MEDFORD, Ore. — Oregon’s old, second-tier ocean fisheries carried the load again this year, forcing anglers to look far and deep to make up for the worst ocean salmon-fishing season on record here.
Oregon’s recreational fleet spent fewer days fishing for coho and chinook salmon and caught fewer of these Pacific Northwest mainstays than they did for either albacore tuna — which are caught far offshore — or Pacific halibut, which ply the deepest waters off the coast.
“That was a really good season for us on halibut,” says Wayne Butler, a Bandon charter-boat operator. “Salmon fishing was so spotty, so hit-and-miss that I didn’t want to do it. But for halibut, it was 100-percent success every trip.”
This shift in effort and success was the short-term answer for anglers trying to make the best of a bad situation. In the longer term, prospects appear brighter, with some biologists saying the state may have hit the bottom of the current salmon slump.
“That’s pretty safe to say because this year was so bad,” says Brandon Ford from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Marine Program in Newport. “When they said that salmon fishing stunk, they meant it.”
The recreational salmon season this year was the most restrictive ever, ratcheted down to make up for poor chinook returns coastwide after a string of years with poor ocean-rearing conditions.
Oregon-wide, recreational chinook landings came in at about 1,700 fish, compared to the long-term annual average of 25,200 chinook, Ford says.
The catch was more than half that of the worst-ever prior year, when anglers landed about 4,000 chinook in 1998, Ford says.
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