Salmon Run Beats Predictions

This year's run of chinook came early and now looks much stronger than predicted. In a report to the Idaho Fish and Game Commission at its April 24 meeting in Lewiston, department biologists said the current forecast for Idaho chinook coming over Bonneville Dam is 24 percent higher than the April 3 forecast. The current forecast calls for a Bonneville run of 155,000 fish. The 1991-2000 average is 70,400 chinook at Bonneville. At the other end of the river system, the current forecast for chinook over Lower Granite Dam, the last dam before the fish enter Idaho waters, is 61,000. The preseason forecast was 43,300. The 1991-2000 average over Lower Granite is 13,700. In the current forecast, hatchery chinook are expected to be 39,900 while natural fish will number about 21,100. Anglers may catch and keep only hatchery chinook. Through April 21, the chinook run over Lower Granite was 12,820. Daily counts over this dam increased considerably starting April 17. This is the second highest number of fish over the dam for this time period in the last 10 years. Anglers will see a higher than normal percentage of big chinook this year, fish that have spent three years feeding at sea. Biologists are concerned about the two-ocean portion of the run, those fish that have spent two years in the Pacific. The big factors are releases of smolts from hatcheries and survival of those fish as they prepare to return to Idaho.