 2022 - South Fork Salmon River Chinook Fishery Update

Hi Everyone!

I hope you had a great holiday weekend. If you made it out to the South Fork Salmon this weekend – I’m jealous! I didn’t get a chance to make it out there, but it sounds like it was a wonderful weekend for those who did.

According to the PIT tag array at Krassel, fish are really moving now. In the past 3 days, there have been over 50 PIT tagged hatchery adults detected at that array, which is just a few miles below the lower boundary of the sport fishery. For those of you who are paying attention to detections at the array, I think you’re going to see A LOT of detections this week!

Our check station data from the past week on the South Fork confirms that fish are arriving in decent numbers. The table below shows our total estimates for the season thus far.

Fishing started out slow on 6/27 and 6/28, as there were very few fish in the system at that time. However, as the fish started showing up over the weekend, we started documenting some harvested fish. Fishing effort peaked on Saturday (7/2) with 545 hours, which is still pretty low. In total, we estimated 25 hatchery adults were harvested this past interval – we physically checked 17 of those fish.

I think catch rates are really going to pick up this week. Our harvest share is currently sitting in the 900 – 1,000 adults range, so we still have a ways to go. With a 2-adult daily limit, this harvest share could be met pretty quickly, so if you’re really excited to fish the South Fork Salmon this year, get out there in the next week or so. As soon as we start seeing daily harvest estimates in the 100 fish range, the season will go really quickly.

That’s all for this week. Stay tuned for another update next week! Hope to see many of you on the river this weekend!